First builds of Mac OS X 10.5.1 pack over two dozen fixes - Page 2

Amen to this. Stacks is indeed an interesting function. I'm really looking forward to it. BUT, it is no replacement to hierarchical (contextual menu) folders. I used this functionality in OS 9 and OS X Tiger, and now they want to remove it in Leopard? Try to efficiently navigate 70+ nested folders from the dock using stacks. Heck, post a screen shot of how you do this. I'd be curious to see just how well this works.

...really, post a screen shot. Please?....\

Oh, and P.S... To those who might label me as a complainer, I'm not complaining. Just voicing my opinion. I brag on Apple all the time, but I believe that through feedback, they can make even better products. Leopard is awesome! I can't wait! I am ready to 'embrace the change.' But I want to use Apple's super-fast turnaround time on improvements and updates to my advantage. Apple knows how to listen, and that's one of the reasons why I love them.

I am really enjoying Leopard. It looks really pretty and the new features look cool.

OF COURSE IT HAS BUGS!!!.... it is a new architecture. It was ready for public release. That DOES NOT MEAN it is ready for mission-critical apps. Wait until 10.5.3 at minimum for mission critical apps. Until then, Lepoard will not match Tiger for stability. Obviously! But I still think it's a very promising new product.

All you whiners who complain about the methods of the WORLD'S BEST OS MAKER can just go straight to hell. Your complaints are ill founded. It's the best in the world, deal with it. Surely you have worse problems. 10.5 is a toy for now, a very nice and pretty toy. Don't be so quick to complain about the world's OS master. Dock folders or whatever are an easy add-on and not a strong or lasting criticism of 10.5.

just mentioning it, goodness, sorry for having an opinion..

[QUOTE= 3. Safari. Why can't i choose to have safari in tabbed browsing view all the time like version 2? I really hate having my screen jump down when I first open a tab. If it ain't broke - why fix it? At least make it a user selectable option.[/QUOTE]

Just so you know, you can still do this. Open up a single window, then go to the View Menu, and select "show tab bar". From now on, even after restarting safari, you'll have your cherished tab bar, even when you only have one window open.

[QUOTE= 3. Safari. Why can't i choose to have safari in tabbed browsing view all the time like version 2? I really hate having my screen jump down when I first open a tab. If it ain't broke - why fix it? At least make it a user selectable option.[/QUOTE]

Just so you know, you can still do this. Open up a single window, then go to the View Menu, and select "show tab bar". From now on, even after restarting safari, you'll have your cherished tab bar, even when you only have one window open.

Although there are some valid points in this thread, someone has to do it:

They do? You have copied the Dock application from 10.4 and replaced the 10.5 Dock application with it? And Spaces still work? I think not.


Change for changes sake is not helpful. There are plenty of legitimate complaints about the 3-D dock. At least you can easily make it 2-D with a terminal command. But why not expose that option in the GUI?

And stacks - nice idea for some things, but why did they replace the normal hierarchical folder view? Why can't the user choose? Sometimes stacks will be best, sometimes the old way.

For the record, I don't even use folders in my dock, but at least I'm not so blinkered I can't understand other people's legitimate complaints.


Your brain is ill-founded. You are the perfect example of the worst kind of "Apple-can-do-no-wrong-fanboy".

What are the problems about the dock? I'm just asking, for me stacks are are perfect since i can open the directory if i want.

Indeed. Guys, use the program before whine.

It depends, i didn't have a single problem but even if i did, Leoapard is a great experience, on my machine is evene faster than Tiger and i love some of the new features.

Guys Apple don't do miracles, leoaprd is incredibly stable and complete but some bugs are in for sure.

I totally agree. Nice to see someone misquote you to let you appear like a a fanboy. Mac users are whiners :-)

I did not misquote him. Perhaps you cannot read. I quoted two full sentences from his post, unedited.

Here they are again:


Now, you can go back and forth between this and his own post, and verify that it is an exact quote, not a misquote.

Perhaps you would like to explain what you think those two sentences mean? Because for me, the first sentence says "don't question Apple", i.e., they can do no wrong, and the second one states that the complaints are ill-founded.

There is one ill-founded complaint in this thread. That is that Safari 3 doesn't have the ability to show the tab bar at all times; this has been shown to not be true. The other complaints - transparent menu bar, 3-D dock, stacks have replaced hierarchical folders in the dock, are well-founded, legitimate complaints. These three things have demonstrably reduced the efficiency of OS X's UI for some people.

I've read the solution to my 'bug' number 3 (tabs in Safari) and offer a big thanks to Jeremy Brown who solved it. I guess it just wasn't in the place I was expecting (like Preferences>Tabs...who'da thunk it eh?).

