OS X: I love/hate Leopard

[SamIAm]

I installed Leopard last week, and some things are great, and some things are busted. I wanted to start a thread to share successes and failures with the new OS, so we can pool resources.

THINGS I FIXED

stacks

When I saw the press, I thought "The dock holds apps. The stacks are folders on the dock. Hence docks are folders of apps." That's great, since windows and gnome and kde have had folders in their dock for a long time now.

Turns out stacks are just folders of files, and everything on the right side of that little 'road' is for files and everything on the left is for apps. Bummer.

Well, I fixed it by just making an alias of ALL my apps, and then putting those in folders, and those folders in the dock. The problem is, the dock representation of stacks is pretty ugly imo. I wanted them to have a standardized look, so I made a folder called "<space>Net" in my net folder, and "<space>Pics" in my pics folder, so they'd stay at the front of the stack.



My folders are Games, Media, Net, Pics, Tech, Tools, & Downloads.

dock icons

Note that I changed the trash & finder icon in the dock. The best Panther tutorial I found was here. However, when I wanted to replace the existing .png with my new .icns, I had to convert the icns to png, as follows:
sips -s format png <new file>.icns --out <new file>.png

The icon cache is in a funky spot in Leopard. You'll need to delete it and let OSX make a new one, so use the following to find it:
sudo find /private/var -name *iconcache*

Then restart the dock with:
killall Dock

spaces

I wasn't that excited about spaces. I never really used virtual desktops much in Unix and Linux, so didn't miss them in mac. I played around, and switching manually is about as awkward as I'd remembered. HOWEVER, if you move to apps like you normally do, whether that's by clicking on the dock or apple-tab, you'll automatically move to that space.

That means I can setup my latex compiler and viewer on their own space, including setting it in the Spaces control panel so they start there by default. The same with firefox and chat on their own space, and paintshop on IT'S own space. Now I never really pay much attention to what space I'm on; I just let the OS go where it needs to go, while my desktop doesn't stay cluttered with photoshop under chat under everything else.