Plaidophile

Okay, so I've finished transitioning my G5 to OSX 10.5 after installing the two TB hard drives. So far I'm pretty impressed with it and the new Finder et al are definitely growing on me, but there's a few niggling issues (of course).

• Mail.app's new organizational structure is a bit wonky. I liked having the non-special folders as descendents from Inbox, since it made it a lot easier for me to deal with my various filtering rules. At least the server storage hierarchy can be moved above the 'special folders' group, but I really don't see why the hierarchy was changed in this way and how it could be seen as beneficial... and if you're going to make it so you can reorder the groups, why not just make it so you can reorder everything arbitrarily?
• Spaces is close to useful, but not quite there. It'd be nice if you could make the transition time shorter, and if there were a persistent, configurable display showing where all the windows are (like the fvwm2 pager). Also there's a few niggling issues with the intersection of apps which span multiple screens and the MacOS document-centric model, especially when it comes to keyboard-based window focus (though at least Terminal.app seems to deal with things consistently). It'd be especially nice if you could make a single window sticky, rather than the entire app.
• The Dock has two annoyances with it:
  • Neither style looks particularly good (the mirror doesn't really hold the icons very well, the black background is a bit size-weird and also doesn't tuck nicely in the corner if you use TinkerTool et al to force it to the end position)
  • When you pin it on the right, it shifts your desktop icons over to accommodate it. This is VERY annoying, because I like to have my dock on the right and pinned to the end, where it's unobtrusive and provides an ideal level of "motor memory," but I also actually use my desktop to manage ongoing things.
• Speaking of the desktop, the "downloads folder" thing is obnoxious. I like keeping temporary stuff on the desktop so I don't forget about it. The clutter is an impetus to make things less-cluttered. At least that's easy enough to change, though, and now there's this better default location for Mail et al to put things than Documents.
• I didn't think all those complaints about the transparent menu bar were particularly necessary. They were. God damn that transparent menu bar is horrible.
• Does Time Machine really need such an overblown screen-modal UI? And, as a corollary, can't there be some way of easily accessing it which doesn't involve pinning it to the dock, especially since it's not a real app? Not that I see myself using Time Machine that much anyway, and I put an Applications stack in my dock which works well for the stuff which I don't use frequently. (And of course there's Spotlight, but its search results tend to be a bit nondeterministic.)
• What'd be really nice, actually, is if you could bind a stack to a keyboard command. It'd be really cool if I could press a key combination to bring up the Applications stack (it defeats the purpose to a quick launcher if I have to mouse over to it, after all). Spotlight isn't really that good a replacement for QuickSilver.

So far I'm not really loving Leopard, though I'm not hating it either. It's definitely a worthwhile upgrade, especially if you have a whole bunch of Macs (its VNC "screen sharing" integration is amazing and, surprisingly, totally interoperable with Chicken of the VNC and OSXVnc-server!), and Time Machine is ostensibly pretty cool (though I'll know more about that when I actually have more backups to speak of). The new Finder is also very nice (though now I feel a bit lost when it comes to actually finding a window since all the visual cues have completely changed). There's just a few UI quirks I'd like to see worked out. Too bad Apple doesn't generally make a habit of doing UI changes within point releases...