Nice Hi-Fi but where do I play my old wax cylinders?
/I'm sure that it's considered cool to demonstrate how unimpressed you are with an updated Mac OS but some of the moans strike me as rather churlish, especially coming from people who make a living in geekopolis. It's nothing new, they moaned about moving from 9 to 10 and I have no doubt they will continue to moan at every new development. Meanwhile millions of the rest of us happily move on.
Dave Winer is unimpressed, but then he usually is unless he's discussing something he thought of. Matt Neuberg lists six things he hates about Leopard. He complains about the new reflective dock. He says it takes up too much valuable screen space and recommends using a little terminal magic to make it unreflective. However, when I checked the width of the dock as it appears when located on the side of the screen (in unreflective mode, by default) it seems to me that it takes up exactly the same amount of space as it does in reflective mode at the bottom of the screen! And, of course, you can easily resize the dock in any case, whenever you want.
He complains about visibility and I can only assume (in all seriousness) that the man needs to get his eyes checked out. Personally, I like the look of the folders and the icons and they all seem perfectly visible to me, even without my readers on. But if you want big bold folders and icons it's not a difficult job to change them if you want. Some of my desktop icons are colourful animals and cakes (not that I find that it helps me remember what they contain) which is just a throwback to the days when I thought such things were, erm, cool. Visibility also depends on your desktop image. I don't like the galactic default image with Jaguar which, I'm sure, was chosen largely to look good in pre-sale screenshots. I now have a plain blue/grey background and the dock, all the files and the icons show up perfectly. So, if you have visibility problems my advice would be -change the backgound!
The moan that really did it for me was Neuberg's complaint that he can't run Classic (OS9) anymore. Classic doesn't run on Intel based Macs but did on older PowerPC Macs, until now that is. Neuberg has data in HyperCard (!) which he likes to peruse now and then and he uses FrameMaker to create PDFs and large documents. Fair enough, FrameMaker is still widely used by technical writers but if you are going to moan at anyone you should really complain to Adobe, who stopped support for FrameMaker for Macs in 2004.
There is another way of using FrameMaker on your Mac...install Windows! I have Windows XP installed on a partition and switching between the two systems in a doddle. FrameMaker also runs on other OSs such as Unix and Solaris. Or run two Macs, it's not as if Neuberg doesn't have the room (with a bit of tidying!). see above
UPDATE: German IT magazine Heise has rubbished Leopard's Firewall. This has been followed, predictably, by lots of other sites moaning about the poor or supposedly non-existent security affforded by Leopard. I'm no techy but I'll stick my neck out and say this is largely bollocks: Space cowboy (13680)
Dave Winer is unimpressed, but then he usually is unless he's discussing something he thought of. Matt Neuberg lists six things he hates about Leopard. He complains about the new reflective dock. He says it takes up too much valuable screen space and recommends using a little terminal magic to make it unreflective. However, when I checked the width of the dock as it appears when located on the side of the screen (in unreflective mode, by default) it seems to me that it takes up exactly the same amount of space as it does in reflective mode at the bottom of the screen! And, of course, you can easily resize the dock in any case, whenever you want.
He complains about visibility and I can only assume (in all seriousness) that the man needs to get his eyes checked out. Personally, I like the look of the folders and the icons and they all seem perfectly visible to me, even without my readers on. But if you want big bold folders and icons it's not a difficult job to change them if you want. Some of my desktop icons are colourful animals and cakes (not that I find that it helps me remember what they contain) which is just a throwback to the days when I thought such things were, erm, cool. Visibility also depends on your desktop image. I don't like the galactic default image with Jaguar which, I'm sure, was chosen largely to look good in pre-sale screenshots. I now have a plain blue/grey background and the dock, all the files and the icons show up perfectly. So, if you have visibility problems my advice would be -change the backgound!The moan that really did it for me was Neuberg's complaint that he can't run Classic (OS9) anymore. Classic doesn't run on Intel based Macs but did on older PowerPC Macs, until now that is. Neuberg has data in HyperCard (!) which he likes to peruse now and then and he uses FrameMaker to create PDFs and large documents. Fair enough, FrameMaker is still widely used by technical writers but if you are going to moan at anyone you should really complain to Adobe, who stopped support for FrameMaker for Macs in 2004. There is another way of using FrameMaker on your Mac...install Windows! I have Windows XP installed on a partition and switching between the two systems in a doddle. FrameMaker also runs on other OSs such as Unix and Solaris. Or run two Macs, it's not as if Neuberg doesn't have the room (with a bit of tidying!). see above
UPDATE: German IT magazine Heise has rubbished Leopard's Firewall. This has been followed, predictably, by lots of other sites moaning about the poor or supposedly non-existent security affforded by Leopard. I'm no techy but I'll stick my neck out and say this is largely bollocks: Space cowboy (13680)
...if Leopard trusts the service (it's a root process, or it's signed with an acceptable crypto signature), it will have access through the firewall. Since Leopard ships with cryptographically-signed binaries/packages, I guess I'm not seeing the problem - if Jo(e)-evil-cracker already has 'root' on the system, the firewall isn't going to help save the system, after all... Perhaps Heise are just used to using Linux, where the firewall trumps all ? You could argue that the 'Block all incoming connections' is badly worded, but you could argue that reading the documentation for a new firewall would be a useful thing to do as well.Exactly!
