Contrary to my usual habits, I was very excited to get my hands on Mac OS X Leopard, to the point where I went ahead and pre-ordered it, thus officially deeming myself an “early adopter.” I then spent the month of November on Webmacster87.info with my so-called Leopard Feature Presentation. However, Leopard had a few disappointing attributes, which I summed up best in the following quote that I wrote on December 1st:

Leopard does have a share of downsides, and does suffer a bit from an “Apple knows best” syndrome in the fact that a number of features don’t come with preferences to allow the user to choose what he/she wants in his/her user experience, and probably the best example of this concerns Apple’s new desktop, translucent menu bar, and 3D Dock.
From Review and Final Recap: Mac OS X Leopard

Well, at long last, these downsides have been corrected. Three and a half months after Leopard was released, 10.5.2 was published, an 180 MB update that among making many, many bug fixes, also reverses some of the “Apple knows best” attributes.

For one thing, the translucent menu bar is no longer as translucent, but even better, they’ve added an option to turn off the opaque menu bar completely! What’s now there is a greyish gradient menu bar, which is actually fairly reminiscent of the rest of Leopard’s interface (and easier on the eyes than the white translucent menu bar type I was using before).

Also, I have finally fallen in love with Stacks. Apple has now made it possible for you to set the folder icon as the representative icon for the stack (instead of a “stack” of the top three files), and the pre-Leopard list view has returned–even better because you no longer need to right-click to get to it. While I’m going to keep using Fan mode for the Downloads folder, I love the list view so much more for Applications and Documents stacks.

As for the 3D Dock, the Mac developer community is so awesome that there are a large number of freeware tools available that let you switch to the 2D Dock style if you prefer, so I think that the complaints over the 3D Dock have died down (not that I ever had problems with it).

All in all, I’d say that now with 10.5.2, Leopard is finally truly an undisputed worthwhile package that I highly recommend everyone upgrade to. Apple may have taken three and a half months to catch up, but Vista has been out for 13 months now, and Microsoft still hasn’t fixed that!

Anyway, I’m very glad to see 10.5.2, and feel so much happier using my computer thanks to it. Now let’s see if perhaps it has the power to fix random shutdowns…

Tags: Dock, features, Mac OS X Leopard, menu bar, Stacks, update

In my inaugural Leopard Feature Presentation on the New User Interface & Dock, I may have been a bit harsh on much of the new interface, but the wonderful Mac community have continued to come out with ways to rectify many of Leopard’s shortcomings. This morning, TUAW blogged about an incredible new way to dress up your stacks. Now, I didn’t come down too harshly on Stacks, which does seem like kind of a neat idea, although its implementation seems limited and I miss the ability to right-click on a folder in the Dock and get a browse-through menu. But one of the quirks of Stacks is that the icon for a stack is the icon of the item in the top of the stack, which often can misrepresent the stack or make it appear odd. For example, if you put a stack of your Home folder in the Dock, the top icon would be the folder icon for your Desktop! Seem a little strange?

This morning, TUAW blogged about some designers who have come up with some really cool designs for “Stacks drawers”, which are little folder overlays which you can set to automatically appear at the top of your stack, include the general icon of the stack you want, and appear as a little translucent drawer that still let you see the icons behind it. (You can see a screenshot, along with downloads and further instructions in the linked TUAW post.) The download includes drawers with icons suited for your Home, Library, Downloads, Applications, Desktop, Documents, Public, Utilities, Photos, Movies, and Music folders. You also get some additional “novelty” drawers with the shadow person used for Accounts, the @ for bookmarks, the action button gear, the Command key icon, an envelope for Mail, a check mark for to-dos, the “i” for Information, and even Apple’s sideways version of the Windows logo as seen in Boot Camp. (And, of course, there’s a generic drawer with no icon on it.) And of course, what’s to stop other graphic designers from making their own?

The icons are actually folders that you place inside the folder that you want a stack of. The names, by default, have spaces on either end of them so that they appear at the top of stacks that are sorted by name. For Stacks that are sorted by date, however (like the Downloads stack, for example), the TUAW post links to some Terminal-fu that you can use to set the date modified of a folder to the year 2020 so it always appears at the top of the stack.

One minor quirk that I had with this technique is that the name of the icon can’t be identical to the name of the stack it’s housing–once you change it, it works fine. You’ll also have to get used to the fact that when you open the drawer/stack, the drawer icon also comes along for the ride, but I think that the presence of those icons now to remind me of exactly what stack I’m looking at just looks so cool, and makes Stacks more useful. Now let’s hope that Apple offers something like this built-in, without the need to add folder icons to make it work…

Tags: customization, Dock, hack, icons, Mac OS X Leopard, Stacks, Terminal