The Roadmap to Leopard?

Alexandros Roussos writes with a link to the site MacScoop, which claims to have obtained a roadmap for the months leading up to Leopard's release. It's a straightforward article, stating how much access individuals outside the company will have access to the product prior to October. "Major build on early August - In a little more than a month, Apple's development team targets a feature-full build. The build that was provided to developers during the World Wide Developers Conference earlier this month is actually not totally feature frozen. Some minor features are currently being finished for the system. These features will arrive in the August build along with user-interface improvements, sources told MacScoop. If you expect major 'wow' features or interface changes, you will be disappointed. What we may expect is additional settings and [some] user interface polish[ing]. Among the most criticized parts of the new user interface [are] the new menu bar and Dock."

Transparency craziness...

[Anonymous Coward]

"What we may expect is additional settings and [some] user interface polish[ing]. Among the most criticized parts of the new user interface [are] the new menu bar and Dock."

Okay, I was wondering what the "new menu bar and Dock" were referring to. Here's Apple's page [apple.com] on the subject. Damn, I was really hoping they were bringing back NextStep-like vertical menu bars a an option, but, nooooo, they're making the menubar transparent. Useless. One of the most key UI elements transparent? Why? For a few extra pixels of the desktop that you won't usually see behind windows anyway? What is this? Windows Vista? Thank goodness they are apparently leaving the window border transparency alone.

It's a bad sign when the OS isn't released yet and there's already a patch to remove this new "feature" [manytricks.com]. Please, Apple, at least make it optional in Preferences.

Re:Please oh please oh please, DITCH STACKS!

[Anonymous Coward]

Bullshit. In grid mode, the icons display with file names, and a right-click gets a menu, and one of the items is to open the folder in the Finder. Yeah, there are some rough spots that need fixing up, but because of the NDA I won't go into that. But I figured I'd stretch the NDA a little when I saw blatant misinformation about dock behavior, from someone whom I'm guessing doesn't actually have the beta but is just passing on misunderstood info.

Re:WTF?

[Anonymous Coward]

"I've read in a review that the new indicator for running applications - a small glowing dot - is sometimes difficult to spot between reflections on the dock."

I would have to agree. I've had some confusing issues with it, when trying it. I hope Apple fixes it.

Re:Please oh please oh please, DITCH STACKS!

[Anonymous Coward]

You're right that by default the Stacks sort by and use the last added item icon, but you can change to different sort criteria and thus a different icon will be reflected in the stack.

It may be possible to manually change the stack icon but i haven't looked into it very much.

Another big complaint people had with Leopard is that a previously advertised feature of screen sharing within iChat appeared to have been moved to the new Finder instead. While the Finder does indeed support screen sharing i can state that iChat appears to have the feature there too. At least there is a screen sharing button in iChat and one of the capabilities iChat 4 reports is apple:iq:rd:server and apple:iq:rd:client.

For any XMPP devs that might read this post here's a list of all the capabilities reported when i did a service discovery on iChat:

iChat v3 capabilities

http://jabber.org/protocol/si [jabber.org]
http://jabber.org/protocol/si/profile/file-transfe r [jabber.org]
jabber:iq:version
http://jabber.org/protocol/bytestreams [jabber.org]
apple:iq:vc:capable
apple:iq:vc:multivideo
http://jabber.org/protocol/sipub [jabber.org]
http://jabber.org/protocol/xhtml-im [jabber.org]
vcard-temp:x:update
apple:iq:vc:video
apple:iq:vc:available
apple:iq:vc:audio
Service Discovery (http://jabber.org/protocol/disco#info)
apple:profile:bundle-transfer
apple:iq:vc:multiaudio

iChat v4 additional capabilities

apple:iq:rd:client
apple:iq:vc:recauth
apple:iq:vc:ice
apple:iq:rd:server
apple:profile:efh-transfer
apple:iq:vc:auxvideo
http://www.apple.com/xmpp/message-attachments [apple.com]
apple:profile:transfer-extensions:rsrcfork

So it looks like iChat will get some new abilities. I think the ICE stuff will solve one of the major problems that Tiger users have complained about, NAT traversal for audio/video. I believe the efh stuff is encrypted file transfers but am not sure. Looks like there's no Jingle or true SIP support coming though. :(

You know...

[SvnLyrBrto]

> I'm also curious about how they are handling mounted volumes. I noticed
> that they were not on the desktop anymore (yea! I hate using the desktop
> for anything but wallpaper).

You can take HDs, CDs, iPods, servers, and mounted disc images off the desktop right now, if you're so inclined.

Go to Finder>Preferences, or use command-comma while Finder is the selected app. From there, just uncheck the top three ("Show these items on the Desktop") boxes in the "General" pane. Bamf... nothing on your desktop but what you purposely put there.

cya,
john
 

The problem with the new dock

[alms]

is that you can't tell which applications are running and which are not. In the Tiger dock, running applications have a very visible black triangle under them. In the Leopard dock, there is a much more subtle shadowing effect that indicates running applications. It needs to be less subtle.

