Dave Landers

I’ve had Leopard installed for several days now, and mostly it is good. Here are some delights and gripes and bugs and other thoughts.

Mail

Mail still doesn’t obey the Hide checkbox when it is started at login. Just what is so hard about this? I find this really annoying. My son did figure out a rather clever “cheat” - he starts Mail in a different Space, so it is not really hidden, but just looks that way (but I’m not using Spaces).

And Mail still doesn’t grok the age-old function “go to next unread message” (the shortcut for this should be “spacebar”).

On the plus side, Mail will finally display a proper count of unread messages in the Dock icon (rather than only counting messages in the inbox).

And in the bug arena, there is something seriously wrong. I occasionally see a popup from Mail saying it can’t identify the certificate for pop.gmail.com.

When I inspect the certificate, it is the one for my work email account. So something is seriously broken in Mail’s multiple-account settings or fetching.

Mail / RSS

I never really have got along with RSS in the browser - never seemed right to me. So I thought having it in Mail was a good idea - it’s really where I’ve wanted most of my feeds all along. But Apple’s implementation is just not “there” yet. It would probably work for someone with just a handful of feeds, but not for me.

First, there is just no way to import a set of feeds from anywhere but Safari. I found these instructions and got my OPML feeds imported (via Firefox to Safari to Mail - ugh), but they lost their folders. It took me a while to figure out that you can create folders for feeds (you just create a new mailbox), and then I was on the way to rebuilding my folders, and importing feeds into them. But along the way I figured out that you can’t sort or arrange anything. So I was stuck thinking I’d have to rename my folders so they’d be “aNews”, “bTech”, “cBlogs”, etc. Gack. And things were just getting crowded in the sidebar - what with my inboxes and all my mail folders, there just wasn’t room for a dozen more folders for feeds.

So I came to my senses and went back to using the most excellent NetNewsWire.

Safari

I think the best thing in the new Safari is actually the new eye candy in the Find feature. I was always having trouble seeing the default (subtile) blue highlight. Apple has now made it easy to see the find results on any web page (regardless of color scheme).

The history menu also now has two new options: Reopen Last Closed Window and Reopen All Windows from Last Session. Fantastic for those of us who sometimes accidentally close or quit.

The other two things I like come with the debug menu. First, they moved Open Page With and User Agent from the bottom to the top of the menu. And the new Web Inspector is great (kinda like Firebug, but more Apple-y). I especially like the way it rolls up CSS styles and shows Metrics (margins/borders/padding/size).

Spotlight

Spotlight just seems to work better. First, there’s new stuff contributing - most notibly Web History. Spotlight searches now include your Safari cache, so you can find that site you visited last week.

Also, they’ve made the “Top Hit” automatically selected (rather than messing around with the Command key). I can type, for example, C-Space, sys, Return and get System Preferences. It’s just better.

iCal

Well, finally you can set a default alarm for new events, although there’s no way that I can see to set the default sound to anything but Basso. And the default alarm doesn’t seem to apply to notifications created from Mail. So some progress here, but still a way to go.

Stacks

I actually like this. I used to keep folders in my Dock for Applications and Downloads, but this just works better. I don’t really like the Fan view, but since my Dock is on the side, all I and use is Grid anyway.

Quick Look

This is going to be really handy, especially now that I’m starting to learn the shortcut (Command-Y). It’s way faster than launching an app just to see what’s in the file. Next, I’m going to have to try a code syntax highlighter.

Random Issues

I have my desktop background set to display photos from a folder. Sometimes, first thing in the morning, my second monitor comes up with the default Leopard background. If I bring up preferences, it does think that it’s displaying the photos. If I wait a half-hour (when the photo is scheduled to change), it gets with the program.

I have noticed that the login dialog doesn’t get focus when I wake from sleep. So I type my password and nothing happens till I click in the login dialog. The worst part is that I sometimes have found bits (or all) of my password sitting in other dialogs or documents - which means those dialogs actually had keyboard focus while they were supposed to be locked out. Scary.

I am disappointed that WiFi with WPA is still not right. I have never been able to hold a connection to our work WAN for more than about 15 minutes (it had steadily grown from 5 to about 15 over several Tiger updates). Now, it seems we’re back to 5 minutes. My home network (Linksys) is not as bad as at work, but it does drop connections occasionally, too. I have no data, but it does seem worse than with the last update of Tiger. I never had these problems with my PowerBook.

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