The Roadmap to Leopard? 152
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... (Score:1, Informative)
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! (Score:5, Informative)
Re:WTF? (Score:1, Informative)
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! (Score:2, Informative)
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-transf
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... (Score:5, Informative)
> 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 (Score:3, Informative)
Patterns are bad (Score:4, Informative)
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 (Score:1, Informative)
As for why Jobs' demos really flew... if anything I'd guess that he had a maxed out GPU.
Re:Patterns are bad (Score:3, Informative)
Re:What I'd like to know (Score:3, Informative)
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 (Score:4, Informative)
Re:The menu bar... (Score:3, Informative)
Re:Finder flipping out when network shares go miss (Score:3, Informative)
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:
So switching to autofs and a multi-threaded automounter will help some hangs - but not all hangs.
Translucency sucks (Score:3, Informative)
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 (Score:2, Informative)