My other 4 'bugs' still stand though as do many of the others as you mention.

And a number 6 from me - Shutting down my MBP now takes an extra 10 seconds before the chip whine dies down until I know it's truly died. If i close the lid any time before this, it goes into 'standby' mode with the slowly flashing power light...even though i selected 'shutdown' from the menu. Annoying.

Column view in the Finder?

Selecting from 8 level nested hierarchical menus with thousands of items in them would drive me potty. Using folders in the dock has honestly never occurred to me as something even vaguely useful.

Incidentally, for those of you that don't like the transparent menu bar, the answer is to use a Mac with an Nvidia 5200FX card in. It's solid grey on that. One would suspect there is a setting somewhere for that to be found.

[QUOTE=MacSuperiority;1169717]THEN DON'T FUCKING USE IT!

Stick with Tiger if you dont like it.


I don't post often but this comment got me to log on again.

In my opinion, Leopard wasn't quite ripe. I've been through lots of OS upgrades and seriously, this one surprised me.

Can't sync iDisk. Disk Utility crashes (after it nearly toasts the processor). Firewire disks can't always mount. Icon stacking on dock folders is pretty lame.

But hey, we bought the upgrade and the sum of all the Leopard headaches wouldn't come close to what a Vista user had to handle.

in replay to an earlier comment/several comments along this line.


>>>1. Inconsistent finder functionality.

This comes under the longstanding FTFF heading and things related to it - subsection finder metadata not being stored and/or honored at the directly level.

things are alot better in Leopard but still not perfect - problem is Apple chooses not to "complicate" the user interface if you will with all the options/configuration settings needed to make everyone happy on this front, myself included -- this issue is considered at a zero priority level as the decision always comes down to simplicity over complexity (if and when apple finds a way to do both elegantly they add it to the OS - or at least that is the ideal).

Personally I almost never use icon view so I mainly want my list view or column view windows & columns to stay the way I leave them or to be able to universally set them a certain way once and for all... yeah good luck

>>> 2. Dock. Really rubbish.

yup it is different than before yet with many of the same or similar deficiencies as the old dock, if you want to be a power user may I suggest trying DragThing out for size as even with hidden options enabled the dock is never going to please a small but vocal crowd of longtime mac users.

Personally I would settle for more configuration preferences for the dock but then usability suffers when person B doesn't know how to operate person A's mac setup etc [Apple likes this kind of enforced consistency as they believe its in the best interest of the Brand]. It's the same thing whenever Apple chooses to "innovate" with the GUI and self consistency, certain nichés (some quite sizable) are emotionally/viscerally affected (but no one is about to switch back to windoze just yet are they?) -- purity is not about to happen nor should it, could it be better yes, it could always be better and I wish it was.

>>>3. Safari. Why can't i choose to have safari in tabbed browsing view all the time like version 2?

Here I have some relief for you, yes the preference is indeed gone but alas the last used setting (of the "Hide/Show Tab Bar" or CMD+Shift+T) is persistent so turn this on once and you should be set -- Apple decided this was a simplification if you will... Yes it is not exactly the same but logically if you want tab bars (as hopefully most do these days) you pretty much always want tab bars or you never want them if you follow that.

4. Mail. Don't get me started. No option to download all my old mails from .mac, poor poor quality syncing. I can't even be bothered with the HTML eye-candy until all the rest of it's fixed.

Mail is getting better incrementally, but you need to remember Apple likes to find ways to keep things relatively simple for the average user, mail is actually very advanced in many ways but some of its more advanced features (such as Rules) are not still not well exposed in the GUI at this point. Subtle things like Encryption and Signing has been built in for years, but relatively hard to get working as apple choose not to focus on these things. "downloading all your old mails from .mac" is actually possible assuming you have been leaving them on the server (it is IMAP) after all -- .Mac for me has always been slow but I suffer with it for the convience and integration/unique feature advantages -- iDisks access is always going to be hindered because the webdav protocol is far too interactive so any latency in your connection really hurts the real world performance which is not good to begin with.

>>>5. Spaces. What, no separate backgrounds for each space?

There are many options Apple could have implemented for spaces (perhaps some are available via the command line/plist settings?) but the main problem here is it is already a difficult concept that can be very confusing to use for many users (consider using spaces with 2 or more monitors for instance) .. [For instance try a newbie use spaces without its menu bar extra showing and watch the confusion]

As a side note may I offer the suggestion of disabling spring loaded folders when using spaces and exposé - so that you have 100% manual control with the spacebar so that the user has time to think - just the way I like to configure it...

