I must say I'm disappointed in Apple's latest major OS update, OSX version 10.5 "Leopard". Perhaps I haven't caught the correct vibe, or learned all the tricks yet, but it just seems like I'm paying the cost of having to spend more time getting to my files in exchange for some pretty bells. Considering the 2+ years of development time, I have to admit I expected more from Leopard.

1) New Icons aren't all they're cracked up to be.
The new folder icons are quite disappointing. Bland. Hard to discern. Boring blue color with no excitement. They look dull and non-descript. And did I say boring? For a while I thought it was because I just don't get the style or amn't GQ enough. But then I came to my senses and found this post reassuring me that all my initial reactions were dead-on.

2a) Stacks are weak. Part One.
The stacks were the kind of thing I saw in the presentations and didn't exactly get, and now that I've had a chance to work with them I find they're dumb. In a few instances, they make small collections of items easy to view and select from with just one click. But for anything with more than a good number of items in it the stack becomes useless. Not only will you waste your time reading through the Fan list or hunting through the grid, but then you'll get to the end and it'll say "X more in Finder", so you'll be forced to click it and view the window in the traditional way, where your search for the file/item must begin again. I find this very lame, and what's worse with the new Stacks behavior I can't seem to revert to the Tiger way which allowed me to right-click a folder in the dock and view its contents all in one scrolling list.

2b) Stacks are weak. Part Two.
The icon for a stack in the dock is the icon of the first item in the list. So my stack of my Applications folder isn't labeled with an easy to recognize Applications icon, it's labeled with my Adium icon! So now when I want to launch Adium, I inadvertently open my Applications stack, and when I want to find my Applications list, I overlook the thing I think is Adium! I get the idea, it's a stack, but the icons aren't clear enough to see the other icons stacked up behind the first.

3) Spaces doesn't compete.
Spaces is a long overdue addition but is a few years behind the curve, and doesn't match-up to the usability and spatial-manipulation of Compiz-Fusion's Cube found in the latest version of our favorite Linux operating systems.

4) Lack of transparency controls reminds me of how arrogant Apple's designers are.
The fancy new dock, apple bar along the top, stack menus, and others make use of the very popular transparency effect. They all look great with Apple's new purple galactic desktop background. But they fall short in not giving us any option to control the degree of transparency, thus making some desktop backgrounds "bad". Making this situation even worse, is Apple seems to have sadly broken their great design/usability track record and given us something that is all fashion and no function. The reflection in the Dock might be pretty, but it just gets in the way visually. Fortunately there's a hack for that.

5) Rock Star View is Dumb as Hell.
In the marketing Apple tells us to give our files the "rock star treatment". This allows us to view them as if they were album covers in iTunes or on an iPhone. Wow, that is dumb. How much money did they spend implementing this? It makes me sad to think all the good things that money could go towards. If not for buying Plumpy'nut for starving children, then at least for a new way to navigate files that is actually useful. Why would I want to look at folder/file icons as if they were album covers?

All-in-all, don't get me wrong. Leopard is a welcome update to the Mac OS. (As any would be). I'm disappointed in the sacrifice of usability for glamour, but I'll get over it. For a thorough and detailed review of the Leopard, read this Ars Technica article by John Siracusa.