Safari Remembers

The new Safari 3 is out for both Leopard and Tiger (it's included in Mac OS X v.10.4.11). It's pretty nice, I have to say. It now works with Blogger's HTML editor dealio, which is excellent (though slightly buggy at present). The find function now kicks some serious — and, more importantly, some Firefox — ass. Safari now handles tabs intelligently, letting you not only rearrange them in a window, but also letting you tear them off or drop them into existing windows. All extremely slick. Oh, and it's really pretty and fast as Hell. Seriously, it's smokin'.

But perhaps my favorite improvement to Safari 3 is that window placement is now remembered properly. You see, Safari of yore (of Tiger, actually) would remember the placement of the last window opened, rather than the placement of what I'd call the "base" window, or the first window opened. So, after using Safari, if you'd opened any windows other than your first window — even if you then closed them — the next time you opened Safari you'd get a blank window where the last open one had been. Or sometimes in seemingly random spots. I complained about this a long time ago, and it never got fixed to my liking. It was part of the reason I ended up switching to Firefox — I'm rather anal about my window placement and I like my browser pinned to the upper right hand corner, but in Safari it was always moving. Argh!

Well, Safari 3 fixes this. Sort of. Actually, I'm running Safari 3 in both Tiger and Leopard. The behavior remains unchanged in Tiger, but in Leopard, all is as I like it. So perhaps this is a fix in Leopard and not so much a Safari fix.

Either way, it's just one more reason I like Leopard and can't wait to be done with Tiger.

Can't. Frickin'. Wait.

That said, will I switch back to Safari once I've successfully transitioned to Leopard? Only time will tell. But somehow, I doubt it.

Remote Management Commands in Leopard

A while ago I wrote about the networksetup command, which provides a command-line interface to network preferences, as well as the systemsetup command, which provides command-line control over additional system-level preferences. In the past those commands were stored in the labyrinthian:

/System/Library/CoreServices/RemoteManagement/ARDAgent.app/Contents/Support

Yes, inside the ARDAgent. Perfect.

Finally Apple has put those commands in a location the shell recognizes as a command path. In Leopard they reside in the far more sensible:

/usr/sbin

Now all you have to do to call them is... Well... Call them.

Really now. Was that so hard?

What Everyone's Bitching About

There's been no shortage of commentary on Leopard's 3D Dock, mostly because it's just ugly as Hell. But that's fixable.

There's been almost as much bitching about two other new visual changes in Leopard. The first is the menubar, which is now translucent. I'm ambivalent about this one. On the one hand, I understand that, from a usability standpoint, it's a bad idea. It's now slightly harder to read a primary interface element under certain conditions, those conditions being, in particular, the use of busy Desktop pictures and/or patterns. The default Desktop picture for Leopard, in fact, is an image of outer space whose star field can directly compete for visual attention with text in the menubar. My argument to this, however, is that busy, distracting, high-contrast Desktop pictures are a far greater hindrance to usability than slightly-harder-to-read menubar text, and if you're really bothered by the menubar changes, you should probably switch to a nice, solid or muted Desktop background and remove all distractions from your life once and for all. That's what I do and, so, while the I understand that translucent menubar is not the best idea for usability's sake, it really just doesn't bother me in the least. Actually, I kind of like the muted, lower-contrast lack of in-your-face-ness of the new menubar.

The other big gripe has been about pulldown menu transparency. No. Seriously. David Pogue of the New York frickin' Times for Pete's sake:

The most serious misstep in Leopard is its new see-through menus. When the menu commands — Save As, Page Preview, whatever — are superimposed on the text of whatever document is behind them, they’re much harder to read. Often, Apple’s snazzy graphics are justifiable because they make the Mac more fun to use. In this case, though, nothing is gained, and much is lost.

This one I don't get. Pulldown menus have been transparent in Mac OS X for a long time. (Oh, wait. I mean forever!) The difference between how Tiger deals with them and how Leopard does is extremely subtle.

Tiger Pulldown Transparency: Pinstripes! Ew!
(click image for larger view)

And Leopard does away with the pinstripes, which to my mind is a huge usability gain. At worst we break even here.

Leopard Pulldown Transparency: A "Serious Misstep." Really?
(click image for larger view)

I wonder sometimes if people are forgetting that pulldowns in Tiger were transparent. You'd think, by the level of general annoyance with this change, that they had. Honestly, people. It's really not that bad. I'm totally on board with the Dock thing (though a lot of people don't mind that even). But when it comes to the new transparencies, they just don't bother me much at all. I hardly even notice.

UPDATE:
Oddly, Firefox's group bookmark pulldowns exhibit the old-style, non-blurred menu transparency, minus the pinstripes of course. I can't find another application that does this. Weird.

Firefox's Group Bookmark Pulldown: Old Skool
(click image for larger view)

Leopard Menu Text

It's not a difference you'd probably ever really notice, but Leopard's standard menus now use color to create the dark gray text you see throughout the interface (though not in the menubar).

Tiger's Menu Text: Black, White and Gray
(click image for larger view)

I'm not sure the reason for the change — perhaps to add a warmth and a softness to the text.

Leopard's Menu Text: Now in Full Color
(click image for larger view)

It's a subtle difference, almost imperceptible. And I'm curious what the thinking was behind this change. If anyone has any clues, I'd love to hear about them in the comments.

UPDATE:
John Gruber has the answer over at Daring Fireball, actually. Turns out this is nothing new and not a difference between Leopard and Tiger. What you're seeing here, generally, is the difference between standard and sub-pixel anti-aliasing, two techniques for anti-aliasing text. What you're seeing, specific to my two computers, is the difference between the "Standard" and "Light" Font smoothing style settings in the Appearance Preferences. "Standard," as you might guess, uses standard anti-aliasing — i.e. shades of gray — to anti-alias text, whereas any of the other settings use sub-pixel anti-aliasing, which uses color to achieve the same effect. Turns out I've always preferred standard, even on LCDs. Weird.

More details here.

Leopard Groups

Leopard now allows for the creation of groups in the Accounts preference pane. When creating a new account, you can now select the type, and one of those types is "Group."

Accounts Preferences: User Types
(click image for larger view)

Of note is the fact that Leopard, unlike Tiger, does not create a group specific to the user. That is, in Tiger, when the user "systemsboy" was created, a group called "systemsboy" that systemsboy was a member of was automatically created. Apple has done away with this in Leopard for some reason.

Accounts Preferences: Adding Users to a Group
(click image for larger view)

If you want to add a user to one of your newly created groups, simply select the group and then add the user by checking his name. Multiple users can, of course, be added to a group.

Also of note, control-clicking the user's or group's account and selecting "Advanced Options..." from the pop-up will reveal additional account options formerly configurable only from within the now-defunct NetInfo Manager.

Accounts Preferences: Advanced Options
(click image for larger view)

I'd say this is mostly nice, or at least certainly a general improvement over NetInfo. I could talk a client through this over the phone. NetInfo, not so much. I do think this is a clumsy interface for dealing with large batches of users, but maybe such things are best left to the Workgroup Managers of the world.

In any case, now you know. And knowing is half the battle.

Yo Joe!