Having played around with [Leopard][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][panda] 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][ard] security stuff).
[leopard]: http://www.apple.com/macosx/leopard/
[panda]: http://www.blizzard.com/misc/samwise/panda.html
[ard]: http://www.apple.com/remotedesktop/