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The Roadmap to Leopard?
Alexandros Roussos writes with a link to the site MacScoop, which claims to have obtained a roadmap for the months leading up to Leopard's release. It's a straightforward article, stating how much access individuals outside the company will have access to the product prior to October. "Major build on early August - In a little more than a month, Apple's development team targets a feature-full build. The build that was provided to developers during the World Wide Developers Conference earlier this month is actually not totally feature frozen. Some minor features are currently being finished for the system. These features will arrive in the August build along with user-interface improvements, sources told MacScoop. If you expect major 'wow' features or interface changes, you will be disappointed. What we may expect is additional settings and [some] user interface polish[ing]. Among the most criticized parts of the new user interface [are] the new menu bar and Dock."
Bullshit. In grid mode, the icons display with file names, and a right-click gets a menu, and one of the items is to open the folder in the Finder. Yeah, there are some rough spots that need fixing up, but because of the NDA I won't go into that. But I figured I'd stretch the NDA a little when I saw blatant misinformation about dock behavior, from someone whom I'm guessing doesn't actually have the beta but is just passing on misunderstood info.
> I'm also curious about how they are handling mounted volumes. I noticed
> that they were not on the desktop anymore (yea! I hate using the desktop
> for anything but wallpaper).
You can take HDs, CDs, iPods, servers, and mounted disc images off the desktop right now, if you're so inclined.
Go to Finder>Preferences, or use command-comma while Finder is the selected app. From there, just uncheck the top three ("Show these items on the Desktop") boxes in the "General" pane. Bamf... nothing on your desktop but what you purposely put there.
cya,
john
Imagine all the people...
is that you can't tell which applications are running and which are not. In the Tiger dock, running applications have a very visible black triangle under them. In the Leopard dock, there is a much more subtle shadowing effect that indicates running applications. It needs to be less subtle.
The more small patterns you have in the image (or section of the image near the top), the worse the menu bar looks.
I have my Mac set to change the desktop once a day. At first, everything was great -- it was picking images with sky at the top -- essentially solid color. Then it brought up a zen rock garden, which is one of my favorite images.
On Leopard, it makes the menus unreadable. The dark/light pattern in the rocks makes it impossible to find letters in the menu. I've also found many pictures will make it difficult to read or identify menu extras on the right side of the screen.
They need to fix this ASAP. Oh, and the new Finder icons are horrible too. There's zero color contrast to identify the different folders.
Can't speak for the final release, but the WWDC beta has the following versions:
apache - 2.2.4
bash - 3.2.9(1)-release
ksh - Version M 1993-12-28 s+
openssl - 0.9.71
perl - 5.8.8
postfix - 2.4.0
python - 2.5.1
ruby - 1.8.6
sqlite - 3.3.17
svn - 1.4.3
zsh - 4.3.4
x11 - Xquartz server based on X.org Release 7.2, built on ?P
I think this issue of the Finder flipping out is due partly to the finder and partly due to the automounter (autofs), both of which appear to have received a major overhaul in Leopard. Autofs has apparently been threaded. If the Finder is instrumented with NSOperation (I can find no publicly available documentation to that effect), then the combination of those efforts should be a "Finder" which appears to be much more responsive than on previous versions of Mac OS X.
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