Ok, here are but a few examples of the minor bugs and UI flaws which are annoying as hell in Leopard that I experience either daily or weekly:
1. In list view, you will often see all label colours selected in the contextual menu even though your selection in the Finder only contains one or a few of them:
Note how there is only one item labelled purple in the selection, yet the menu indicates that I am using all the labels.
2. My day-to-day account is a non-admin, Standard user account. If you attempt to drag and drop an application update into the /Applications folder and overwrite an older version you will be:
(i) warned that you have insufficient privileges to perform the action (correct)
(ii) prompted to enter an admin username and password (correct)
(iii) told that you are trying to overwrite an older version of the app (correct)
(iv) However, after clicking OK to proceed with the overwriting, 90% of the time you will be told that the attempt failed because you have insufficient privileges (incorrect - I’ve just entered the correct admin username and password and should therefore have sufficient privileges),
(v) Even though the attempt “failed” the OS has, in fact, partly overwritten the old version so it will no longer launch and when you try and repeat the drag and drop you are warned that you are now about to overwrite a “newer” version of the app (woefully incorrect). However, at least the overwriting will succeed this second time.
While this bug is infuriating, the worst thing about it is that is also completely inconsistent. Invariably, whenever I try to do a screen recording of it in action, it won’t happen, but if I am just getting on with an update while on my day-to-day business, it will fail the vast majority of the time.
3. When installing apps for the first time after downloading, upon first launch you are warned that you are trying to open an app for the first time, where it was downloaded from, and whether you want to proceed, etc. OK, it’s a necessary evil to be asked this so I don’t mind it. However, when you click OK to proceed with the opening of the app, it will open in the background behind the Finder and will not open in front as you would expect it to. The dialogue causes the launched app to lose focus to the Finder.
4. Non-modal dialogues in Spaces are a complete fricking nightmare. When you have an app open that isn’t assigned to any particular space, it is visible in all spaces. However, if that app throws up a non-modal dialogue, it only ever appears in one of the spaces and if you are no longer in that space then... If you fail to notice this, you will blindly click away at the app trying to get it to respond, but because there is a non-modal dialogue that needs to be dismissed first, you will just get a system beep and the app won’t gain focus. You then need to cycle through all your spaces until you find the one in which the dialogue has appeared and dismiss it (if you can...). Which brings me onto the next major issue with Spaces and non-modals. Spaces can’t keep track of window focus - Apple supposedly fixes this in each update but each time, it continues to be utterly broken. If you fail to act on a dialogue straight away and happen to shift to another space, then when you go back a large number of times the dialogue will have lost focus and will now be behind one of the application’s windows. As the dialogue has to be acted upon first before you can use the window or minimise it, you will get stuck and will have to force quit the app because you simply can’t bring the dialogue back into focus at the front. They don’t appear in Expose, so you can’t select them there, you can’t minimise the window to get it out the way because the window doesn’t have focus and because the dialogue needs to be acted on first, you can’t drag the window out of the way, you can’t do anything other than force quit your app and (potentially) lose work.
5. Spaces and focus. I don’t use the split pane view in Mail because there (still!) is no way to add any delay the message being marked as read when you view it so you can’t preview messages without altering their status. Therefore, I open messages in their own windows. I also have Mail assigned to its own Space. If I move to another Space and back, any message windows will have lost focus and moved behind the main window. If I am in a different space and e.g. click a mail to: link in OmniWeb, Mail will come to the front in its own Space, but the new message window will be behind the main Mail window and will not have focus.
Virtually any app with palettes or inspectors (MS Office and any OmniGroup app are the worst offenders for this in my experience) will invariably have one or more of those palettes or inspectors get lost in a different space to the one the app is opened in at some point during their use.
6. Spaces and focus pt. II. OmniWeb is particularly bad for this, and so is OmniFocus. When launching they will always demand that they are the front most app on at least two or three occasions during the launch. If you are trying to launch them and then work in a different app, they will steal focus and shift you to their Space. Of course, you switch back to your previous space to carry on working and lo and behold, the window you were working in no longer has focus and instead another one is front most.
7. Spaces and Window cycling. I guess this is a conscious design choice, but you can’t use the keyboard to cycle all open windows of an app when you use spaces and they are spread across different spaces. Even though they are all listed in the Windows menu (as expected), only those ones that are present in the Space you are currently in will get cycled.
8. Spotlight. OMFG, what did they do to it? They went from a not too great implementation of Spotlight, but at least it sort of worked, to an absolute horror show implementation that makes me shudder every time I use it. The results window has columns so narrow you can’t view filenames and it never remembers the widths you then set them at so that you can actually see what has been found. You have to re-size the columns every... single... time... you... use... it....
You can only sort the results on the basis of three criteria. You are restricted to only one view type (list) and there is no grouping of any kind any more.
If you click the x to get out of your search results and back to the Finder view, your window reverts to List view every... single... time.... My default is column view.
9. Finder. You can’t give the sidebar focus using the keyboard. Ever.
10. Finder. If you change the view for a window, all newly opened windows will sometimes open in that view and sometimes they won’t. Completely inconsistent behaviour
11. Finder. Cover flow view is a good idea terribly implemented. Resizing a window should expand the list not the cover flow part of the display. The list should conform to the settings used for list view instead of being separate from it.
12. Finder. The sidebar randomly, though infrequently, changes its width on you.
13. Finder. The Places and Search For locations will sometimes spontaneously duplicate themselves in the Sidebar (so that you get Devices>Shared>Places>Search For>Places (again)>Search For (again)) in your Finder windows. Only cured by restarting.
14. Finder. Apple have completely buggered up disk image ejection. In versions prior to Leopard, if you had navigated away from the view that the disk image presents when opened, then ejected, the window would stay open and remain in that view. No longer! Now, when you eject, the window will close. However, this is also inconsistent - it sometimes happens and it sometimes doesn’t. There is no rhyme or reason to it.
15. Memory management. OS X is now really bad at handling memory intensive apps. If they crash (which they will do because memory management sucks when your RAM is being used intensely by the app(s)), you will invariably have to restart to get your system back to anything like sane behaviour. CGSErrors and malloc errors are the main problem. Because of the poor memory management, I have had to restart and force restart Leopard more times than all other versions of OS X put together. The number of kernel panics I have had since 10.1 has now doubled since Leopard. It isn’t many but it is far more with Leopard than any other version other than 10.0.
16. Mail. This is still not fixed in 10.5.6 - when updating to Leopard for the first time (by archive and install), your Mail accounts will appear to have successfully been upgraded but they will not display any messages if they are IMAP accounts. You have to trash preferences to get it to work.
17. None of my Macs will go to sleep by themselves anymore if they are on my Wi-Fi network. Never had the problem before but now I do.
18. ARDagent crashes every single time I wake my Macs from sleep. Every single time.
OK, that’s it for now. Those are just a few of the problems I have with Leopard which make me less than happy with it... some are likely unique to me (though I experience them on all the Macs I have), but I also know that the majority are not.