A few more reasons Leopard isn’t ready for prime time

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I’ve been using Leopard in its various incarnations for almost a year now (Actually, a year in August, when I got the long awaited WWDC DVD). It’s been a long road, full of headaches followed by nearly immediate reinstalls of Tiger. It hasn’t been fun…

But this past week, Apple released a new seed build (9a410). This one is by far the most stable version yet, but there are still several little things broken that really shouldn’t be, in my oh-so-humble opinion.

The hubbub over the past few weeks has been about an October release date, fueled by the need to add iPhone and AppleTV specific features, but I gotta say: I think it needs more than a few additional bells and whistles added. There are still some kinks that need to be worked out.

Here are a few of the things that are bugging me so far. The thing to remember is that these ARE bugs and will hopefully be fixed by release, but I can’t avoid thinking that if things like these are still problems, then there may be larger issues we’re not aware of.

Airport will not EVER EVER EVER remember to automatically join the network you were on previous to a reboot. It will sit there after the system has come back up, waiting patiently for you to click the menu item and tell it what to do. I’ve checked and unchecked every relevant option in Network preferences (which, by the way, crashes like a mofo if you move too fast). Why Apple, why?
Hot Corners for launching screensavers don’t work. Hot corners for everything else work perfectly (including Spaces and the new ‘Sleep Display’ command - yes, it immediately puts the display to sleep, just like it says). But damned if I don’t now have to use Fast User Switching to lock my screen. Arghhhh! On a related note, the two ‘hot corner’ dialogs for Screensavers and Spaces don’t jibe…they have different options and don’t update each other. D’oh!
Time Machine is a bizarre and and incredibly confusing application. While it will allow you to encrypt data, it doesn’t appear to do any compression. Additionally, it doesn’t remember where you have chosen to back your data up to. For instance, I have a firewire drive at home. If I unplug it, then plug it back in and launch Time Machine, it tells me it isn’t configured and prompts me to open the Pref Pane and configure it again. What’s up with that? And what’s the deal with those little bags of pretzels the airlines give you? Who’s the ad wizard who came up with that one?
Oh, and did I mention that if you tell it to manually back up that there is no way to stop/pause/defer the operation until later?
While I am 100% thrilled that Apple is adding backup to the OS, I think that the bizarre-o interface coupled with the lack of options (the Pref Pane is strikingly sparse) is going to be more of a hindrance than a help.
Quick Look should be more intelligent. It will allow you to ‘Quick Look’ a folder, but it won’t allow you to see what’s IN the folder. So basically you get a ‘quick look’ at a folder icon. If you double-click the icon, it opens the folder in Finder. The funny thing is that in order to ‘quick look’ it in the first place, you have to be in Finder and choose it from a menu. Vonnegut would be proud of that logic.
Ideally, when in Quick Look mode for a folder, double-clicking the icon would open the folder (still in quick look) and show you the thumbnails recursively. Just my 0.02.

Since I’ve moaned and groaned a little bit, I’d also like to point out a few cool things to help ease the pain.

Parental Controls are working beautifully, even with alternate browsers (Firefox in this case). Hoorah!
Leopard is fast, damned fast, even for a buggy debug-mode beta. I can’t wait to see what the high and tight final build can do on my MBP.
Everything I’ve launched so far works perfectly, including Creative Suite 2, Final Cut Studio and Parallels (as well as a couple dozen smaller apps).
Networking is vastly improved. SMB shares and access are considerably better and faster.

As I mentioned, this is a pretty stable build, but there are still way too many little glitches for a product that was supposed to be out by now. I have faith in our guys, but I can’t help but feel a little disheartened about having to wait another quarter (or two!) to upgrade.

It’s a strong release, but I’m keeping my fingers crossed and my Tiger DVD in my bag for a while yet.

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Viewing 1 Comment

Matt Carrell 04/16/2007 07:37 PM 1 point
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I don't think Airport is very stable in Tiger either. I've had a lot of problems with Airport not wanting to automatically return to a network that it's previously been on. Those problems have improved recently, it seems, but they aren't so far in the past that I can't see why Leopard's still having problems now.

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