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    Leopard Update – 10.5.2

    By greg | February 12, 2008

     Apple has released a new update for the Leopard operating system, and I thought I’d just briefly share some of the changes that actually apply to normal Mac users. The changes, to be honest, make me somewhat happy with Apple because it seems as though this update is in direct response to customer demands. Yes, I might be succumbing to the manipulation…

     

    Often times, operating system updates fix problems that most of us users, would never have known to exist. Microsoft is famous for this. They fix some ambiguous system security flaw that occurs if and only if you’re playing Chess on a Saturday at 9:34PM while browsing Facebook, listening to an album with a 4 star overall rating in iTunes, while wearing your sweatpants backwards, doing the hokie pokie. Alright, I do understand that those updates are actually meaningful. I’m just getting at the fact that the reason a lot of people install the updates in OS X or Windows is because we’re told to by our computers, and we hate the system messages that will continually remind us that we haven’t downloaded the backward sweatpants security update.

    This new update in Leopard fixes/adds two options that have caused a bit of stir in the Mac community up until this point. The first is the translucent menu bar. It was supposed to add to Leopard’s aesthetic look, but instead, it brought about many unhappy Leopard users. There are dozens of apps/scripts that individuals released in order to “fix” this feature. 10.5.2 adjusted the opacity of the Menu Bar to not be so transparent, and it added the option to make the menu bar opaque. While most of us who were really bothered with this have already changed it using other means and now have to figure out how to make everything go back to normal, it’s nice to see this feature added.  *Note: I ran into a problem in which the check box changed my Menu Bar from Silver to White and not translucent. I don’t know whether this was due to a Terminal command I ran earlier or Xspinner. My fix to this (at least that’s what seemed to do the trick) was to delete a change I had made previously (Solidifying Menu Bar – MacRumors) using the command: 

    sudo defaults delete /System/Library/LaunchDaemons/com.apple.WindowServer ‘EnvironmentVariables’ (Simply copy and paste using  + c –>  + v)

    A quick reboot after this seemed to solve everything.  For those of you interested, this option is found here:

     

    System Preferences –> Desktop & Screen Saver –> Desktop (tab)

    opaquefinal.png


     Here’s an example of the difference. To be honest, I think I may now be a fan of the translucent option.

     

    Translucent

     

    trans.png

     

     

    Opaque

     

    opaque.png

     

     

    The next big feature is the Stacks view options. People tried all sort of ways of placing their own personal icon in the front of the Stacks. People would name a folder “*”, modify the date, etc. and sort the stack accordingly so that the icon would sit in front. Now you’re given the option of displaying Stacks as the folder icon itself. Here’s an example:

     

    Old view of ‘Documents’ folder in the Dock

     

    docs.png

     

    New Folder view in Dock (notice actual ‘Documents’ icon)

     

    docs-now.png

     

    One other thing they added is a new view in Stacks. Now along with the Fan and Grid (this view got a minor update) views, you can now view your files in List view. Here’s a screenshot of it in action.

     

     

    listview2.png

     

    This update also added the option to place a Time Machine icon in your Menu Bar, which would be nice if I used Time Machine… I just don’t want to spend money on a hard drive to devote to it. This can easily be disabled in the Time Machine menu in System Prefs. The rest of the updates in this package are little things that simply make Leopard more stable and secure.

     

    Well, hope this was somewhat informative for some of you. Thanks for reading and check back for more Mac info!

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    1. Snow Leopard – Installation (Part 1a/2-Two OS Installations in Three Days)
    2. Change the Default Folder/System Icons in Leopard OS X
    3. Leopard OS X and VMware Fusion
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    5. Snow Leopard – First Impressions and SL’s (not) New Looks (Part 1b/2-Two OS Installations in Three Days)
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    Topics: Apple, Mac, Mac tips | No Comments »

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