HCI Forum topic DISS 720
http://pogue.blogs.nytimes.com/2008/02/13/leopards-not-so-spotty-anymore/
February 13, 2008, 12:56 pm
Leopard’s Not So Spotty Anymore
When I reviewed Mac OS X 10.5, also known as Leopard, I had three complaints.
1. “Now, not all of Leopard’s features are slam-dunks. Take Stacks, for example. When you click the icon of a folder in the Dock (the row of quick-access icons at the bottom of the screen), you get to see its contents, arrayed as a fan or a grid of icons hovering in space… But if the folder is very full, the ’stack’ shows only some of its contents. (In previous Mac OS X versions, clicking a Dock folder produced a simple, but complete, menu of its contents.)”
2. “The most serious misstep in Leopard is its new, see-through menus… they’re much harder to read.”
3. “Otherwise, the only cause for pause is the usual minor set of 1.0 bugs, which Apple generally fixes with software updates following a major software release. I pushed my system hard for a week using the final Leopard software, and encountered occasional glitches with Spaces, automated syncing among Macs, and switching programs.”
Well, on Monday, Apple fired off a 180-megabyte update, version 10.5.2, that addresses those issues — and hundreds more. For example, it dealt with my three beefs above (which weren’t mine alone by any means):
1. Each folder on the Dock now has a shortcut menu that lets you choose to display its contents as the traditional (and more useful) menu of its contents, rather than a Stack.
2. A new checkbox (in the Desktop & Screen Saver panel of System Preferences) lets you turn off menu translucence. It makes the menu bar completely opaque, as it used to be. The drop-down menus themselves are still slightly transparent, but less so than before; see-through text from the window behind the menu is no longer a problem.
3. The glitches I’ve lived with for four months are finally gone.
Now, every software company ships its products with known bugs. This was an extreme example, though — Apple knew from its programmers that Leopard wasn’t quite fully baked, and shipping it that way wasn’t very thoughtful to the faithful early adopters.
Still. I’m delighted to see that now, at least, Leopard is now the sharp, snappy cat it should have been all along.
* Comments (60)
I know it wasn’t perfect, but if you had told me to wait until now to have Leopard, I would have told you to go somewhere a bit unpleasant.
Even with the faults, the positives outweigh the negatives by a magnitude, Time Machine alone has saved my and others’ bacon in the last four months!
Well done Apple - because after 14 months Vista has its original bugs!
— Posted by Jon T
Nice post David.
We are very happy with Leopard and with Apple and our new Macs in general. Wrote about it here:
http://www.ithinkthisworldisperfect.com/2007/11/closing -window.html
— Posted by Jim
I’m glad for the update, but I’m disappointed that the two most bothersome bugs (for me) still haven’t been fixed.
#1 - In the Mail program, the new mail audio alert (the chime that you *should* hear when new mail comes in) doesn’t always work. It seems that not everyone experiences this, but it’s been documented by enough people in a number of forums that it is a genuine issue and not simply a fluke.
#2 - Full screen playback in QuickTime is choppy, regardless of the resolution of the video being played. It’s fine in when played in the QuickTime window, even if it’s been expanded to maximum size. It’s only in full screen that the video gets choppy. This wasn’t an issue in Tiger, and VLC still does just fine at full screen.
— Posted by Daren
February 13, 2008, 12:56 pm
Leopard’s Not So Spotty Anymore
When I reviewed Mac OS X 10.5, also known as Leopard, I had three complaints.
1. “Now, not all of Leopard’s features are slam-dunks. Take Stacks, for example. When you click the icon of a folder in the Dock (the row of quick-access icons at the bottom of the screen), you get to see its contents, arrayed as a fan or a grid of icons hovering in space… But if the folder is very full, the ’stack’ shows only some of its contents. (In previous Mac OS X versions, clicking a Dock folder produced a simple, but complete, menu of its contents.)”
2. “The most serious misstep in Leopard is its new, see-through menus… they’re much harder to read.”
3. “Otherwise, the only cause for pause is the usual minor set of 1.0 bugs, which Apple generally fixes with software updates following a major software release. I pushed my system hard for a week using the final Leopard software, and encountered occasional glitches with Spaces, automated syncing among Macs, and switching programs.”
Well, on Monday, Apple fired off a 180-megabyte update, version 10.5.2, that addresses those issues — and hundreds more. For example, it dealt with my three beefs above (which weren’t mine alone by any means):
1. Each folder on the Dock now has a shortcut menu that lets you choose to display its contents as the traditional (and more useful) menu of its contents, rather than a Stack.
2. A new checkbox (in the Desktop & Screen Saver panel of System Preferences) lets you turn off menu translucence. It makes the menu bar completely opaque, as it used to be. The drop-down menus themselves are still slightly transparent, but less so than before; see-through text from the window behind the menu is no longer a problem.
3. The glitches I’ve lived with for four months are finally gone.
Now, every software company ships its products with known bugs. This was an extreme example, though — Apple knew from its programmers that Leopard wasn’t quite fully baked, and shipping it that way wasn’t very thoughtful to the faithful early adopters.
Still. I’m delighted to see that now, at least, Leopard is now the sharp, snappy cat it should have been all along.
* Comments (60)
I know it wasn’t perfect, but if you had told me to wait until now to have Leopard, I would have told you to go somewhere a bit unpleasant.
Even with the faults, the positives outweigh the negatives by a magnitude, Time Machine alone has saved my and others’ bacon in the last four months!
Well done Apple - because after 14 months Vista has its original bugs!
— Posted by Jon T
Nice post David.
We are very happy with Leopard and with Apple and our new Macs in general. Wrote about it here:
http://www.ithinkthisworldisperfect.com/2007/11/closing -window.html
— Posted by Jim
I’m glad for the update, but I’m disappointed that the two most bothersome bugs (for me) still haven’t been fixed.
#1 - In the Mail program, the new mail audio alert (the chime that you *should* hear when new mail comes in) doesn’t always work. It seems that not everyone experiences this, but it’s been documented by enough people in a number of forums that it is a genuine issue and not simply a fluke.
#2 - Full screen playback in QuickTime is choppy, regardless of the resolution of the video being played. It’s fine in when played in the QuickTime window, even if it’s been expanded to maximum size. It’s only in full screen that the video gets choppy. This wasn’t an issue in Tiger, and VLC still does just fine at full screen.
— Posted by Daren
posted by Dr. Adam Norten at 11:28 AM
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