Leopard Review: Preferences and Dashcode

 

Last week I wrote about my 1 month experience using Apple’s Leopard and the couple of flaws that surfaced. Since that time I’ve had time to play around a bit more and some more eye candy melted :-)…

 

System Preferences Search is Broken

The new system preferences pane (control panel to Windows users) has also received a nice sprucing up with a lot of new little customisations and tweaks added. Particularly like the redesigned layout of the network preferences as well as the sharing preferences. One thing sticks out like a giant’s sore thumb though: search doesn’t work!  At all, that is - both out of the box as well as with the latest system updates. 

Seems like Spotlight’s batteries died out here and its back to hunting for that darned checkbox in the dark.

 

DashCode’s Help needs some Help

I’ve been quite eager to try out DashCode for myself - particularly as a I’ve been meaning to getting around to build a couple of widgets for some time now. I’ve found DashCode to be well designed, generally helpful and quite a good IDE overall. Except for one thing: technical help.

It’s great that DashCode makes use of certain proprietary Apple controls (like the Popup Button). Yet, seeing how these controls don’t quite function in the standard HTML/JavaScript fashion, one would expect some form of documentation. However there isn’t (or if there is its too hard to find.) Apple’s penchant for making things that “just work” seems to have stopped short of helping developer getting down to business… a little different from Microsoft’s approach to Developers Developers (lol can’t help throwing that in whenever possible) which, while as corny as they make ‘em, still provides incredible levels of technical support and documentation to .NET, Silverlight, etc users.

Leopard Review: When the eye-candy melted…

I’ve put off upgrading to Max OS X Leopard in the past but since buying a new MacBook around a month ago I’ve been prowling around the new Apple OS.

The redesigned Finder windows as well as the Fan/Grid views of Docked folders are definitely a great improvement and make organising and finding stuff on your Mac much easier. Ditto for the general look-and-feel of menus, windows and dialog boxes. Everything seems to have been very gently refined to give a sleeker and smoother experience.

However, as always, after the eye-candy melts, some hard-to-crack nuts begin showing up…

Mail
I love Apple mail. It kicks Entourage’s or Thunderbird’s ass from here to Glasgow (here being Aberdeen). But one thing is severely pissing off: notifications! Mail absolutely refuses to play a simple “ding” sound to let me know I’ve got new mail. I mean, come on guys. It’s not like you don’t know about it. Can it really be that hard to ship a simple fix for this…

PhotoBooth
What’s with the huge delay in replaying live video huh? What ever happened to the concept of real time that worked so well in Tiger? I fire up PhotoBooth to take a cool picture of myself (or to check my hairdo *blush*) and the hand movement I make to fix my stray locks delays by five seconds… resulting in undesirable hair patterns. Come on fellas, my rep is being negatively affected!

TimeMachine
As slow as a snail on Prozac. Enough said. 

Facebook Chat

Facebook announced instant messaging earlier this month as predictably predicted by TechCrunch. I’ve only just had the service activated on my Facebook account hence the delayed “ahh” moment. 

Although the IM concept is by no means new (heq hem) I love the way Facebook has implemented their web-based rendition of the service. Elegantly simple and a quite a shining example of AJAX technology. Don’t you just love the way chat windows dock into the chat bar at the bottom?

Taaz.com is Great Fun!

Just spent a few minutes playing at taaz.com which I found out about via a TechCrunch article.

The service is free (for now?) and basically lets you “make over” yourself or your friends. It’s extremely simple to use: you just upload a picture, point out to the software where the eyes and mouth are and then you can apply lip stick, lip gloss, mascara and a whole bunch of other things.

The website warns you to upload “good” pictures: i.e. frontal headshots, high resolution, good lighting etc., but actually it works pretty well with even crappier shots as you can see from the image below.