Does Snow Leopard fix Leopard annoyances? Unfortunately, not always.It even adds some new ones
PrintLeopard was a fine operating system, but there were always things about it that I found annoying. (To see my bottom-ten list, with fulldescriptions, see macworld.com/4270.) When Snow Leopard shipped, oneof the first things I did was check to see whether those annoyances were still there. Unfortunately, many of them were. And I found a couple of new ones while I was at it.
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10. Custom Colors in Finder Labels You still can't customize the Finder's label colors in Snow Leopard.
9. Blue-Gray Folder Icons Still there, still blue-gray, and still hard to tell apart.
8. Bluetooth Support in Address Book OS X 10.4 supported BluetoothSMS sending and phone dialing (for non-iPhones) in Address Book; it vanished in 10.5, and it's still missing in 10.6.
7. Aliases in Docked Folders In OS X 10.4, if I put a folder aliasinside a folder on the Dock, I could drill down into the folder to which that alias pointed from inside that docked folder. This feature broke in 10.5, and it's still broken in 10.6.
6. Mail's Odd Feature Creep Mail hasn't gained any major features in 10.6, thankfully. However, there's still no way to disable features I don't want to use, such as Notes and To Dos.
5. Floating Help Viewer In Leopard, when you opened a Help window,it floated over--and covered up--other open windows. That's fine on a 30-inch LCD, but it's not so fine on a 13-inch MacBook. It's still floating over everything in Snow Leopard.
4. Time Machine User Interface Snow Leopard adds a percentage completion figure that charts the progress of the backup process. That's nice, but it'd be even nicer to have more information and more control than that.
3. Finder Sidebar In Leopard, if you hid the sidebar you also hid the toolbar. In Snow Leopard, that's been fixed--sort of. You can nowselect View * Hide Sidebar (*-Option-S) to hide the sidebar while leaving the toolbar visible. But if you use View * Hide Toolbar (*-Option-T), you also lose the sidebar. So you can have an invisible sidebar and a visible toolbar, but not vice versa.
The sidebar is still broken in other ways, too. You can't set the font size, you can't rearrange the groups, you can't scroll through its entries with the keyboard, and you can't select it with the keyboard.
2. Editing Events in iCal Editing events in Leopard's iCal was painful: You had to double-click on the event and then click the Edit button (or select an event and press *-E). In Snow Leopard, there are two new ways of editing events (in addition to the methods that workedin 10.5).
First, you can visit iCal's Preferences, click the Advanced tab, and select Open Events In Separate Windows. Then, when you double-click an event, it will come up in a new window, ready for editing.
Or you can select Edit * Show Inspector, and a floating window appears, much like the Inspector window in the Finder. When you then select (one click) any event, its information will appear in the floating Inspector window; you can then click any field to edit it. Unfortunately, you can't activate one of those fields from the keyboard. So, once again, I'm forced to reach for the mouse to begin editing. (Onceyou've selected a piece of data, you can navigate with the keyboard.)
1. Columns in Spotlight Results Apple's list of Snow Leopard refinements (macworld.com/5276) promised that the new OS would include "customizable Spotlight search options." I thought that meant the returnof 10.4's ability to specify the columns, including Size, that wouldappear in the Finder's Spotlight search results. Unfortunately, that's not the case.
Yes, there are customizable columns in Spotlight's search results--but only Date Modified and Date Created (press *-J after running a search to see the options). Size, Version, Comments, and Label are grayed out and not selectable.
Given that, I'll still rely on Houdah-Spot (****; macworld.com/3516) for my Spotlight searches, because it works with Size (and tons ofother fields the Finder doesn't support). I really don't understand how something so basic, which worked fine in OS X 10.4, can remain broken nearly three years into the Leopard and Snow Leopard era.
So of my ten original gripes, it appears that six haven't been addressed at all; three (numbers 1, 3, and 4) have had minor fixes; and one (number 2) has been almost fully fixed by Snow Leopard. That's not great, but at least there has been some progress.
The New Glitches
While there are undoubtedly many new annoyances in Snow Leopard (see our wiki page at macworld.com/5275 for a list), two in particular are quite grating.
First: If you use a four-finger swipe (up or down) on a Multi-Touch trackpad and then reverse the swipe without first lifting your handfrom the trackpad, the action will repeat itself when you lift your fingers from the trackpad.
Let's say you use a four-finger swipe up to reveal the desktop, then swipe down again without lifting your hand. When you swipe up, open windows will slide off the screen, revealing the desktop, just as you want. When you swipe down (without lifting your fingers), those windows will slide back to their starting positions. But if you then remove your hand from the trackpad, the windows again slide off the screen, as they did after your first swipe.
The fix: you need to repeat the original swipe (up, in this example), and then remove your hand from the trackpad. That will leave the windows where they belong. This happens only with four-finger swipes,not with all Multi-Touch gestures.
My second gripe has to do with Snow Leopard's revamped Services menu (see "Services That Make Sense [Finally!]" on page 44). According to Apple, services should be available from contextual menus, as wellas from the traditional Services menu. However, that's not always the case. Sometimes they appear on contextual menus, sometimes they don't. Until Apple decides whether services should be on contextual menus, I'd recommend that you use the Services menu--and assign keyboard shortcuts to the services you use most.
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I'm sure there are plenty of other new glitches out there. As you spend time with Snow Leopard, feel free to add any you discover (along with workarounds) to our wild page.
