I always thought the Leopard Dock had its flaws. Mainly that the 3D surface was bright, the S-wave background got in the way, and the glowing “active app” dot was way too hard to see.
I downloaded a few themes from leoparddocks.com:
- Revamped: Darker dock background, no annoying wave
- Liger Indicators: Takes Tiger’s black triangle indicators and adds Leopard’s glow
- New Separator: Dock separator with a correct perspective
This is a test post from the wordpress iPhone app with a test picture. Yay!
another year goes by, and with a few exceptions (New York and Colorado trips, getting a new job) was mostly a non-event. oh wait 1 more to add to the list — the mass Microsoft Zune suicides that have been happening today.
Geek MS-bashing and Zune jokes aside (see digg), I looked up slashdot to find some possible explanations and it looks like it’s due to this being a leap year — today was the beginning of day 366, and something in the Zune exploded. lol..
Happy new year!
It’s not like my opinion about this is going to make a difference, so I’m not going to bother making this some comprehensive Leopard review and instead just go with an itemized list. But to sum up, I’m diggin it a lot and it was worth standing in line on launch day with a bunch of other cult members and watching the confused onlookers drive by (Them: What are you in line for? Us: a new operating system! Them: ….) My only complaints are largely cosmetic, but those are things that are relatively easy to fix (or hack around).
Good:Â
- Faster startups and shutdowns
- No more beach ball of death if Finder can’t connect to a remote server
- I’m finding myself using the CoverFlow and Quick View Finder much more than I thought I would
- Unified window decorations (no more mish-mash of brushed metal, pinstripey windows)
- Time Machine already saved my ass (more details later)
- Mail.app is noticeably faster and more snappy
- Spaces (finally! virtual desktops)
Bad:
- Stacks. Looks nice but it’s behavior and appearance is more inconsistent than useful
- The reflective bottom dock looked sweet for the first few days but the relatively low-contrast blue-orb (replaces Tiger’s black triangle) is hard to see so I can’t quickly tell  which apps are running. I ran the no-glass dock “hack” for less eye candy and more visibility
- The new system folders are lame. It’s much harder to tell at a glance which folders are which since they’re now monochromatic and all the same shape.  (see http://www.indiehig.com/blog/2007/09/09/fix-the-leopard-folders/)
- Translucent menu bar. I know Steve Job’s intent with a lot of these visual enhancements was to showcase your desktop, but at least give us the option to adjust the menu bar’s opacity.
- No sticky windows functionality. Spaces was a concept clearly borrowed from just about every *nix window manager out there, but failed to bring over another feature that’s usually tied in with virtual desktops — sticky windows. I mainly use this on my buddy list and my terminal windows that tail various log files, so it’s sort of annoying to have to switch back and forth between spaces, when having sticky functionality would fix this right away.
Maybe I’ve been doing QA for too long, but when I was browsing through the fixed bugs list for WP 2.2.2, I lol’d when I saw the Priority name for one of the bugs:
I just modified our Bugzilla db here at work to the same — “Critical” is too boring. 
Firefox 1.0 is out. ditch IE and make the internet happy. 
EverQuest 2 is also out today. buy it and help put food on my table. kthx!
step 1: open your MP3 player (or whatever you use)
step 2: put all of your music on random
step 3: write down the first ten songs it plays, no matter how embarrassing
my 10 random songs out of 3202 ..
1. Red Hot Chili Peppers - One Hot Minute (6:23)
2. Elliott Smith - Ballad Of Big Nothing (2:48)
3. The Strokes - What Ever Happened? (2:54)
4. Pearl Jam - Satan's Bed (3:30)
5. Travis - Flowers In The Window (3:41)
6. Smashing Pumpkins - The Crying Tree Of Mercury (3:43)
7. Our Lady Peace - Blister (3:57)
8. Weezer - Crab (2:34)
9. Smashing Pumpkins - Geek U.S.A. (5:13)
10. U2 - Stuck In A Moment You Can't Get Out Of (Acoustic) (3:42)
earthlink’s DSL service has been taking a crap lately. it was down all day this past tuesday and wednesday and very intermittent since then. this prompted me to sign up for a dedicated virtual server, which is still being set up. i’ve got a new domain, which i’ll announce when it’s all ready for the world to see…
i just upgraded to kernel 2.4.22 (gentoo gs-sources build) and i decided to give ACPI another shot. it works, kinda. it doesn’t hang the system on bootup like it did before, so that’s a good thing. auto-poweroff on shutdown works, which is nice to have. however, i still can’t get my holy grail of power management — battery status. i compiled all the ACPI options into the kernel but battery status still wasn’t working (even tried compiling them as modules but got the same results). nothing battery related appears under /proc/acpi so i’m stumped. i suppose i should give the kernel a little more time to mature. oh, i also got the brightness controls working (fn + f1/f2). all it required was compiling “Toshiba Laptop Extras” into the kernel. bonus! need to update my how-to soon…
so i finally talked to the man himself — mandrake, one of the guys who coded enlightenment, the window manager that got me to switch to linux in the first place. he’s been posting about PlanetSide and Star Wars Galaxies on his site so i emailed him and asked what character and server he was playing on (and also confessed that i was using KDE now, heh). he replied back, and also mentioned some bugs he found, including a nasty crash bug. i said that these issues were already known, and then i did a little tech support and made sure that he was running the latest drivers and all that. as someone in a QA position, it’s not technically my job to do that, but on a personal level, i feel like it’s the least i can do — i used enlightenment for about 2 years, and even converted a few geeks when they saw my E desktop running, so i’d be glad if i can help resolve those game issues.