Hmm, how can we make this more “Leopard”? We’ll have to decrease the usability in some obvious ways. I’ve got a few ideas there. Let’s start by removing the uniform background, leaving the icons partially hanging over the desktop. That’ll be sure to cause some visibility issues. Next, the already-small triangles that appear under running application icons can probably be further obscured. Let’s replace those with fuzzy blue orbs. Also, if we can somehow make the Dock less space-efficient, that’d be a plus. But we also have to jazz it up, don’t we? I know! Let’s make it pseudo-3D! And finally, the obligatory demo feature: reflections everywhere! Reflections on the fuzzy blue orbs, a reflection highlight line running across the whole Dock, and—the coupe de grâce—real-time reflections of any windows that move near the Dock! Behold, the Leopard Dock.
How unhelpful are those icons?? The first one looks like the Applications folder, but is actually my home folder. The second looks like the Address Book application, and the next two are just completely anonymous folders. What a silly design decision - not like Apple at all!
Fixes for 3 out of 5 of My Top Leopard Niggles
1) TimeMachine won’t recognise AFP Network drives
http://discussions.apple.com/thread.jspa?threadID=1200619
2) The translucent menu bar
http://www.eternalstorms.at/utilities/opaquemenubar/
3) The 3D Dock
http://www.macosxhints.com/article.php?story=2007101815375480
4) The white highlight under text in toolbars/menus
Nothing yet :-(
5) The way stacks are displayed in the Dock
Still looking :-(
My Top 5 Leopard Niggles
1) TimeMachine won’t recognise AFP Network drives
This is a shocker. There is no way I want to have to connect a USB or Firewire drive to each of my Macs, especially not my laptops. Hopefully I’ve found a work-around to this problem, but it’s far from ideal, as it’s not supported, so could well go wrong.
2) The translucent menu bar
It looks really rubbish, reduces usability, and increases eyestrain. It looks really really really rubbish with some background images, so greatly reduces your choice of suitable wallpaper.
3) The 3D Dock
With reflections and shadows all over the place, and only a tiny little glowing dot to indicate active applications. Luckily there’s a hack to switch it back to 2D.
4) The white highlight under text in toolbars/menus
Looks rubbish; gives me headaches. The contrast is just too high between the text and highlight.
5) The way stacks are displayed in the Dock
The Stack for my home folder has an Applications Folder at the bottom, so looks like it’s the stack for my applications. Other stacks are sorted by most recent file, so a different icon is shown every time a new file is added. Bloody ludicrous!
