Second Day of Leopard (2)

Your worst nightmare?

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Such euphoria. Finally something to be happy about. Hit the pillow after three days of bad sleep. Take a glass of wine and relax. Installed Leopard a total of three times that first day until we got it 'just right'. A lot of good that will do us as it turns out.

Today was a different kind of day. Today was 'back to work'. But something had changed. The underpinnings of the system we'd been used to working with. We'd got used to the annoyances both big and small with Tiger and now here was something different. No more driving quality cars - we needed to work.

And that's when it all started. The following is an 'incomplete' list of the bugs we encountered on the second day with this system - our very first twelve hours working with it.

A lot of these bugs go back several years. We know this because we've reported them and they're still open. And guess what? Leopard really didn't fix that much after all - and introduced a new category of bug of its own.

A lot of users won't encounter these issues. But if they do they shall know the meaning of the words 'frustration' and 'holy wrath'. For bugs like this should never (and otherwise have never) appeared in any OS release for anybody anytime anywhere ever.

Only Apple.

And we don't report these or any bugs to Apple anymore. Why not? Because they never do anything about them. Never. So we're publishing what we've seen. For what good? Who knows. Feel the wrath.

In no particular order.

• Safari is really screwing up form widgets. This is a huge comedown from the previous 'pretty' version. Safari today is rendering web pages and web forms uglier than even Microsoft.
• Three times now the speakers on the Leopard box have 'honked' - loudly. And startled us. And they threaten to bust the speakers. At which point with Apple's reputation on warranties you're SOL.
• One of the really big reasons for upgrading was how crappy Tiger Mail is. News flash: Leopard Mail isn't any better. You get messages from people on Windows and elsewhere with staggered lines. We have our ACP text service 'tidy up quote' which did an excellent job on Jaguar and Panther. Then Apple totally screwed up Mail with Tiger; any number of people with text services pointed this out years ago; and so forth. But who expected them to not fix it for Leopard? But they didn't. It's just as screwed up as ever. How old are those bug tickets? Three years? When are they going to fix this? Why are we using this platform?
• Double click a plain text draft in Mail and it comes up as rich text. Enough said. It takes a special kind of talent to rewrite a good program and make it this stupid.
• Tabbing in a sheet can incorrectly jump you out of your current app and into another one. Hello? Yes this is known from Tiger. No it is not fixed.
• We found 225 MB of shite seemingly downloaded in stealth by 'Software Update'. We never gave the go-ahead on any downloads; still there they were.
• Safari screws up the services pasteboard. The pasteboard's fine until Safari accesses it - then all bets are off and you have to reboot.
• 'MAILBOXES' as the inaccessible root node of the mailbox outline view. We need this? We need this why? Because some idiot who puts hot coffee between her thighs and bitches to Yahoo that she has to sign in to send or receive mail and constantly perturbs everyone by asking why DVDs she rents don't come up wide screen - because she can't find her stupid mailboxes?
• Mail's 'spinners' are TOO BIG. Most likely someone complained the spinners in Tiger were too small. [Which they were.]
• No more 'cool things' in Mail. Mail had this cool feature with Jaguar: when you deleted a message its text faded. That's right: they just (rapidly) increased the transparency and then removed your message. It took but half a second but it was cool. That was gone with Tiger and it's still not back. [None of the cool stuff is.]
• The recent recipients in Mail comes up at the wrong place and needs to be adjusted. And it takes two or three tab hits to get in the list to select all and delete the lot. And they have a 'search' field but it mystifies us why anyone would want or need that.
• You can't always tab into selecting mailboxes and then use the arrow keys to navigate. This is a 'hack': anytime you click on one it shifts focus to the message pane instead. Heretofore you could always tab back; now you can't always do that.
• Mail wants to give you an RSS feed. No thanks. Easy to deal with: go into his plist and delete the entry.
• Safari has a real weird cookies sheet which is counterproductive. It's like this: Camino saw what Hyatt did and decided they'd do the same thing; but in typical FOSS style they changed things and made them worse. They added a truly stupid search box that screwed up focus and tabbing greatly. Now Hyatt copies back - and puts the box not between the buttons at the bottom as Camino but at the top - all by itself. See it to believe it: major design blooper.
