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7 Responses to "Leopard’s Unliked Features"

1. | Reply Daniel
   Posted 02 Nov 2007 at 10:30am #
   

   You can show mounted drives in the Finder sidebar - you just need to drag them there once, and they show up whenever they are mounted after that. The stranger part is where they show up on the desktop: they do not show up in the next spot on the desktop - they show up where they were when they were previously mounted - very odd.

   I really don't care for the iTunes-ification of everything. In Mail, it produces a LOT of wasted vertical space, which now causes my folder list to scroll unnecessarily. Also, whose idea was it to use ALL CAPS for the headers of every section?!

   I also don't care for the folder icons - the "recycled blue" look just does not provide enough contrast to make the folders easy to identify on quick glance.

   I really like the new window style - the unified look is very sharp - it makes the OS look very polished.

2. | Reply Mike
   Posted 02 Nov 2007 at 12:42pm #
   

   I have never had to drag my mounted volumes to the side bar and they always show up, even disk images that I have just downloaded and mounted show up. The drives also show up just under my hard drive like always (I do have the keep arranged by name option on for the desktop and every other window so that may have something to do with it).

   The folders are just plain boring and don't look cool at all.

   The more I think about it I think the thing I dislike most is the lose of the event info drawer in iCal. I used to be able to keep it open and when I made a new event I could just tab my way through all the attributes of it even in the month view (which is the only view I use). Now I have to make an event press 'command' 'I' to tab through everything, and then if I want to be able to see all of the calander at once I have to grab the mouse and click on 'Done' since it has no key stroke that I can find. I also have to keep getting info on each event I click on rather than just having it displayed over tho the side as soon as I click on it.

3. | Reply Aaron
   Posted 02 Nov 2007 at 12:52pm #
   

   The folder Dock icons appearing as their contents is infuriating and confusing. I also can't stand the new folder icons. They require way too much concentrated scrutiny to identify. It's actually keeping me from upgrading my main PowerBook and G5 until Panic updates Candybar or something so I can easilly change 10.5's ugly defaults to something that is actually usable.

4. | Reply The Dude
   Posted 02 Nov 2007 at 11:08pm #
   

   Hmmmm, your list is too short:

   * The stupid quarantine for downloaded stuff. I don't like having to 'OK' every .flv file I get. I had to put a folder action for my downloads folder.

   * The tiny icons in the Finder & Mail sidebars. It takes a lot more effort to drag/drop onto them accurately.

   * I deleted all the canned searches in the Finder sidebar, but the header won't go away.

   * The unified view in the Finder: Some folder have 5 or 6 items, some have 250 - I don't want to view them the same way. There is a way to bypass this behavior, but it's too complicated to use on a regular basis.

   * Spaces losing my Quicktime windows as I switch around. The movie will still be playing, but the window is gone. You can get it back by minimizing it to the dock - but the don't doesn't show the movie playing anymore either. Zooming the window doesn't bring it back either.

   * The desktop pictures prefpane loses my settings every time it loads. I use a sub-folder in my pictures folder to randomly select my desktop. Every time I load the prefpane it selects the TOP ITEM in list: Apple Images. I have to expand the Folders item below and re-select my folder to get a new image. It, naturally, won't show the one I was viewing before I loaded the prefpane. Grrr.

   There are more, but these are just the ones that immediately pop into my head.

   The lack of attention to detail in the non-developer portion of the OS is disturbing. The developer stuff is cool though.

5. | Reply The Dude
   Posted 04 Nov 2007 at 1:52pm #
   

   I take it back, the desktop pictures prefpane problem isn't consistent. Sometimes it screws up, sometimes it doesn't; I haven't nailed down exactly what conditions cause it yet.

6. | Reply alex kent
   Posted 04 Nov 2007 at 2:27pm #
   

   "Mounted drives not appearing in Finder sidebar"

   the behaviour you describe is not exhibited by my erase+install Leopard. maybe a setup specific bug ? a hangover from 'upgrading' 10.4 ?

   external FW harddisks, cd's, dvd's, etc. all show up in Finder sidebar under 'DEVICES' (yeah, like Gruber i can't stand the ALLCAPS)

   but... the Folder Dock Items live preview is really dumb design.

7. | Reply sjk
   Posted 05 Nov 2007 at 8:46pm #
   

   My vote would be "Everything John Siracusa hated about Leopard in his Ars review" (though not quite as vehemently) if the poll had that choice.

   [quote comment="44149"]The stranger part is where they [volumes] show up on the desktop: they do not show up in the next spot on the desktop - they show up where they were when they were previously mounted - very odd.[/quote]

   For me that could arguably be a feature since it's frustrating in pre-10.5 how icons for commonly-mounted volumes don't preserve their new locations when moved from easily cluttered right side "next spot" Desktop locations. Of course I might change my mind after seeing how well/poorly the new behavior works once I'm actually using Leopard.

   One of my first impressions of Spaces during brief testing was that it really needs some way to disable the ()*@#$ workspace auto-switching -- I want to do it explicitly, thankyouverymuch. I sure hope Apple won't neglect its development because I'm increasingly doubtful of the future for any third party OS X VDMs that haven't already become abandonware (or close to it).

   Gotta love the new symptoms of Finder's ongoing browser vs. spacial identity crisis.