6. Pretty much what everyone else has been saying.

many of these issues will be patched in the next two point releases and some usability issues will be addressed by third parties as well - whether it be the translucent menu bar (already some hack jobs for this) or dock functionality -- for all those wishing the hierarchical menus come back in the dock I don't see that as likely unless apple chooses to abandon its fans and stacks which i see as really unlikely -- my suggestion would be to try using the dock from tiger to see if you can live with it instead -- /System/Library/CoreServices/ is where you will find Dock.app -- I realize this is a sucky option but if the dock is you main issue with Leopard I think you might just want to try to adapt/change or suffer with this hackjob until something in leopard 10.5.7 breaks it - leopard has so much goodness that its worth putting up with a few "unnecessary changes" I guess you would call it.

whoops i forgot to submit my reply for about 5 hours but none the less there you have it..

as for your new number 6 I can't say for sure exactly what is happening on you mac but i beleive any time you give up at shutdown has likely been more than won back at startup.

For what it is worth have you gotten into a regular usage case with leopard yet so that startup/shutdown times have stabilized and spotlight is fully up to date index wise (there is a bug fix coming in 10.5.1 that related to spotlight indexing and disk utility in particular if your wondering why permissions repair is so sluggish)

That was my plan too. I have a 'Super Duper, clone of my Tiger drive prior to update and have had to boot off this a couple of times to run something that won't work in Leopard. However, after Leopard, going back to Tiger seemed like going back to OS 9! It seems antiquated and so much slower. So now I am staying with 10.5.0, bugs and all.

The main problem I have experienced with Leo is the Finder hanging up on occasions and a failure to be able to quit even with Force Quit. This after running certain FTP related apps I think but it is hard to say as I multi-task all the time. The OS has so far recovered from a few hard shut downs ok but it is a worry. Now I write this I realize I better try a Super Duper clone of my current Leopard boot drive immediately! I assume it will clone?

I thought super duper didn't work play nice with Leo. Have they released a version that is compatible with Leo? That's one of the things holding me back from Leo.

I am no whiner: I love Apple and Leopard ... This is my only really negative comment too. I suspect either Apple will restore this ability or there will be (maybe already is) a third party add on to give us this back.

I have So many apps I use daily for my multi-media work that the Dock is reserved for just a few main items like Mail and Safari. All Adobe CS3, all Apple Pro, Quicktime related, Server Admin, FTP stuff, etc. were in nested folders accessed from various pop up folders in the dock in Tiger.

Now I am wasting way too much time accessing applications. I also need to drag documents onto application's icons as I often want to force open in an alternative application from the creator and again the previous spring loaded folders in the doc were for this perfect, alas now i have no simple way to do this.

Anyone know a stable Leopard friendly third party dock add on to restore the Tiger method?

I do know Super duper won't look at a Time Machine drive but I have not tried a straight forward clone of the boot drive yet (I am ashamed to admit!). I will try now unless anyone knows for sure...? (also Carbon Copy Cloner too worth trying if SD fails).

nothing about the repair permisson BS which takes 20+ minutes to do nothing but cause problems.

Just talked with a good friend with Leopard, says his Super Duper clone of working Leopard drive worked perfectly. He has an Intel mac and i need to test on a Duel G5 to be 100% happy but it is good news so far.

Can you explain this? I can run repair permissions on any one of 5 Macs here all with Leo (ranging from G4.s G5s and Intel machines) and all run Repair Permissions without issues.

Correction: I do see a difference, sorry. I never sat and watched before and must have assumed it was the same as Tiger. It does work just no progress bar. hard to say if it is slower for me.

To all you dock whiners:

Why don't you just download one of the half dozen freeware utilities that give you nested folders? They started appearing since the day Leopard was released. Then you can stop filling up forum threads that are not related to your preference on how the Dock should work.

Repair permissions is nothing but a red herring. It's not like permissions on files spontanously change one day. Repair permissions is the biggest troubleshooting red herring since zapping your PRAM.

Could you please name such freeware utilities?

1. Best to give feedback to Apple to get the job done correctly. I think Apple do get to read some of these comments ... I hope anyway.
2. I avoid 3rd party Finder altering utilities as much as possible for such things due to future problems with OS conflicts. I will cave in on this one for productivity sake till Apple fix this. Please post link to your trove of utilities that fix this in Leopard.
3. Constructive comments are not whining in my view. One comment may not have any impact, if a ton of experienced users write in it may have more credence.

I beg to differ on Zapping Pram, (I am open to input on permissions). It has got many Macs up and working after a kernel panic for users i support. I am not saying it fixed the initial cause but got them up again so we could trouble shoot the cause.

