Linked List: October 28, 2007

Sunday, 28 October 2007

Andy Ihnatko: What’s Leopard Really Worth? ★

Andy Ihnatko:

I think the way to sum up the correct level of anticipation for Leopard is to compare it to a movie that stars Gene Hackman or Michael Caine. You know that it’s going to be worthwhile… but the coin’s in the air as to whether it’s worth seeing right away.

Displaperture 1.0 ★

Peter Maurer’s freeware (donations accepted) utility to restore round screen corners in Leopard. (Worth noting that while round corners are gone in Leopard, they’re there on the iPhone.)

Scott Moritz Full of Ca-Ca. Again. ★

Ged Maheaux on TheStreet.com’s Scott Moritz’s bullshit “scoop” nine days ago that Apple was going to release a new sub-notebook alongside the debut of Leopard.

Leopard UI Gripes ★

Overall, the visual UI style in Leopard is much improved, but there are an assortment of odd decisions, and Rory Prior’s list covers most of the ones that annoy me. The new placement of sheets is particularly weird — to me they look like old System-6-era modal dialogs that are just floating above the window. The previous “coming out of a slot” treatment for sheets was a nice visual indicator that the sheet was connected to the underlying window.

Developer-Level Changes in Leopard ★

Nice rundown from Matt Gemmell of what’s new in Cocoa in Leopard. I expect the stream of Leopard-only third-party apps to start tomorrow.

15-Lateral Last-Second Touchdown ★

Incredible last-second comeback — a 13-lateral 60-yard touchdown.

Product Placement in Ads? ★

Photo of a Microsoft Office ad in The New Yorker. It’s a guy walking past a newsstand in a city, and on the newsstand are dozens of bags of Frito-Lay band chips. Is Microsoft selling ad space within its own ads?

Eleanor Flannery Mann ★

Congratulations to my pal Merlin Mann and his wife Madeline.

Interpreting Apple ★

Buzz Andersen:

My point in all of this, I suppose, is that when it comes to interpreting Apple’s actions, Ockham’s razor is usually the best guide: the simplest explanation is to be preferred.

Unsanity Application Enhancer Causes Botched Leopard Upgrades ★

An important heads-up: If you’ve got APE installed, you should upgrade to Leopard with a Clean Install or Archive and Install, not an upgrade. People doing upgrades with (apparently outdated versions of) APE installed are getting stuck at a blue screen after the installation. Love the way Apple’s support document puts quotes around “enhancement” when describing what APE is.

(My upgrade advice still stands — APE is the sort of “unholy diddling with system software” that warrants a Clean Install.)

Update: Unsanity’s Slava Karpenko has acknowledged the problem on Unsanity’s weblog.

‘Alex’, the New and Much-Improved Default Text-to-Speech Voice ★

669 MB on disk — the largest file in Mac OS X Leopard. The quality is truly impressive. Jonas and I are having a lot of fun with it — I’ve got him convinced that my PowerBook knows what he’s doing.

Update: Here’s an example I recorded of Alex reading this entry — note that it reads “MB” as “megabyte” and correctly pronounces the “X” in “Mac OS X” as “ten”.