[taugust04]

Dan Frakes said:

Apart from Mac OS 8/9, which had greyish menus, every other version of the Mac OS has had brighter-white menus than 10.5.2. So I guess I'm not understanding what's so bad about this improved -- as in, "I can see menu items clearly because they're no longer marred by the show-through of what's behind them" -- menu appearance ;)

Not to be a nitpicker, but the gray/metallic menus have been included with 10.5 since its release. The transparencies are rendered in Quartz, and are dependent on the vintage of video card/chipset. For those that install Leopard on an older Mac, such as a 12" PowerBook or eMac, (Mac OS X Server 10.5 removes them entirely, regardless of hardware) you would have been greeted with the gray/metallic menus the entire time. The 10.5.2 update adds a checkbox to toggle the menu bar transparency- which was something already being performed by the OS by checking the video hardware. I personally think the gray/metallic menu bar is an upgrade and is more pleasing on the eyes.

[jdb8167]

Not all Macs show a translucent menu bar. I'd assume if your Mac isn't capable of showing the translucency, you won't have the option. Did you have a translucent menu bar in 10.5.1?

[ghoppe]

I notice some people haven't been seeing the option for Translucent Menu Bar under the Desktop & Screen Saver section of System Preferences.
I installed the update on two Macs, A quad G5 and a new Intel 8 core. The Translucent Menu Bar checkbox does not show up on the quad G5 but shows as expected on the Intel.
I wonder if the option was omitted from the Motorola build accidentally? People haven't mentioned what type of Macintosh they have, can we confirm this? Are there any G5 users that can confirm they have this checkbox?

[ghoppe]

jdb8167 said:

Not all Macs show a translucent menu bar. I'd assume if your Mac isn't capable of showing the translucency, you won't have the option. Did you have a translucent menu bar in 10.5.1?

I had a translucent menu bar in 10.5.1. I still have a translucent menu bar in 10.5.2. The option to turn off translucency doesn't show on my quad G5.

[ibeetle]

[quote name='Dan Frakes']
>

ibeetle said:

Quote

Serious question: What was this "direction"? The only thing I saw was a crazy UI that, depending on your choice of Desktop picture,

Well now if I told you, then it wouldn't be a surprise now would it? ;0)

Seriously, I am surprised you are asking that about the direction of the UI. Before Tiger was released there was much written, some in Macworld magazine about how Apple may be abandoning the idea of a screen full of of icons, folders and application shortcuts. Spotlight, Stacks, off the table (hidden in the Dock) Download folders, and (to and existent) Spaces is Apple moving in that direction.
Using transparencies things are cleaner, less noticeable, The next step? Do away with the bar altogether. Put a clock in the Dock use keyboard shortcuts and Spotlight, and Poof no more need for a Menu Bar.
Very clean. Very minimalist. Very much thinking different. Very much Apple. Or at least Steve Jobs.

As far as what you saw is your opinon. You are talking about a visual astetic. You did not like it. I understand that and repect that. But to use Macworld magazine to imply that the marjority hated the transparency when in fact it was the minorty that did not care for the new look.
I wonder how many Apple press only conferences you went to and caught the ear of a Apple employee and told them how you hate the new transparency and how everyone you know hates it certainly giving Apple the impression that they needed to spend the time and money to reverse engineer two years of work. All because a bunch of bloggers are scared of change.

[ghoppe]

ibeetle said:

Using transparencies things are cleaner, less noticeable, The next step? Do away with the bar altogether. Put a clock in the Dock use keyboard shortcuts and Spotlight, and Poof no more need for a Menu Bar.
Very clean. Very minimalist. Very much thinking different. Very much Apple. Or at least Steve Jobs.

Transparency does not make things cleaner and less noticeable. Quite the opposite. With too much transparency you get more visual clutter and things that you don't need to see (the background behind the menu) becomes more noticeable.

Quote

As far as what you saw is your opinon. You are talking about a visual astetic. You did not like it. I understand that and repect that. But to use Macworld magazine to imply that the marjority hated the transparency when in fact it was the minorty that did not care for the new look.
I wonder how many Apple press only conferences you went to and caught the ear of a Apple employee and told them how you hate the new transparency and how everyone you know hates it certainly giving Apple the impression that they needed to spend the time and money to reverse engineer two years of work. All because a bunch of bloggers are scared of change.

Personally, with the right background photo, I like the translucent menu bar. With the wrong background picture (even the default starfield picture) it looks horrible. With the default picture, there are little distracting stars right near the text of the menus often obfuscating letters -- making an "a" look like an "o" and so forth.

