7451 Alternating back and forth between OS 10.5.1 Leopard and OS 10.4.11 Tiger on the same computer, as I've been doing lately, is a study in contrasts between a mature, well sorted out and refined operating system, and a young, rough-around-the-edges, still pretty buggy one. There was a similar dynamic when Tiger was introduced back in 2005, compared with the by then reasonably reliable and solid OS 10.3.9 Panther, but this time the difference is much more pronounced, due, presumably, to the fact that under the hood, Leopard is a much more different bit of cat than Tiger was compared with Panther.

The way things have been going, it usually plays of something like this: I will boot into Leopard, get a bit of a rush from the interface, which I like better than Tiger's, and things go relatively well for the first day or so, but then the swap files start piling up and bugs begin manifesting. diminishing performance and causing erratic behavior and frustration.

It may be partly due to the way I use computers, and the fact that I'm on a dialup Internet connection. I usually have some twenty or more applications open at any given time, and Leopard evidently isn't well-optimized for talking to dialup, with POP 3 email performance in particular being horrible. Mail downloads are slow even on a fresh restart, and deteriorate progressively with uptime, finally just stalling, and I've given up trying to send attachments through SMTP servers and am profoundly thankful for Gmail's Webmail interface as a workaround.

Staying in Leopard without a reboot eventually manifests another bug - the Spaces feature stops working properly. I have latched onto Spaces as a not-altogether-satisfactory stand-in for WindowShade X, which does not support Leopard yet. With Spaces, I can open, say, email programs in one space, browsers in another, a text editor in a third, and so forth, then switch back in fourth among them by clicking the appropriate application icon in the Dock - at least when Spaces is working as it should.

When it stops working properly, you can no longer switch Spaces panels by clicking on application icons in the Dock, making it necessary to use the Spaces menu in the menu bar or a keyboard command to move from one panel to another. Also, when this affliction sets and, program windows hidden with the Finder Hide command will no longer reappear with a click on the Dock's application icon. You have to find the actual document in the Finder and click on that.

At first it will sometimes spontaneously revert to normal behavior, but eventually it just stays broken, about the same time as some folders and documents in the Finder stop responding to double clicks. Interestingly, by going to list view in the Desktop Folder in my Home Folder, I can usually get stubborn folders to open.

However it's all extremely tedious. As I write this, I've been on the same boot session in Leopard for over a week, and the Finder is VERY flaky. I don't know if this is an issue with the Finder, the Dock, Spaces, or all three, but it surely is a annoying, requiring a restart to restore normal behavior. Just relaunching the Finder doesn't help.

If anyone out there knows what this glitch caused by and/or has a workaround, please let me know. At least if I get totally frustrated I can always boot back into OS 10.4.11 on another partition on my hard drive, Tiger being a paragon of stability and where everything works the way it should.

In the Leopard positive column, one of the many little unheralded tweaks is that the spellchecker now separates words that have been miss-typed with no space between them. In earlier versions, what you got was the words with a hyphen inserted in the correction selection dialog, which was more less useless, or at best cumbersome, requiring manual removal of the hyphen in the corrections dialog.

Since the OS X spell checker is the only one I use regularly, this little improvement is much appreciated. I'm not the world's most accurate typist, and words run together is an all too frequent typographical error.


Charles W. Moore

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