Macopinion

Leopard Spots

by Marc Zeedar macopinion@designwrite.com

Recently I've been writing about some of the cool new features of Leopard (Mac OS X 10.5). Overall, despite a hassle getting it installed, I love Leopard. I wouldn't switch back to Tiger if you paid me. However, that doesn't mean Leopard is without flaws. There are some bugs and issues, so today I'm going to explore some of the spots on this Leopard.

Stacks
Stacks I still find utterly useless. They are slower than the old menu list approach, hold fewer items, don't support hierarchal folders, and long filenames are so truncated as to be unrecognizable. (What the heck is "Inst...rake.app"?) And I don't like the way the top stacks icon displays in the Dock -- it's a muddled mess and tells me nothing about what's actually in the folder.

Stacks is so bad it makes me feel like I'm missing the point of them. Do I not understand how they work or their purpose? Can someone explain why anyone would find them useful?

Spaces
By far the best -- and worst -- feature of Leopard is Spaces. Apple's done an amazing job of implementing something extremely sophisticated and complicated. The controls for switches Spaces, moving items between Spaces, and managing Spaces are wonderful, and the subtle animation when switching Spaces provides just enough feedback so you're not confused but not so much that it slows you down.

But it's exactly because it works so well that I find Spaces frustrating. It has raised my expectations. I want it to be a mind reader. For example, at any given time I might have a dozen BBEdit documents open in different Spaces. I have them grouped by "project" -- two or three are HTML pages I'm editing, a couple are MacOpinion columns, some others are articles I'm working on, and so on. When I click on BBEdit, I'm thinking "I need to edit that web page" and it totally confuses me when Spaces switches me to an article in BBEdit. Probably an article I haven't looked at in a week or two. Why the heck did Spaces decide to switch me to it? Surprises and computing don't mix.

But worse than minor oddities like that, Spaces has some serious bugs. For instance, I've seen it many times not respond when I try to switch to a particular window of an application even though I have selected that window via the Dock item's popup menu. I choose it and instead of displaying the document, it will jump me to the Finder. Perhaps I'm in the right Space, but the document I want is not displaying. Sometimes it takes several tries before I can get the window I want to the front.

I've also see Spaces' "auto-switch" feature suddenly stop working. Spaces itself still functions -- that is, I have multiple Spaces and can switch between them manually -- but clicking on an application that should switch Spaces doesn't do it. After a while the auto-switching will start working again, but I have no idea why it stops or how to get it going again.

That's really minor compared to the biggest annoyance: Spaces will occasionally "reset" all your Spaces. This is like leaving a dozen projects on your desk at lunch and coming back and finding someone has "cleaned" your desk for you. Now you can't find anything!

Sometimes this is application-specific, like when the Finder quit on me and I lost all my open Finder windows. But I've also noticed this happening in other circumstances in multiple programs and I think it's a Spaces bug, not the fault of the applications in use. What Spaces should do is remember all open windows and their locations and be able to restore them if you reboot or have a crash.

The problem with Spaces not remembering open windows and their locations is serious: I can spend an awful lot of time organizing my Spaces and for all that structure to just vanish on a whim is painful and discourages me from putting much effort into using Spaces.

I've read a few critiques of Spaces on the web and while some seem to think it's so broken as to be useless, I disagree. It works well in certain situations and in most cases it's better than nothing. Even when I occasionally curse it and am annoyed because it's jumping me where I don't want to go or making simple things more difficult, it's still better than all the window clutter I had previously.

For instance, one problem I've run into is I have Mail set to be in Space 1, but I'll have a file I'm working with in Space 7. Now I want to email that file. So I have to switch to Space 1 and create a new email message, then either move the message or the file window to the same Space so I can drag it into the message to attach it. (I could use the file selector dialog, but that feels harder than dragging it from the Finder window.)

So this kind of thing is annoying, but how did I handle the same situation before Spaces? Back then I would use Expose, hiding and revealing windows, trying to get a situation where I could have only the Finder window and the email message showing. That was always tricky and required some shuffling. Spaces is actually easier, just not perfect.

The two biggest problems with Spaces are 1) it doesn't understand "projects" and organizes windows by application, not function, and 2) the loss of your Spaces structure when rebooting. The latter's serious because not many people are going to invest much time creating a complicated Space if they'll just lose it on reboot.

The former's an interesting perspective. For me Spaces naturally functions as a project-separator. That just makes the most sense to me as I'm a multitasker. The problem is, many tasks involve more than one program. If I'm editing a website, for instance, I might be using BBEdit, Dreamweaver, Safari, and REALbasic. But I also use those programs for other projects, too. I don't want to be switched to a different Space when I click on one of those programs.

One person I read felt like Spaces' auto-switching is the flaw, and I'm inclined to agree, to an extent. There are times the auto-switching is really handy, but other times I want to stay in the same Space I'm in. For instance, say I want to create a new BBEdit document. If I click its icon in the Dock, I'm switched to a different Space containing existing BBEdit document. That was not what I wanted at all. To "fix" that I have to create my new file in that Space, then drag that window to the Space where I wanted it to be. That's extra steps simply because auto-switching won't let me stay in a Space where there are no open windows.

One solution would be an option to turn off Spaces' auto-switching, perhaps on a one-time basis (like holding down a modifier key when clicking an app icon). This would effectively say to Spaces, "Switch me to this app but stay within this Space." This would solve a lot of the problems today's Spaces has.

All that said, Spaces is useful as it is. It just needs refinement, and Apple's usually pretty good at that and will roll out little improvements in system updates over the next few months.

-

macopinion@designwrite.com