You are of the opinion that it's only a vocal minority who hated this change without providing any evidence that this is the case. I'm sure Apple has the evidence in the form of suggestions emailed to them or what have you, and that impacted their decision to make the change. By using the phrase "Reverse Engineer two years of work" you seem to imply a lot of person-hours went into this change and a lot of person-hours were wasted in the initial implementation of the transparency. The reality is they probably just needed to tweak a value to make the menus less translucent, and adding the checkbox was likely quite trivial in comparison to other OS engineering tasks.

(Addendum: especially since the code for non-translucent menu bar is already in the OS in order to support low-end graphics cards)

I did a google search to try and confirm the "vocal minority" hypothesis. A found a survey, though far from scientific, called "Worst Leopard Quirks: The (bad) little things that drive us nuts" that may shed some light on this. Out of 1095 people, nearly half of them (541) voted for "Translucent Menu Bar. (Would Be Nice to Have a Translucency Preference Slider.)"

This ended up #7th most voted for "quirk". (Quite rightly, the baffling dynamic stack representation on the dock was at #1).

Worst Leopard Quirks Survey

[tallscot]

[quote name='trip1ex']
> [quote name='tallscot']
> >

montgomery_burns said:

> > What happened to the Apple defenders who dismissed the criticisms and called those people whiners?
>
> Choice is always good. I don't have a clue why anyone would not want the choice to turn a feature on/off. Some people argue that they themselves don't mind the new behavior, and that's fine. But telling someone who hates the new behavior to shut up is ridiculous.
>
> This is one area that Microsoft has consistently been better - choice. Even though Windows is garbage, it does give you a lot more options in regards to turning features on/off. Apple (Jobs?) tends to think that their way is the best way, so you should just stick with that, and they don't give you options. Of course, Mac users can always download a haxie from a 3rd party developer, but we shouldn't have to hack our OS to give us choices that should be there in the first place.
>
> So I agree that this is great news in regards to the Stacks behavior and menu bar transparency.
>

I don't think choice is always good. I mean you say it's good and you say MS is better at it, but then you say Windows is garbage. Maybe one reason Windows is garbage is because MS is giving users too much choice. :)

No, I could go into great detail as to why Windows is garbage. Having more options is not the reason, in my opinion. It's how they implement the features and options.

What would be so horrible about having a simple slider bar to adjust the transparency yourself? Would that make OS X garbage? I don't think so.

[uchuugaka]

waaa waaa waaa
You idiots that download on the first day of a release deserve any problems you get.
You idiots who whine when 3rd party software breaks deserve the same.

[Dan Frakes]

ibeetle said:

As far as what you saw is your opinon. You are talking about a visual astetic. You did not like it. I understand that and repect that. But to use Macworld magazine to imply that the marjority hated the transparency when in fact it was the minorty that did not care for the new look.

What is the evidence that it was a "minority" that didn't like the semi-transparent menu bar? Although it's true that my comments encompass my own opinion, they also reflect the outcry from many other sectors. And I didn't hear anyone gush about how great the semi-transparent menu bar was. A few semi-favorable remarks were the extent of the comments on that side.

But forget opinions; let's look at the original Leopard menu bar objectively. At best, with the right (solid-color) background, it could be attractive. At worse, with the wrong background, it could be a UI disaster that made reading menu items -- and even the menus themselves -- difficult. I think most people would agree that a feature that varied so dramatically based solely on the user's choice of Desktop background needed to be tweaked.

ibeetle said:

I wonder how many Apple press only conferences you went to and caught the ear of a Apple employee and told them how you hate the new transparency and how everyone you know hates it certainly giving Apple the impression that they needed to spend the time and money to reverse engineer two years of work.

Alas, I only wish I had such power that I could convince Apple that my opinion was not only representative, but important enough that they should change the OS for me ;) The only time I ever mentioned this personally to Apple was during a briefing last October when I simply asked if there was a way to disable menu-bar translucency. Apple changed this because users complained.

ibeetle said:

All because a bunch of bloggers are scared of change.

With all due respect, I think you're fooling yourself if you think criticism of the original Leopard menu bar came from just "a bunch of bloggers scared of change." I read criticism from bloggers, professional reviewers, and user-interface experts online and in print; read complaints on our forums and in scores of emails from users; and heard objections from many people -- from professionals to beginning users -- in person. I don't remember the last time so many people were in such agreement about something relating to Apple ;)

[flowney]

That "listening" at Apple seems reluctant to me. This tug-of-war over hierarchical menus has been going on since the MacOS X 10.0 developer and public betas. Hierarchical menus were well established by the time of MacOS 9. Even back then, dropping hierarchical menus drew substantial fire from end users. After a great hue and cry, they appeared in MaxOSX.

So here we are again, fussing over the same thing. Someone at Apple seems to think that persistence will result in acceptance. They keep pushing what they probably view as a better way of doing things. The NeXT column view is another example. Customer reaction says otherwise but they keep on trying to marginalize the alternatives to what they think we need.

