OK, lets get this out of the way first: Leopard is by far the most amazing product Apple has ever shipped and Apple deserves all the praise they are getting.

But….

What the hell were they thinking with stacks? This has been a gripe for mine for several months, but I haven’t been able to vent my frustration at this step back due to NDA. In Tiger there was what were essentially old school stacks, folder. Now you could drag a folder, or even an entire drive, into your dock and then click and hold to get a menu, allowing you to drill down the file system quickly. Even more helpful is a single click would open a new Finder window at that folder. Even though I sometimes didn’t need that particular directory, it became the standard way for me to open a new Finder window.

Now Leopard introduced an extremely cool feature called Quick Look and another extremely cool developer feature called Core Animation. Obviously if there was a way put those together with dock folders it would be exceedingly cool. And at WWDC it looked like that was what stacks would be. In the final build it looks like they remembered the Quick Look and Core Animation parts but completely forgot the dock folders parts, to the point that stacks (beyond the downloads stack) are pretty much useless.

You can’t drill down the file system, instead it opens a finder window when you click on a folder. But what’s worse is that it now means it takes 2 clicks to get a new finder window. The Applications stack is pretty pointless for power users, as it only seems to go up to 79 items shown and you can usually get to the application faster by using spotlight (which may I say is amazingly fast now). The downloads stack is the only useful one of the lot.

Other than stacks there isn’t a huge amount I can find fault for with Leopard. I’m a bit disappointed with Apple in over promising in some areas, but what they have put in is amazing enough to make up for that. About the only other small thing I can complain about is that Apple now has Core Animation, but has opted to change the front row transition to a simple fade, rather than the exceedingly cool transition Front Row 1.0 had.

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Too many people complain about technology. Computer games are making children violent. The internet is putting people at risk from fraud or worse. Computers are destroying our society because people aren’t socialising, instead opting to go online. If you believed all the nay sayers you’d think that technology offers no benefits to humanity. While the list of benefits that technology gives to us all is easy to fill up, there is a story on Apple’s website at the moment that really shows technology at it’s best:

For Ailing Student iChat Means ‘iCan’

Ignore all the little asides which are added in by Apple to promote their products and just think about the core of the story. A young boy going through something most of us hope never to have to experience being able to gain at least some of his regular life back. Medical technology can cure the sick but it can’t do anything about giving back the time taken away by the illness. Computers and the internet are a way to help people stay in touch with the outside world, where they would otherwise be isolated. This story isn’t a story about how Apple helped this kid get his life back, it’s a story about how technology helps give lots of people in similar situations a chance to have their life back and that is something the nay sayers will have a hard time arguing against.

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Code Collector and Code Collector Pro were both updated today to fix a small bug we found in Leopard testing. When Friday comes your code snippets should run on the new cat without a hitch.  Minim 1.1.3 has a few minor UI issues but these don’t affect usability too much and will be fixed in the upcoming 1.2 update. Of course not having the final build that everyone has means we can’t guarantee 100% compatibility yet, but hopefully Apple won’t have changed much between the last build we developer received and the version we’ll all be installing on Friday.

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Last week I saw the finishing line and this week I’ve been able to almost touch it. Yesterday I managed to get my to-do list for Minim 1.2 finished. I built the first internal beta version (1.2b1) and have started using it to access my main library (I actually started using it a while ago when I accidentally built a release version and opened it, thereby updating my 1.1 library). Of course now I’m using Minim 1.2 properly I’m noticing quite a few bugs I’ve missed.

And while we’re on bugs, it might be worth outlining my testing method: I don’t write any automated tests. Yes it may be worth it to some people, but unless I’m writing a framework I do not see the point in writing code to test code. The best way to test an application is to actually use it. It takes time but it tries to break the application in ways users will break the application. Only write code to test stuff that people will write code to interface with. If I was adding AppleScript support then yes I’d build a bunch of AppleScripts I can run.

That said, the Leopard feature list on Apple’s website highlighted a feature I’ve missed in my use of Leopard: Automator UI recording. I’m going to be experimenting with this to build up a UI test suite for Minim 1.2. While I don’t like the idea of writing automated tests for a piece of software, I’m all for having a way I can automate the testing of my app based on using it as a user.

Most of the remaining work centres around the UI (mostly icons) and a few bugs I’ve found. I’m pretty confident of having an early November release for 1.2 but this all depends on how long it takes to do the marketing and distribution side of things, specifically the screencasts.

I’ve included some screenshots of 1.2 below to liven up this otherwise text filled post. And just a note, there may not be a post next week as I’ll be heading over to the Apple Store for the Leopard launch. Unfortunately my ADC account expires on the 25th and so I have to pay for my final copy of Leopard. Don’t worry though, we’re testing all our apps against Leopard already so we’ll be Leopard compatible when the big cat ships next week.

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