Mr eel
You Pimped the Dock? Jesus Christ, Why!
Every release of the Mac OS brings changes that people don’t like. My tack it to try and live with things before I complain about them. Usually it’s just an adjustment. Sometimes however, there are choices in the OS that are sub-par.
Leopard doesn’t bring many dramatic changes — from the user’s point of view. It’s mainly tweaks and improvements. Pretty much every part of the OS has had a good spit and polish. I’m happy to see slightly ropey interfaces like the networking preferences get a good going over. The Finder is actually… still a bit crap, since it can’t decide if it wants to be a spatial browser or not, but at least it’s not a slow motherbitch anymore. Best of all, the Finder doesn’t hang when network drives disappear. Honestly, that last one was the only thing I looked forward to in Leopard.
By and large, it’s nice. It’s faster, neater and visually more coherent.
Except… except the dock is tacky junk. It’s totally at odds with Apple’s hardware design aesthetic. Rather than simple, attractive and usable, we get the UI equivalent of hub-cap spinners. Tacky and pointless.
Don’t get me started on stacks. They suck completely. Give me back my hierarchical menus.
I even liked the transparent menu bar at first. I’m a sucker for gimmicks like anyone else. However after using it for awhile, I’ve found it to be pointless and at times unusable. Pick the wrong desktop and it gets a bit difficult to read. Oops! Besides that, it often just looks ugly, with weird gradients derived from the desktop image and whatever filtering Apple has applied to the menu.
I find these poor choices particularly striking and disappointing because they are so far away from how Apple approaches it’s hardware design. I’ll live, but man it’s irksome.
Comments