Having played around with Leopard for about a day now, here are some of the little details I’ve noticed:

  • Arrows no longer wrap the selected app in the app switcher; if you wanted to switch to the last app in that list, you used to be able to hit left-arrow twice after command-tab. Now, perhaps you’d like something in a nice command-shift-tab.
  • Exactly twice, I’ve gotten the app switcher to show me about five app icons to choose from, when I had more like twenty running, and not in multiple spaces.
  • I’m sure I’ll get those neural pathways rewired to search for the gears icon when I want System Preferences any month now.
  • The subdued Spotlight icon is totally better. Now maybe they can get to work on not showing the fucking thing at all, and just giving me some UI when I ask for it.
  • In fact, the entire menu bar looks better. Granted, I use a relatively light background image, and that might just naturally look better through the translucent menu bar, but I like it.
  • I didn’t see an obvious use glass even on the sides preference string in the Dock’s binary after about 5 seconds of semi-attentive searching driven by a barely measurable interest in the result, so there must not be one.
  • While we’re talking about widely varying Dock appearances based on its position on screen, stacks don’t fan out from the side of the screen (and the View as submenu disappears).
  • For the longest time, I’ve had this dance of scripts that set the DISPLAY environment variable correctly (for the running X11.app) in my iTerm shells, in the off chance that I didn’t end up with :0. The same application (i.e., /Applications/Utilities/X11.app), now cannot be run without starting an xterm. The reason is that it isn’t the X server or even a wrapper for it. Basically, it sets a DISPLAY value somehow and starts an xterm, and lets (I assume) launchd worry about the messy business of actually having X running for it to talk to.
  • Type in a vnc:// URL for an ordinary VNC server into Finder’s Connect to Server dialog and it’ll launch Screen Sharing for you — albeit with a security warning (because an ordinary VNC server doesn’t support any of the ARD security stuff).

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