MacRecon > Leopard doesn’t purr as expected

Well… that’s not much of a surprise, eh? Apple releases its new OS and there are many things yet to work out. Unfortunately, some of the biggest complaints this time have to do with the most talked-about features. Not to mention that all the hype surrounding the OS didn’t fare well when the launch came and everyone had to do a reality check.

The dreaded blue screen of death comes to the Mac. After installing Leopard, many users could not believe what was appearing if front of their eyes: a lonesome blue screen where the Mac would refuse to get out of. Had somehow the dreaded Windows curse made its way to the Mac? Not really, as it was later discovered that this issue was caused by having Application Enhancer installed in your Mac prior to the upgrade. Here’s a thread on Mac Rumors with a fix.

Your Mac spits at Leopard. More accurately, it spits the Leopard DVD out. Here I had some first-hand experience, as whenever I inserted the Leopard DVD for install, it spun inside my MacBook Pro for a while before being ejected. I wasn’t alone in this issue, as a quick check in Apple’s discussion boards revealed that many other users had the same problem — curiously enough, many of them were MBP users as well. The possible fixes listed were to install Leopard through an external DVD reader/writer, make a bootable image of the DVD in an external HD through a second computer, or boot another Mac in target mode and use it for installation. But what if you had nothing but your problematic Mac at your disposal — like I did? Go down to an Apple Store, and the Genius will install it for you through an external HD that they have handy under their desk (for what I guess is for maintenance purposes for all Macs). Curiously enough, if you phone Apple regarding this issue, they will acknowledge its existence and tell you that they’re working on it. But as for my local Apple Store… they hadn’t received a single case of it — let alone heard of this issue’s existence.

The new menu bar. If there is one potential design mistake within Leopard, it’s definitely the new, transparent menu bar. You will either like it or hate it — but it just doesn’t fit with the interface, anymore. This is because everything in the desktop looks solid when compared with the menu bar. This design issue is even more apparent when you have a window maximized in your screen — you’ll see how the transparency of the menu bar generates the illusion of wasted space when below you have the solidness of the window. Apple should’ve included the option to change between the new menu bar and the old one, at the very least. Whoever releases a utility that fixes this, will have my praise.
UPDATE - OpaqueMenuBar from Eternal Storms Software brings back the solid menu bar! You, sirs, have my praise.

The new dock. Same as the menu bar — you’ll like it or hate it. Once again, Apple should’ve added the option to change between dock designs. Another utility to fix this is also very welcome.

Stacks… not as much. If you used to access folders in your dock while in Tiger, you probably enjoyed the smooth navigation of it. Unfortunately, even though the new Stacks feature is pleasing eye candy, it doesn’t work if you have over 70 items in it. My case: when I had my applications folder in Tiger’s dock, right-clicking on it allowed me to scroll through my vast collection of apps; now in Leopard, it will not allow me to scroll through it… only view all at once, with no option to change this, as right-clicking on it now only serves to configure the stack. Yet another utility that brings back Tiger’s scrolling is worthy of attention.

Time Machine lack configuration options. Time Machine serves its purpose as an automatic backup tool, but does not go beyond that. What if you want to further customize how it backs everything up? Maybe you want it only to use an X amount of GB in your external drive and not up to all of it? Or maybe you want it only to do weekly backups, and skip the daily and hourly ones altogether? But as far as Apple is concerned, the only aspect that they’ll allow you to control is to select which drive will have everything backed up, and which files or folders not to include. Beyond that, there’s nothing much that you can customize. I bypassed the option to not use all of the drive’s space for backup by creating a separate partition on it with the amount of space I was willing to let Time Machine use. Not very practical, I know… but it works for me. So here’s to hoping that Time Machine 2.0 will be more customizable.

Overall… Even though I may sound harsh on Leopard, it is the best OS that Apple has released up to date, and definitely should get the guys over at the big MS headquarters a tad worried. The only reason I’m being critical on Leopard is because hype can definitely destroy every wild fan’s dreams about it. Leopard is a must-buy, even with the usual .0 (point-oh) bugs that plague every release. Just keep in mind that Leopard is good-to-great — but nowhere near excellent-to-perfect, yet. But stay tuned, as soon I’ll soon be posting why Leopard does purr.

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[tags]Apple,Mac,Mac OS X,Leopard,Issues[/tags]