Patterns are bad

[ghutchis]

The more small patterns you have in the image (or section of the image near the top), the worse the menu bar looks.

I have my Mac set to change the desktop once a day. At first, everything was great -- it was picking images with sky at the top -- essentially solid color. Then it brought up a zen rock garden, which is one of my favorite images.

On Leopard, it makes the menus unreadable. The dark/light pattern in the rocks makes it impossible to find letters in the menu. I've also found many pictures will make it difficult to read or identify menu extras on the right side of the screen.

They need to fix this ASAP. Oh, and the new Finder icons are horrible too. There's zero color contrast to identify the different folders.

Re:Agreed

[Anonymous Coward]

The impact of memory latency is usually overstated, especially when you are looking at the performance of media-related tasks (i.e. throughput oriented). The Core 2 Duo has massive L2 caches to compensate for latency, and the win from having fast amounts of physical memory (instead of relying on virtual memory) would completely outweight the latency penalty.

As for why Jobs' demos really flew... if anything I'd guess that he had a maxed out GPU.

Re:Patterns are bad

[WhatAmIDoingHere]

I have something like a star field cluster for a background. Pretty much a bunch of black with greenish white dots. There's some of the cluster behind the "Help" menu but it doesn't keep me from being able to read "Help" and it doesn't look bad, either. The regular menus being transparent over my open document/browser/whatever actually is pretty cool.

Re:What I'd like to know

[Anonymous Coward]

Can't speak for the final release, but the WWDC beta has the following versions:

apache - 2.2.4
bash - 3.2.9(1)-release
ksh - Version M 1993-12-28 s+
openssl - 0.9.71
perl - 5.8.8
postfix - 2.4.0
python - 2.5.1
ruby - 1.8.6
sqlite - 3.3.17
svn - 1.4.3
zsh - 4.3.4
x11 - Xquartz server based on X.org Release 7.2, built on ?P

Finder flipping out when network shares go missing

[Gary W. Longsine]

I think this issue of the Finder flipping out is due partly to the finder and partly due to the automounter (autofs [apple.com]), both of which appear to have received a major overhaul in Leopard. Autofs has apparently been threaded. If the Finder is instrumented with NSOperation (I can find no publicly available documentation to that effect), then the combination of those efforts should be a "Finder" which appears to be much more responsive than on previous versions of Mac OS X.

Re:The menu bar...

[LKM]

Actually, animations in Mac OS X usually serve a purpose (windows "flowing" in and out of the dock tell you where you can find them) and/or tend to only appear when they aren't annoying (menus don't "fade in" because that is annoying when you want to select a menu item, but fade out after you've made your selection).

Re:Finder flipping out when network shares go miss

[Guy Harris]

I think this issue of the Finder flipping out is due partly to the finder and partly due to the automounter (autofs), both of which appear to have received a major overhaul in Leopard. Autofs has apparently been threaded.

If nothing is in the process of being automounted, the automounter has precisely nothing to do with any Finder hangs.

With the old single-threaded automounter, if a mount was in progress, the automounter would be incapable of responding to any other requests. As the old automounter was a user-mode NFS server, which handled /Network/Server, as well as directories such as /Network/Applications and /Network/Server, those paths referred to symbolic links in the file system implemented by that server, so any references to them turned into requests to the automounter - which, as noted, would hang, if the automounter was in the process of trying to mount a file system from an unresponsive server (which includes servers that aren't on your network because you've disconnected from the network on which they reside).

If, however, the automounter wasn't in the middle of a mount, it could respond to those requests. However, if the server in question was unresponsive, subsequent NFS requests would hang.

With autofs:

• references to already-mounted file systems would be handled entirely by the autofs kernel code, without involving the automount daemon at all;
• references that trigger a mount, because they're referring to a file system not already mounted, would be handled by a thread in the automount daemon separate from threads handling other mounts, so if the mount hangs because the server doesn't respond, other references that involve the automount daemon can still make progress (although if they also try to mount from an unresponsive or unreachable server, they won't make much progress until they time out).

So switching to autofs and a multi-threaded automounter will help some hangs - but not all hangs.

Translucency sucks

[Steeltoe]

Translucency really, really sucks. It is distracting and makes it harder to read. Just look at Word for Mac or iTerm. The translucent effect just makes it harder on the eyes, while providing NO benefit. It should really be optional overall.

Now, MenuShade is a program that gives your menu a less-brighter shade. THAT is a good idea, because it prevents the menu from burning in your fancy LCD. Im using it all the time, and it is easier on the eyes, AND simple to read.

Re:The Dock & the Menu Bar

[boscosmith]

I maintain 12 macs for different friends and family. The people using them are not power users, but they know how to configure their machines. Anyway, of the 12, ONE person moved their doc to the side. Something to do with Final Cut Pro and wanting to have the video time slider at the very bottom of the screen. Other than that, everyone leaves it on the bottom.