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Well, WordPress 2.5 has been released for about a week now, and I’ve been able to grace Webmacster87.info with its presence after spending some time last night doing an update. I’ve had some opportunities to play around with the new admin interface and some of the other changes, and since this is such a significant update to WordPress, what better time to do a review of the update? So, I’m going to take the time now to discuss some of the things that I like about the update, some of the things that I don’t like, as well as talking about some of the things that I’ve done to Webmacster87.info during last night’s update.
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Tags: 2.5, administration, Dashboard, features, interface, review, update, widgets, WordPress

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

Most of us have used and loved Software Update–that little thing from Apple that premiered in OS 9 that tells us whenever our Apple software has an update available, and automatically does all the updating stuff for us.

Well, Software Update has acquired some new aspects in Leopard. For one thing, (although I have yet to see it,) apparently Software Update now checks for updated versions of printer drivers. Woop dee do. But another thing which I find sort of strange is that Apple has seemed to have slimmed down the application. Now while things are downloading and installing, you get this more compact window that tells you what’s going on now, but doesn’t let you see any of the other applications waiting to have things happen to them, like they used to.

However an additional aspect is that now, whenever you’re installing an update that requires a restart, Software Update will actually ask you to restart the computer BEFORE the installation proceeds, and right before the computer is about to shut off, THEN Software Update actually begins the installation, and then automatically restarts the computer. In Tiger and earlier, on the other hand, the update would take place in the background, and a restart wouldn’t be necessitated until after the install was done (and even then I could delay it until I was ready for the restart, and often did). Personally, I think this new setup is a bit more difficult to work around, and forces me to really have to interrupt my workflow more than before in order to do updates, making them less convenient. Nevertheless, Software Update still is handy and helps make sure you can be absolutely up-to-date (which has only backfired very rarely).

Feature Satisfaction Rating:

Be sure to check out the other articles in the Leopard Feature Presentation, occurring throughout the month of November here on Webmacster87.info.

Tags: applications, automatic, drivers, install, Leopard Feature Presentation, Mac OS X Leopard, printer, review, Software Update, update