I keep Slashdot in my RSS because it's still a great clearing house for links. But the asinine commentary that comes with the links drives me crazy. Case in point:
"One of the selling points of the iPhone was its revolutionary touch-screen full keyboard. But a study has shown that text messages sent from iPhones contain significantly more typso than messages from phones with other kinds of keyboards — and aren't entered any faster."
Yes the virtual keyboard was touted as a revolutionary selling point. But the revolution is not to be "better" or "faster." The point is that the virtual keyboard allows for a mutable interface. When you don't need the keyboard, it's not there, not taking up precious real estate on the surface of the device. Equally important, the touch screen allows for intuitive interfaces that aren't forced thru the keyboard. Slide to unlock, touch a voicemail to hear it, touch a link to follow it, etc. So the virtual keyboard doesn't need to be "better", it just needs to be "good enough."
George Lucas: "I basically worked out a general theory for the Force, and then I played with it. The more detail I went into, the more it detracted from the concept I was trying to put forward. It worked better as I got less specific... So the real essence was to try to deal with the Force but not to be too specific about it."
(From Star Wars: The Annotated Screenplays)
And don't we all wish he'd remembered that 20 years later?
The 3D Dock sucks. Much hash has been made about why it sucks, but sometimes the gestalt view of the layman is the most telling. On first boot, on my Macbook with the glossy screen, there were so many glares and reflections - some real, some virtual - that I couldn't distinguish... well, anything. It's a visual trainwreck. Using the defaults command to make it 2D is better, but still aesthetically inferior to the 10.4 dock. I guess I'll be browsing at leoparddocks.com.
The translucent menu bar is irritating. Not so much that I want to pluck my eyes out, but it's harder to read and it doesn't even look cool. It's just pointless.
And the thing with the folders in the dock is insane. How can that be a useful idea for anyone, anywhere? I was looking forward to the Downloads folder with the fanout effect, but that shapeshifting icon thing was just too irritating and I had to take it out of my dock. Please give me a haxie to disable that.
I like the unified look, but I still hate the rounded recessed buttons of Apple Mail compared to the metallic raised buttons of, say, Safari. If you open Apple Mail, Safari, and iChat, and set them side-by-side, guess which one still doesn't look "unified"? If someone with clout at Apple is in love with those recessed buttons (El Jobso?) then why haven't they had their way with other apps like Safari? At least then we'd have the "unity" in "unified".
On the other hand, Apple Mail, traditionally a performance dog since at least 10.3, is much more snappy in Leopard. Props for that, but I always thought that Apple Mail in Tiger, with its weird buttons and poor performance, felt like a stepchild compared to the other bundled apps. Now at least it feels like a peer, even with the odd buttons.
The system as a whole feels much faster, even if it isn't - but I think it really is. Windows drag smoother, minimize faster, Dashboard loads faster (remember in Tiger, the first time you'd go to Dashboard after a reboot, and everything would strain as all the widgets loaded at once? No longer noticeable.)
Quick look is awesome. PDFs, Word docs, text files, source code, movies, iChat transcripts... get a look at any of them without having to open an app. Is there a hotkey for toggling full screen mode without going to the mouse?
Cover flow of directories: Originally I wrote "meh. Not for me." but I take that back. If you're not a big iPhoto user, as I am not, you probably have some folders full of images that are not being managed by iPhoto. Cover flow + quick look is a fun and convenient way to browse those folders.
When you select Show All from a Spotlight search, you now get a real Finder window and not some bizarre supernumerary window. Hurray!
To many people (but, admittedly, probably not most people) Spaces is more of an overdue item than a gee-whiz item. Unix, X11, virtual desktops, old-timers, here's a nickel, blah blah. I used to be a big fan of virtual desktops, so much that I used and loved DesktopManager when I first switched from Linux to OS X. Then when Tiger came out, it broke DesktopManager. After that, I learned to make good use of Exposé and learned to live without virtual desktops. Time will tell if I re-incorporate Spaces into my workflow or not. Binding applications to specific Spaces is cool, and the way that Spaces works with Exposé is cool. I'll probably try it, but I don't automatically assume I'll keep it.
