www.devco.net by r.i.pienaar

Fixing some Leopard annoyances

Some of the UI decisions that Apple made with Leopard is questionable to say the least. The ones that gets to me are:

• The menu bar is semi transparent, thats just lame as your background wallpaper makes the menu harder to read. An annoying fix is to add just the right amount of black or white pixels in a strip at the top of your wall paper. This does not solve the problem if like me you move between laptop monitor and external display being primary depending on your location.
• The glassy dock takes a lot of space and just distracts, all the reflections and stuff makes the very faint dots even harder to spot. A working fix can be found here. See below for a screenshot of my fixed dock.
• The starry desktop background that came out of the box looks unprofessional and badly done, its also too busy and distracting. A very easy fix here.

OS X Leopard

Last night I joined a few 100 people in queuing for Leopard. My first plan was to go to Regent Street but I decided it might be a bit mad out there so I headed to Buewater shopping centre instead.
I am really glad I went there, there were several 100 people in the queue but I got in around 5:15 and were maybe number 15 in the queue so I was in and out in about 10 minutes with Leopard and a swanky tshirt.

• Parallels let you mount your guest drive as a drive on your mac, for some or other reason this gives a time-out problem. Parallels have committed to a free patch for any issues so Kudos to them
• Little Snitch stopped working well and will require a paid upgrade to version 2. Version 2 is much improved and I think this is a must-have app so will be happy to pay for it, its very inexpensive.

Other than these problems, I've been 100% happy with it. So far I don't think its a total killer upgrade really, the unified look and feel is nice and makes for an all round more polished feel to OS X something that Microsoft have right for years now with their Designed For plans that requires you to comply to their design guides, I think the unified look and feel of Windows apps is invaluable.
The big feature for me is perhaps the new Finder, quick look and coverflow makes dealing with images so much easier, in the past I had to rely on all sorts of 3rd party apps to just browse images without pain, now Finder does it perfectly.
The biggest disappointment is Spaces. I had high hopes for it, from a UI perspective its too hard to pin applications to a given Space. I might have to stick to You Control: desktops. Will give spaces another try though.

iPod Touch

I previously mentioned how I am not a fan of the new iPods, I did not get a chance to see the touch then yet.
Now I have and I am sold, they are expensive but I think ultimately even without being able to get one in from a cheaper country I'll end up getting one.
It's really nice and fun to use, performs and responds quickly to your commands, even coverflow is usable which is what I really want from this device at the moment, a great ipod.
Obviously I would have liked it to be an open platform where I can run 3rd party applications, that would be fantastic. It is not however what I am looking for in an iPod so I am pretty happy to get my hands on one, might do so 'morrow when I am in the city if they have stock.
The only 2 major missing features in my mind would be more storage and bluetooth, other than that I think it's the one to have.

The State of The iPod

Firstly, I am sorry I have not been posting here often, work has become incredibly busy as I recently started a big push in getting my own business off the ground which as anyone know is very time consuming.
Now about the iPods, Apple recently released all new iPods through the whole range and of course the new iPod Touch. I went to the shop to take a look at the iPods (not the touch yet) and have to say I am incredibly disappointed.
Each iPod that has a display now does video, cover flow, animations and a revamped interface, all of this comes at a cost of processing power. Unfortunately it seems the CPUs are not up to it. Consistently throughout the range the interface is sluggish and you end up waiting around for things to happen quite a bit.
The wheel on the classic is also not as precise as you'd want it. I have a old (now dead) iPod and I found it much easier on it to go direct to the song/album I wanted because the wheel was much more accurate.
There are work arounds for the sluggishness - turn off album art - but that distracts from the niceness of the whole thing.
So now I am holding out hopes for the Touch, even though it is too small to hold my music it might be the solution. Reports indicate that the screen is bad compared to the iPhone and so might not be that great.
So have we reached the point where there is no iPod worth buying? I am starting to think so