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« Last post by nontroppo on November 30, 2007, 07:23 AM »
Crashing: Leopard is as stable as Tiger here (my sample is smaller than his, two weeks and a bit). Number of crashes requiring reboot since my switch nearly a year ago: 1 (in Tiger, probably caused by Parallels as other users reported the same issue with that beta build). I don't have a meta-analysis study of crash frequency of Tiger vs. Leopard, but neither does he. it is a rant so I don't think he is claiming objectivity.
Similarity 1: it is common OS-agnostic advice to not be an early adopter, it is hardly something unique to Vista. Yup, the move files across drives bug should have been fixed before 10.5.0. ever surfaced, but the fix at least came quickly. Ideally bugs should not exist in any OS. Tiger also had "issues" when it was 10.4.0, requiring several bug fixes to get more stable. To claim that Leopard is now like Vista, but Tiger was different is revisionist ranting.
Similarity 2: OS X has shipped with transparency effects since 10.0.0. This is a non-similarity, and weak rant material (note the utter lack of sharp comedic wording here).
Similarity 3: Apple really pissed off a lot of users with the change of the Dock and the opacity of the menu bar. Reflections in the Dock actually do have solid perceptual benefits (symmetry detection aids visual search), but the blue lights to indicate an open app really are too low contrast. The old arrow was neither ideal (arrows indicate toggle state normally, so the metaphor is misconstrued). This was fixable a few days after Leopard came out via changes to preferences. But the depth of antagonism of such small changes was pretty spectacular on forums, and a chunk of that really was "This looks different I don't like it". Nevertheless, Apple would have saved a lot of bad blood by having a UI checkbox:
[ ] Old dock style.
But the change from Tiger->Leopard is pretty minor overall visually (note Leopard got slammd elsewhere for not being radical enough!), and the largest valid criticism is 1 PNG image whose contrast is reduced. This is not the case about XP->Vista. I must iterate also that Leopard draws to screen as fast/faster on the same hardware as Tiger (including old hardware). This *really* is not the case for Vista at all. Personally? I like the new dock, but have simply edited the offending PNG image to enhance its contrast and change the colour.
Similarity 4: Windows networking sucks irrespective of OS! Machines appear or disappear on Network neighbourhood depending on the menstrual cycle of humpback whales as far as I can tell. From Tiger->Leopard, I've lost one named machine, but gained another on our work network (a draw). I gave up long time ago looking for named shares (in XP pre-switch) and have used IP addresses since, that way networking works identically on XP, Leopard and Tiger. What that has to do with Vista I'm not sure.
Similarity 5: Haven't used Time Machine, I'm personally happy using bootable clones. The fact they don't do block-level is the major technical limitation (probably they hoped to use ZFS for this then hit roadblocks). I think apple pulled the network sharing at the last minute (as it was advertised then just vanished). Apple could have delayed the whole OS until whatever bugs got worked out, and then pundits would have cried how "Leopard is the new Vista". Irony huh? But as Darwin points out, comedic gold was mined best for this similarity so I like this one best!
Leopard == Vista? Nope. Apple should have properly described the application firewall on release (stopping the confused Heise report coming out), and should have found the data loss issue in testing. They should have not underestimated how many people would have moaned that the dock looks different (even if a block of it was really just aesthetic subjective conservatism). They absolutely should have tested with logitech drivers (which had old versions of a a heavily-discouraged kernel hack) to stop the upgrade freezes wrongly linked to the BSoD. There are serious issues that have surfaced that need quick fixes still (wireless is flaky in 10.5.1 and 10.4.11 for some users). I'm pretty happy to see Apple get slammed, but this rant wastes energy on making comparisons that don't really fit.
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