A Tough Day with Apple
November 4th, 2007Too much change in the same day might not be such a good thing. Today I upgraded to MacOS 10.5 Leopard and replaced my keyboard with one of the new slimmer keyboards. After about having spent about six hours with both, I’ve gone back to my old keyboard (glad I kept the receipt) and I’m considering doing the same with Leopard until 10.5.1 or later.
First, the keyboard – it’s extremely flat, which is nice that it won’t collect cat hair and other grossness. However, some of the keys have been rearranged and they’re so flat that I’m having trouble typing at all. I actually feel like I’m in my first high school typing class with this thing, my accuracy is so bad. Maybe some laptop users love their keyboards and long for that feel on the desktop. But personally, I’m not seeing it. This thing is going back pronto.
Leopard has fared a little better than the chicklet keyboard. So far, I don’t have anything glowing to say about it, but the things that annoy me only tend to do so in small to medium amounts. For example, the new unified theme is so… grey. I mean, I suppose it’s fine, but it’s a lot like nothing at all really. There’s not much to dislike (or like) about it because it’s just so indistinct. It looks more like a theme than an official Apple UI. And the menubar – some folks are making a lot of full about it being a little translucent, but I only use solid color backgrounds for the most part. So it’s not really affecting me. The dock is a little more annoying, not because of the new style of it, but because that new visual style means all my icons are smaller for no real benefit. Thank goodness for the Terminal hack that makes the 3D effect go away.
As for “Spaces” (the virtual desktops) I don’t see the point. Spaces seems like it solves the same sort of problems Expose does, but I prefer Expose. The new iTunes-like Finder windows are pretty nice, except that you can’t resize the text in the sidebar. This means that I’m missing my targets in the sidebar a lot more than I used to.
However, the worst thing by far about Leopard is the new “Stacks” feature. It used to be that you could drag a folder into the dock and either click on it to open the folder, or right-click on it to get a hierarchical menu (like the Apple Menu of OS 9). Clicking on a Stack now either gives you a fan of items (for a few) or a grid of items (for a lot). So far, this behavior is infinitely less desirable than the previous 10.4 behavior, and I’m hoping for a preference to turn it off in 10.5.1.
As for the changes in Mail, iCal, Safari and Address Book – they’re a bit different, but I’m not experiencing any “ah-ha” improvements. I suppose once Spotlight finishes indexing my hard drive and iTunes finishes looking for new cover art, there will be speed improvements. And Trevin says that Quick Look will change my life. I figure I’ll give Leopard a week, and if I’m grumbling about Stacks and other issues, I’ll head back to 10.4 for the rest of 2007.