Leopard Upgrade

Posted on 30th Dec 2007

So, I took the plunge and upgraded to Leopard while I had time to occupy over Christmas. Probably could’ve found something higher on my todo list really, but an impulse grabbed me when I was in the Apple store, and that was that.

So, opinions. A mixed blessing really. User interface elements are a lot nicer, particularly the new reflective dock (which seems to be a bit controversial round the web). There’s also a neat little hidden trick for putting spacers in the dock, a problem I had to hack around in Tiger by placing “fake” apps in the dock which threw up errors on accidental clicks.

The spacers tip comes courtesy of a post I found on the MacNN forums, which basically involves adding extra entries in the dock’s plist with the command:

1. defaults write com.apple.dock persistent-apps -array-add '{tile-data={}; tile-type="spacer-tile";}'

Stacks are a good idea, but I can’t see myself using them beyond my current “Downloads” stack that’s tidied up my often messy desktop. The one thing I don’t like here is the “stackyness” of the icon given to them. I think the idea is that it looks like a pile of files that you’d make on a desk, except it’s just a bit too neat. No pages sticking out at jaunty angles, folders with their contents falling out, or even any shadows to show height. I’d be happier if I could just replace the icon with a custom one that represented what I used that stack for.

Spaces is the only other major change I’ve used, which is an achievement considering the number of times I’ve tried and given up with virtual desktops in the past. There’s not much to comment on, other than it being implemented really well, and I’ll probably stick with using it for a while.

Oh, and the much touted, improved networking in Finder. Or rather, the lack of it. Finder successfully discovering my Windows shares had always akin to me being able to hit a playing card with a dart while blindfolded,  but thankfully when Steve strolled out last MacWorld to show off Leopard he told us Finder would now have improved networking features. I still hit the same problem of only being able to discover Windows PCs on a full moon, and now to add to the mix I get errors (6602, for anyone interested) when trying to connect to password protected shares on Vista. Clearly a huge improvement.

Luckily I have found a workaround for this problem, but oddly it comes in the form of a simple Applescript:

1. tell application "Finder"
2. mount volume "smb://mediacenter/c$" as user name "frosty" with password "pword"
3. mount volume "smb://mediacenter/d$" as user name "frosty" with password "pword"
4. mount volume "smb://mediacenter/e$" as user name "frosty" with password "pword"
5. end tell

Which begs the question if it’s this easy to get working in Applescript, why does it always fail in Finder? And moreso, why do these two methods not just call the same underlying API?

Another downside is the default icons. I know, it’s easy enough to change them, but Apple pride themselves on their design – why choose these? As soon as I find some folder icons that agree with me these will be gone.

Anyway, enough with the negatives. Overall, Leopard’s quite an improvement over Tiger. There’s the big, noticable changes like the Dock, Spaces, Stacks and Time Machine (which I haven’t tried yet, and probably never will), but I’ve also noticed a lot of minor changes that just make it that little bit nicer to use. Toolbars are now almost universally consistent, rather than the mishmash of plain grey, gradients and brushed metal that were round every corner in Tiger. Terminal’s been improved with the addition of a remote connection window (to be fair this could’ve been there all along and I’ve missed it). The translucent menu bar is far more subtle than I expected, and not a problem to work with on most backgrounds. I’m sure I’ll come across more changes as I carry on using it, and hopefully the networking issue will be fixed in 10.5.2 due out sometime in January.

I won’t hold my breath though.