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Why Leopard is BetterAnd where it's safer. Originally published at the CLIX Exchange.
At the get-go it was more natural to boot into 10.5. The preset was for 10.5. And until today it still was.
But all the work we do is on 10.4 and not 10.5. If we get a program working we then boot into 10.5 to make a 10.5 build - we'd never research on 10.5 because the file system is so screwed up, wasteful - and potentially dangerous.
Even surfing to this forum with 10.5 is stupid. The Safari people have namely accomplished the impossible again. This is what ordinary phpBB form buttons look like on 10.4.
And here's what the same buttons look like on 10.5.
Impressive, innit? ;)
Despite all the quirks of Tiger it's a far safer, far more reliable platform. So now we find ourselves in the curious situation that we boot by default into 10.4 instead of 10.5. That says something about the Beige Kupertino Klownz and their imbecilic 'UE engineers'. ;)
Why Leopard is Better
Here are some of the reasons Leopard is better for ordinary users. It's not much.
- The menus. The windows lose a bit of corner curvature as Givenchy, Armani, and Dior redefine fashion for 2008 but whoa - the menus gain it! Also notice the obnoxious level of shadow. It's just too much. People will never get used to something this impractical.
Notice the menus are whiter (which is good) but notice they've added something else very very important: the selection gradient!!1! This is what keeps those UE treponemas up at night. Right away you feel such an overwhelming respect for them and their supposed 'profession'.
 
 The dock. It's 'glass' today. Glass glass glass! Ring a bell? Have they copied from M$? No? Then why do they call their 'secret setting' 'no-glass'??!?? Can you get used to it? Perhaps. But it looks like so much kiddie toy doll house shite. With small cornflower bulbs underneath to tell you an application is running.
And hey but you can actually make an icon more translucent if its windows are hidden!!1!
And this gravity dependent illusion is blasted away if you try to move the dock to the left or right edge of the screen. And do they in such case revert to the former rather sane UI? No way! What you get instead is this black thing with some kind of luminescent neon rim around it. How charming.
- Sheets. Sheets coming out of windows can at times overlap one another. You can't do this programmatically but the system can - witness Tracker's 'add' function to the paths sheet. Are we to consider this an improvement? Sheets also add some weird kind of 'dirty shadow' under their windows to the top part; this is just downright annoying and ugly.
What this all boils down to is the following. Disregard a 64-bit kernel that may or may not be any good and disregard the rewiring of 'OPENSTEP' to 64-bit that too may or may not be any good; what's left? What's left for ordinary users?
A bunch of inessential extremely poorly designed UI 'improvements' that actually #1) make little logical sense; and #2) almost without exception prove ugly and impractical.
What conclusions can we then draw? Two immediately.
- Change for the sake of change is never good. Never has been and - haha - certainly isn't now.
- Apple's fartsy Beige UE engineers and HI group can't even be gifted with the compliment 'you are totally worthless' - they're not even that good!
Anyway: back to the inferior Tiger before someone tosses their Xmas cookies.
Postscript: The Apple Hardware Lockin Bait & Switch
New PC purchasers don't have to get V*STA - they can get XP. Dell and others still ship it pre-installed.
Apple won't do that with Leopard. People who buy an Apple Lemon™ are stuck with Leopard. Users get one UI theme (with a minor variant) and one mouse button and one OS. Perhaps they can find Tiger online somewhere but the likelihood they'll do that is minimal. They're stuck with the immensely unfinished and ugly Leopard.
Food for thought.
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