The current 10.5.2 iteration of hierarchical menus does not have parity with hierarchical menus in 10.4.x. In 10.4.x, you click on a folder in the Dock, hold the mouse down and smoothly move through any number of hierarchical levels, reach a document or application and then release the mouse to launch it. In 10.5.x, you have to click once to invoke the hierarchy. Dally too long and you get the prefs, so beware of that. Then you get to traverse the hierarchy and click again to launch an app or document. In 10.4.x, you got to use aliases and symbolic links to create powerful alternative organizational schemes for your apps and documents. In 10.5.x, you are stuck with a single, literal interpretation of your document and application organization scheme.

No, the anti-friends of hierarchical menus at Apple are still engaged in a kind of passive resistance.

Message was edited by: flowney I should clarify my comment regarding aliases / symbolic links. They do not work for folders but they do work for apps and docs. Thus, I can create a 'real' folder with 'real' subfolders etc. and place aliases to applications and documents in them and then put that 'real' folder in the Dock. This actually makes the better practice of deliberately thinking through alternate access paths easier than sloppily aliasing extant folders. So this aspect of the problem may not be as bad as I originally thought.

[trip1ex]

[quote name='tallscot']
> [quote name='trip1ex']
> > [quote name='tallscot']
> > >

montgomery_burns said:

> > > What happened to the Apple defenders who dismissed the criticisms and called those people whiners?
> >
> > Choice is always good. I don't have a clue why anyone would not want the choice to turn a feature on/off. Some people argue that they themselves don't mind the new behavior, and that's fine. But telling someone who hates the new behavior to shut up is ridiculous.
> >
> > This is one area that Microsoft has consistently been better - choice. Even though Windows is garbage, it does give you a lot more options in regards to turning features on/off. Apple (Jobs?) tends to think that their way is the best way, so you should just stick with that, and they don't give you options. Of course, Mac users can always download a haxie from a 3rd party developer, but we shouldn't have to hack our OS to give us choices that should be there in the first place.
> >
> > So I agree that this is great news in regards to the Stacks behavior and menu bar transparency.
> >
>
> I don't think choice is always good. I mean you say it's good and you say MS is better at it, but then you say Windows is garbage. Maybe one reason Windows is garbage is because MS is giving users too much choice. :)

No, I could go into great detail as to why Windows is garbage. Having more options is not the reason, in my opinion. It's how they implement the features and options.

What would be so horrible about having a simple slider bar to adjust the transparency yourself? Would that make OS X garbage? I don't think so.

Does it hurt if one person lets their dog crap in the park? No. The problem is when everyone's dog craps in the park.

[LRCarter]

The FolderBrander solution only works as long as the folder you add to the dock does not contain folders. Otherwise, a new icon is generated for the dock that looks like a set of folders and the FolderBrander folder is lost. As long as there is a sub-folder in the folder, you get this new icon. If you remove the folder, the FolderBrander folder icon comes back.

Now for some strange results and a work around! If the folder in the dock contains just one alias to another folder and it is the first item in the list, the icon for the alias shows up as the icon for the folder, not the folder's icon. So, my work around is to make an alias to my folder, insert some blanks to force the alias to be the first item in the list, and now the dock looks close to the way I would like (with the exception that I have to see the alias arrow in the icon, but I can live with that).

[samrod]

Why didn't someone ask this question sooner? Yes, I'd say 10.5.2 addresses my two biggest issues with Leopard:

1. Safari's painfully slow domain name resolving and wireless networking.

2. Stacks vs Folders

Safari on my 6mbs cable modem felt like dialup, especially when browsing MySpace profiles. As of 10.5.2, not only does Safari scream on my MacPro, but wireless reliability and performance have improved on my MacBook considerably.

While folders are back, they behave distinctly different than in their pre-Leopard incarnations. The one functionality that's been lost is command-clicking a docked folder to show it in the Finder, which is now triggered by selecting "Show in Finder" (1 additional click). Displaying the folder list now needs a left-click rather than a right-click, as the right-click now displays the folder/stack options. Still, they're welcome back and I've left the downloads folder as a stack.

Leopard's Spotlight is much more responsive and useable than Tiger's. And I'm using the builtin calculator all the time.

I was using MilkyWay in Tiger, but honestly, QuickLook is great (despite serious usability and consistency issues).

As for cost savings, Leopard adds "Sleep Display" as a hot corner trigger in the Expose prefs. I now snap the cursor to the bottom-right corner of my screen and my display instantly goes to sleep. This is great for those of us waiting for Apple to update the Cinema Display line while we pay the higher power consumption fees of CRTs.

I'm trying to get into Spaces more, and while I see it's benefits, I do a lot of drag and dropping between apps and windows, so I'm not sure how to continue that with Spaces.

samrod

[samrod]

How do you rationalize calling those who complained about the translucent menubar whiners, while you yourself appear to dislike the stacks-only in Leopard?