I ended up upgrading to Leopard (Mac OS X 10.5) and I think that was a mistake. I should of headed my low expectations and not even bothered. There are many annoyances and a few bugs. The biggest bug which is actually impacting my work is also the oddest, some how they broke “tar”.
Leopard upgrades tar to version 1.15.1, the previous version was 1.14. In the new version the –exclude file parameter does not work. I have several scripts using tar to do builds and packaging, and not being able to exclude files screws it up completely. I ended up booting into a VMware ubuntu environment to do a deployment, ridiculous. Looks like I’m not the only one with Leopard tar problems.
Here are some other annoyances:
- Opacity of Menu Bar and Menu Items makes the menu items difficult to read and adds no benefit at all. I’m surprised it is not configurable so it can be turned off.
- Applications icon in dock defaults to first application, this makes it look like the Address Book is always running. I solved this by creating an ” Applications” folder alias, notice the space in the front. The old Apple trick to get things to sort to the top.
- I thought Spotlight could replace Quicksilver since all I use it for is launcher and calculator, unfortunately Spotlight is too slow. It crashes frequently for me and I haven’t been able to get the demoed calculating to work. I disabled it again and using Quicksilver.
- I thought tabs in Terminal could replace iTerm, but alas the shortcut keys to switch between tabs don’t work
- Foreground and background window colors seem reversed, everything before was grayed out if it was in the background, but with Leopard the background windows are lighter and the foreground window is darker.
- Stacks not coming out in a straight line is annoying, that falling away curve just looks wrong.
The only new feature I’ve found that I like so far is the Applications folder popping up out of the dock, however since I use Quicksilver I’m rarely launching applications like that.