[Macworld]

Post your comments for Leopard?s year-old annoyances here

[dreyfus]

We have 100% (plus some) agreement here. I found the creepy sidebar (especially the lack of customization - it is almost unreadable on my highres 17" MBP) and the changes to iCal (which has lost some 90% of its usability with 10.5) to be my biggest gripes.
I want to add a point regarding your item 9 (folder icons) that I actually consider even worse then the points made: In 10.4 the folder icons and the sidebar icons were identical - anybody just switching to a Mac could see right away that they are the very same thing. A lot of people I know who switched to the Mac after Leopard arrived have been deeply confused by this (getting the head around OS X' folder structure with some folders like "Library" existing in more than one place is one of the first headaches anyhow - I really wish Apple would use some easier approach here). This leads to e.g. users manually jumping through x folders to copy something to Documents instead of just dragging it into the sidebar, because they are under the imagination that these are different folders (because the icons do not match and many folders having the same name is normal under OS X).
I also do not know what stops Apple from bringing BT pairing capabilities back to Address Book. I would really love to silence my iPhone during presentations/conferences and still have an incoming call HUD or text message appear on my screen. We had this capability for years.
What seems strange to me is that 10.5 is really so inconsistent in the usability area (folder icons, sidebar and iCal being the prime examples for bad). Why add significant improvements like QuickLook (I could no longer live without it), Spaces and Coverflow view in Finder and abolish other great things to make usability worse?
For me using PathFinder 5 (the new version is marvellous) and Contactizer Pro solves some of the Finder, Spotlight and iCal issues. Unfortunately most other issues will have to be addressed by Apple.

[lordPatton]

I agree that the changes to iCal have made it more frustrating to use.
One hint: Selecting an event and hitting Command-E will bring up the pop-up in edit mode. From there, either command-I to get rid of the window, or command-e again to leave edit mode but keep the info window open.

[arapp24]

Thank you for the review! May I add two things to the wishlist for christmas ;-)
1) In my .me account (I hate that by the way - and I am glad that I am still able to use my .mac address) Mail constantly forgets my signatures after restarting. They do stay in preferences but I have to reactivate them every time. In my other accounts, they stay perfectly well, however.
2) In ICal I added birthdays from the Address book as an "imported calender". That works fine but when it comes to mobile.me synchronisation with my iPhone, it is not there - quite annoying.

[dreyfus]

Your birthday and subscribed calendars will sync fine via iTunes once you turn "push" for the calendar off in the iPhone's settings when using software 2.1 and up. I have mail and contacts set to push and calendars to sync, this way all birthdays and e.g. subscribed holidays show up just fine. I could not use a calendar without holidays at all, so living without push is the only option for now.

[eddy_k]

Labels, Folders and Mail annoyances are secondary to me. All the others you mention are indeed my "first" choices in the same order ! Thanks for your review.

[BornAgain]

I just want to see better support for the nVidia 8800GT graphics card that is supposed to be the (expensive) upgrade from the ATI 2600XT...

[UpQuark]

You are right on. I agree with everything you mentioned. I would add to that using the pop up drag/drop feature is broken as well. in 10.4, if I drag a file from the desktop to my hard drive, hover, it pops open and I can navigate down to where I wish to drop the folder. In 104, the 'finder' window pop up is 'above' all other windows during this operation. Not with 10.5.5. I have to move windows out of the way first, then to the drag and drop. Very annoying.
On my wish list since OS X came into being, make the home/end keys move the cursor to the left(or start of a sentence-line) and end move the cursor to the 'end' of the line. I would include a mutator key to have the cursor move to the end of the page/paragraph and top of the page/paragraph.
It would be great to have this globally - like in terminal or TextEdit or Safari or iChat or... :)
Beyond that, I still feel that OSX is the best representation of a modern OS. I like Ubuntu, but the driver issues keep me away. And compared to vista or even XP, no hands down a window. This my opinion and I am even more grateful for the options availed to we, end users. Choice is a good thing.

[Lightbhox]

I've only been using Leopard for a few weeks now after upgrading from Tiger. I've noticed a few things that bother me and I have no clue why they have changed.
Back in Tiger, whenever I would open a new finder window for applications, finder would remember where I last was in applications, in Leopard doing the same will always start fresh at "A" in alphabetical order.
Also I'm on a MBP and in Tiger, two fingered scrolling worked everywhere, in Leopard it doesn't seem to work in many windows/applications ie. this one I'm typing in now.
Your points 6,5,4 & 3 are also major annoyances to me too, and I hope for changes soon.

[griffman]

"Selecting an event and hitting Command-E will bring up the pop-up in edit mode. From there, either command-I to get rid of the window, or command-e again to leave edit mode but keep the info window open."
This helps a bit, and you can drag the window around to see what's behind it ... but both are kludges that sort of help make the overhaul not a total disaster.
The old way was efficient and space effective; the new way is (I guess) more space effective, as you can never see your event info without asking :), but much less efficient.
-rob.

[rubberchicken]

I was hoping to see Preview in the list. In 10.4 you got a proxy icon whenever you used preview. In 10.5 there is no proxy icon.
I use PDF documents a lot (probably sent 20 of the buggers today via email) and the lack of a proxy icon makes composing an email containing several PDFs a huge pain in the botty. Instead of being able to print-preview a document and drag the resulting icon into an email, I now have to "email document", which creates a new email, and then drag the attachment into the email that i actually care about. This is incredibly frustrating because this stuff worked flawlessly in 10.4
And... where did the preview button go when you open the advanced print settings?
Leopard has so many quirks... so many good things but you get the feeling that the top brass were distracted by something else while they were developing leopard. I hope they are going to make it up to us with Snow Leopard!

[Jarmo]

Hear, hear!
The search is a strange beast, it's been turned upside down in every single OS version since System 7. Guess it's just impossible to get it right.

[kill953]

There are too many annoyances still remaining in Leopard for me to bother listing them all here, but the top three with the Finder are:
1. Spotlight windows (this wasn't mentioned by Rob) don't remember your column widths between searches, and the default ones are crazily narrow so you can't even tell what has been found because the filenames are so badly truncated.
2. If you run a non-admin account, 25% of the time a drag and drop app installation into /Applications will fail with a 'you don't have permissions' style error message even though you just entered the admin username and password when prompted to do so. Worse still, when you repeat the process a few moments later you will be warned that you are trying to overwrite a 'newer' version of the app even though the installation you just attempted failed and this message is obviously completely wrong.
3. Ejecting a disk image will often cause the whole window to close rather than just reverting the view back to the top level directory like it used to in all other versions of OS X. This also only happens about 25% of the time and there doesn't appear to be any rhyme or reason as to why.
As an aside, for Time Machine, Charles Srtska (of Pacifist fame) created a little app called Time Tracker that will show you what was copied during each Time Machine back up. He released it on the MacNN forums about 6 or so months ago, but it isn't listed on charlessoft.com. Works a treat, though.

[griffman]

You can find TimeTracker here:

TimeTracker download (68KB)

I didn't want to list it in the article, as it's not an official product from CharlesSoft -- it also apparently has some bugs, and it's light on features, but it does indeed work (I've been using it for a few months now). However, TimeTracker's existence doesn't excuse Apple from providing an official tool to let us know what a key part of the OS is up to! :)

-rob.