Russell Beattie

I keep seeing screenshots of Leopard, and wondering what the hell the Apple community is smoking. Translucent menus - with no options to make it opaque, the Dock is now 3D, with no other options (though happily it's solid on the side... oh thank you Steve!) and Coverflow in the Finder? I guess that's one way to make sure the Apple faithful keep upgrading their machines. Make it as insanely resource intensive as possible.

The thing that boggles my mind though is the "Stack". What in Earth are these people on? It's a damn MESS. Step back, close your eyes, power through the distortion field and open them to take a good look at that screen shot above. It's INSANE. You've got a grid of folders and icons with microscopic text thrown in a pile - that's not useful or efficient, I don't care WHO you are. It's a mess! It's like someone at Cupertino is trying to play an enormous joke on everyone: "Watch, we're going to put the most ludicrous new GUI thing possible in here and see if anyone notices how insane we are. Ahhhhahahahahaaaa."

The worst thing about the Leopard launch though isn't the insane eye-candy, it's all this "real Unix" garbage so my geek friends can defend themselves from my taunts by insisting they're using Unix, and therefore don't deserve to lose geek cred. And worse, that OSX is somehow more "pure" because it's related to BSD. Baloney. Sorry to burst your bubble, but using a Mac makes you a Power User, not a tried and true Unix guru. Go get a real OS, you losers.

Bleh.

-Russ

Update: You gotta love it that not only does MacWorld agree with me about the Stack, they use the same wording, complete with a screenshot of a million icons thrown in a grid:

"Unfortunately, the Dock's new Stacks feature is a mess, replacing a utilitarian approach to stashing folders in the Dock (click to open the folder, click and hold to see a list of the folder's contents) with a snazzy but generally less useful pop-up window featuring a stack or grid of icons."

Very nice...

-R