Bob McCune

Today Apple released version 10.5.2 of Leopard. I normally wouldn’t get too excited about an OS point release, but 10.5.2 is definitely an exception. The reason being is Apple has fixed the two most widely panned changes in Leopard: the translucent menu bar and Stacks.

The translucent menu bar has to be the most criticized UI change in Leopard. This was an odd, Vista-like change that never made any sense. At best it was annoying and at worst it screwed up the antialiasing and made the menu bar illegible. Thankfully, the option to turn off this craptastic feature has been added in the latest release. Under System Preferences > Desktop & Screen Saver there is a new checkbox to turn off the translucency. Now you can go from:

back to the more sane:

The other heavily criticized feature is Stacks. A stack provides a new way of viewing the contents of a Dock folder. For instance, clicking on the “Downloads” stack in the Dock produces a view like the following.

Although I think this is an interesting idea, the initial implementation was somewhat half-baked and actually took away functionality found in previous releases.

The two main problems were that you were limited to either a fan view, like above, or a grid view. Neither one of these views worked well with folders containing a large number of items. The other problem was it was impossible to tell the difference between the various stacks in your Dock as you had no control over their icons. Each was simply displayed as a “stack” of the folder content’s icons.

I’m glad to say this too has been addressed in the latest release. You now have much more control over the behavior of this feature. Right-clicking or Control-clicking on the stack displays a menu allowing you to select between grid, fan, and list views. Additionally you can also choose between displaying the folder as a Stack or a standard folder. These changes effectively give you back the behavior you had in earlier versions of OS X.

The 10.5.2 update introduces a whole host of fixes and features beyond the ones I’ve mentioned, but these two alone are reason enough to upgrade.

Go Tasty Burrito!