What I Love, and Loathe, About Leopard

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I also embedded my Documents and Applications folders in the Dock and set them both to display contents in a grid that appears and disappears at a single mouse click.

The problem? The more stuff I put in those folders, the more their dock icons change, and visually, I find it confusing. Taking the word "stacks" perhaps a little too literally, the icons that get embedded in the Dock change depending on what is considered to be the "top" of the stack.

By default, the items are organized alphabetically, so a file that starts with the letter A will be at the top and become the temporary icon for that folder. It may be the thumbnail image of a photograph, or a document, or a video file. Put something new in that folder that goes to the "top" and the icon in the Dock changes to match, meaning the icon lacks the kind of visual consistency that something used so often really should have.

Leopard: Still the Cat's Meow

And if you look really closely, you'll see those icons are really "stacked" atop the icons of other items in the folder. As I look now at the icon for my Applications folder, I see Firefox stacked on top of a folder, and under that I see the top of the pointy hat used in the icon for Emailchemy, an e-mail utility.

My question about Stacks is: Do they really need to look like stacks? Why can't they just look like folders, or something else, that never changes. Again, an otherwise great idea gets watered down by sloppy execution. Could the way they work now be made optional?

These are, however, in the grander scheme of things, rather minor complaints. (Though not the only ones, as you'll see in the slide show accompanying this feature.) Leopard blows the doors off any other operating system. Features like Cover Flow, adapted from the feature of the same name that is used in iTunes and on the iPhone and iPod touch, gives a gorgeous animated method to browse through files of every type quickly, and Quick View even lets you look at them closely without having to go to the trouble of launching an application. And the multiple desktops offered by Spaces is, in time, going to change my day-to-day working life. Or so my editor hopes.

In short, I love Leopard, though not without reservations. And I am confident that Apple can fix the system's shortcoming fairly easily.

Hesseldahl is a reporter for BusinessWeek.com .