(Updated 3/26) The addition of a spiffy new Apple Time Capsule prompted the final move in our household to OS X 10.5 aka Leopard. After holding off for five months on my most important, work critical system, a 15″ Macbook Pro, I swallowed hard, threw a pinch of salt over my shoulder and inserted the Leopard install disk. At first, the installer claimed it would be over 2 hours to upgrade. But as the installation progressed, the time estimate shrunk faster than a pile of chocolate chip cookies at a Pressman family reunion. Less than an hour later, the Macbook Pro rebooted into the familiar starry, purple nebula desktop of Leopard.
This is the only system that I use for mail so it was my first experience with the upgrade of Apple’s simply named Mail program. It seems much, much speedier. As a guy in need of lots of reminding, I love the new to-do list of reminders. And there’s a handy RSS reader that lets you drag and drop any blog post to a folder for future reference and searching. That is way cool and may convince me to switch some feeds from Bloglines to Mail.
I’m still struggling with a folder display annoyance, however. In Leopard, if you add a folder to the dock, the dock displays the icon of the first file on that folder instead of the folder’s own icon. I find that wicked confusing. If I have a folder of specific documents related to airplanes, for example, I usually customize the folder icon with something that reminds me of that (say a folder sprouting wings). But with Leopard, the dock now ignores my carefully chosen, customized icons for folders and displays a generic document icon or something (see photo). Likewise, a folder of application shortcuts now displays the icon for the first application instead of the application folder icon.
One way to get around the issue is to put an alias to a folder instead of the actual folder in the dock. Then you get the correct icon but you can’t click on the folder and have a cool and useful display of its contents (you get a Finder window of the folder). Argh. Maybe I’m missing a new preference setting somewhere?
UPDATE: Oh yeah, missed an entire new set of preferences for Dock items. Ooops. As the current issue of MacWorld points out, you can now right click on a folder in the dock and chose which icon it displays — first file in the folder or the folder’s own (potentially customized) icon. Excellent.
The Leopard upgrade, combined with an upgrade to VMWare’s Fusion 1.1.1, also now lets me successfully open my Windows Vista Boot Camp partition while I’m running under the Mac OS. That capability to open Boot Camp partitions under the Fusion has been included in the program for a while but didn’t work until I upgraded everything this week.
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