He speaks for me. The loss of hierarchal menus in the Leopard Dock has made me postpone my intended purchase of a new laptop. Jobs demonstrated hierarchal menus in the Dock when OSX first came out. I use the feature quite a bit. Leopard's stacks might be fine for some, but for others this is a complete step backwards. Apple should know this, and should have provided users with an option to retain Tiger's Dock functionality.

First, why should I have to download a free utility. This is the kind of thing, Apple should have just know would piss off a lot of loyal users. Second, why do you not provide us for a link for one of these free utilities. I certainly am unaware of any. Third, I complain because I hope people will do like I did, and contact Apple's feedback site to also complain about this issue. I have done that and send Jobs an email.

Wow, we get a free ticket straight to hell for complaining about a product that many bought, and that is from a public company that many people are part owners of.

I suspect you probably would like things better in China, where people aren't allowed to complain and they just accept their lot in life and whatever is given to them by the powers that be. Yes, master, thank you master.

Finally, you sound like one of those US politicians who always respond to criticism by saying, the US is the best Country in the World. Even if that were true, does that mean it cannot be better and that we shouldn't strive to make it better?

check this out....

http://www.versiontracker.com/dyn/moreinfo/macosx/22117

XMenu - 1.8

Product Description:
This program brings back the Apple Menu to Mac OS X and includes also a complete application launcher. By adding one or more global menus to the right side of the menu bar you can easily access your preferred applications, folders (and subfolders), documents and files. Furthermore there's no explicit need for a configuration (e.g. creating lots of folders and aliases or adding items to user-defined setups) - just activate the menus you like. All menus and submenus update themselves automatically just like the good old Apple Menu so it's not necessary to refresh them manually. In addition, XMenu optionally displays small or large icons and follows aliases and symbolic links. Finally, please note that contrary to most other solutions, this is neither a hack ("haxie") nor an unofficial menu extra.

FolderGlance

http://www.versiontracker.com/dyn/moreinfo/macosx/27670

Product Description:
FolderGlance is a small Contextual Menu Plugin for the Finder. When it is installed, it allows you to control-click or right-click on folders to see and open their contents, as well as examine the contents of sub-folders down an unlimited number of levels. FolderGlance also has the following features:

Adding your own custom folders to the contextual menu, enabling FolderGlance to act as a very versatile launcher
Moving, copying and making aliases of the currently selected files in a folder you browse to
Control-free popups: Open the contextual menu without holding down the control-key or using a two-button mouse
Drag-and-drop of files and folders
In-menu preview of arbitrary files
Opening files with an application different than the default by using an "Open with..." menu you can tailor to suit your own taste
Changing the font size used in contextual menus
Disable the menu fade effect, for a more speedy menu experience
Browsing into package contents
Optional display of custom file and folder icons
Customizable sorting and customizable display of hidden files and folders
Trash files directly from the contextual menu by typing Command-Backspace or Command-T
Localized to Japanese, French, Polish, Italian and Norwegian.
Universal: Runs on both PowerPC and Intel-based Macs!

I tried that but it doesn't really work. You can't quit applications from the Dock because it doesn't seem to know they're open and the icons keep bouncing even after an application is open.

I knew it was a bit "quirky", but I didn't realise it was that bad. Guess that's a non-starter, then - sorry

These forums should be filled with complaints about the dock.

The loss of hierarchical folder access has made a lot of users' workflows horribly inefficient. There is simply no justification for the loss of such highly relied upon functionality. Stacks can be useful. But it is obvious that apple made a number of interface blunders in implementing them.

One of the reasons that the mac platform has maintained a superior GUI is the culture of mac users. We won't settle for merely "ok". When it is obvious that apple has screwed up, we will complain long and hard. We'll keep at it until apple corrects the problem.

Whilst I believe there a few 'needed' things before people calm down (read: shut up temporarily), saying that everyone should complain here to cause Apple to act is silly. Apple has tools for which your feedback goes directly to them. And also stops the asinine "They should!" "They shouldn't!" arguments from crapping up threads.

[QUOTE=Gizmo-xl;1170006]check this out....

http://www.versiontracker.com/dyn/moreinfo/macosx/22117

XMenu looks like a possibility, though not quite as convenient as Dock folders (more awkward place on the top right), and it's unclear if it works with Leopard (site doesn't say, but it probably does). Definitely worth a try if Apple doesn't update.

Folder Glance - I didn't like it much when I tried it in Tiger.

Thanks for sharing...

You do know "Leo" is commonly associated with a Lion, short for Leonard(o), etc.? Using it as an abbreviation for Leopard is just wrong, especially if Apple decides to use Lion for a future OS X big cat marketing name.