• The Cocoa document controller never reuses inodes. Put another way Leopard never opens a file and writes to it - it destroys the file first and then creates a new one. This is truly stupid.
• There are massive difficulties connecting to AD. This isn't our bug but it was sent to us. Leopard Server doesn't work in the network. See http://discussions.apple.com/message.jspa?messageID=6001329 for further info.
• Safari still allows services to interfere with its rendered 'read only' pages. You can surf to www.apple.com, select all, invoke any text service available anywhere - and the entire page turns to mush. A clever hacker could use this 'hole' in a phishing expedition. This bug was reported long ago. By us. It's a testimony to Hyatt's stupidity it's still not fixed.
• Mail still won't show the 'Drafts' folder. You can move a message to this folder and it will disappear. This idiocy has been pointed out to those pinheads long ago. By us. They told us to check Leopard. We did. It has not been fixed with Leopard.
• One of the security bugs we reported was storing the screen saver screen lock flag in the user area. This was another one of the ones that got the snotty response 'check Leo'. We checked - it still isn't fixed.
• Mail has a checksum set somewhere. Your services menu is a mess when you first install. Every yahoo wants on there. Try to take them away and it mostly works OK - but mess with Apple Mail and you'll suddenly be prompted again and again for your POP passwords and it will never save them. Restore its NSServices key and all is again right with the world.
• But the above goes deeper. For Mail has a tonne and a half language files you don't need. And if you remove them Mail will burp at you. This is part of the new 'signed applications' technology. The problem is when third class engineers sign crappy apps you can't fix them. And this sucks. Mail is 280 MB on disk.
• Mail is today - get ready - 10706 files on disk. This isn't a misdemeanour - this is serious.
• Mail today takes - get ready - 280 MB on disk. This isn't a misdemeanour - this is bloody ridiculous - and serious.
• A mail program that takes 280 MB on disk. That's just too funny. Sorry.
• Safari hoards a lot of junk too. But remove it and suddenly your passwords don't work anymore.
• Shadows on sheets. Who thought of this stuff? This is ugly and there's no way you can debate it. Say what you want about the menu bar and the dock - but this is ugly. Like everything else it should be something you can live with but here it's not so certain. Apple are supposed to be good at graphics and design. And sometimes they are. But they can also screw up with the best of them.
• Too much shadow everywhere. It can make windows stand out from the windows behind them but the algorithm's still not right and it gets almost obscene. Put a blank white page behind your dock icons and look. They put shadow ON TOP TOO. Trying to crop screen shots satisfactorily is going to be fun: ⇧⌘4 does a good job but gives you pics wider than a football pitch is long.
• Preview forgets to recalculate the size of cropped images. You have to actually save an image before it shows you the right size. This was the best thing with Tiger Preview. Now an anonymous pinhead screwed it up.
• Focus rectangles are thicker, some fonts are smaller, some are larger.
• /home and /net are aggravating. Especially the latter which seems to imply a network connection attempt and can time out for five or ten seconds.
• The blue dock bulbs that replace the flippies (which replaced the ellipses with NeXT/OPEN) are not effective: they're not that easy to see. Perhaps again a 'getting used to'.
• Shift - command - click is screwed up. It can take some time figuring out the 'logic' but if you did you're in for a surprise: nothing works in Leopard. In case you don't know: selecting things in a list is supposed to work exactly the same way as selecting text in an editor. Whatever you do with the arrow or other keys (and the mouse or trackpad) is supposed to 'select' as you hold down shift and do the same operations. You click the first item; then hold down shift and click the next and cover everything in between. You can also hold down command and shift to start a new series. But now none of that works and you simply cannot select things in any way as before - and all this because some idiot with six months total computer use experience decided he could make things better.

And that was only the first twelve hour day. Finding out they still haven't fixed Mail was really disheartening; discovering all the bugs one naturally assumed they'd take care of - after all they told us to buy Leopard and check - was really bad.

If we weren't supporting software; if we could just 'leave it all' and go do something else; if we didn't really need our computers; then yes we would demand our money back. The product is defective.

Yes the underbody is good - as good as they come. It has a feel of quality. Knock on wood. But the upper floors in this monster system are designed and engineered by a bunch of flappy handed interior decorators.