Leopard quirks

Dave Bourke · Post by **Dave Bourke** » Fri Feb 15, 2008 3:30 pm

I've been playing with 10.5.2 on a new iMac now for a couple of days and I've noticed a few odd things about it.

1. Focus. When the Desktop appears on boot-up, I normally don't touch the mouse. Instead, I hit Command-`to shift focus from the Desktop to a Finder window. In Leopard, nothing happens ••“ I'm stuck in limbo until I click with the mouse for focus to register. This works fine in Pather and Tiger. (I try to use the keyboard as much as possible to alleviate tendonitis).

2. Focus. When working in an application and I bring up the file Open dialog, sometimes the focus disappears so I can't use the keyboard to navigate in it. The app is frontmost, its menus are present in the menu bar, yet the keyboard won't work for navigation until I click the mouse on the dialog window. This seems to happen about once in every five times. Very disorientating.

3. Focus. The new floating Help window now means that all keyboard input is directed to the app whose Help file is open. So even if Help appears to have focus, Command-Q will quit the application you seek help with. Which is fine. Except that not all Apple applications behave like this. Or third-party ones either. For those, you have to click on an application window for focus to register. So, again, a matter of guess and click.

4. Spaces. As I wrote earlier, I keep two Finder windows open in column view on my Desktop. I thought it would be a good idea to open another super-big Finder window in a second Space to use CoverFlow in all its glory. Which works great. Until I restart and find all three windows are now in Space No. 1, resized and set to CoverFlow view. Which is, frankly, pretty useless.

I had been going to upgrade the Mac Pro from 10.4.11 after initially seeing Leopard in action on the iMac. Now I'm not so sure...

Kind regards.

Dave Bourke · Post by **Dave Bourke** » Sat Feb 16, 2008 5:07 am

On further installations and investigations, it appears that problem No. 2 may be confined to a single application (Graphic Converter 6.0.3), which points to it being a bug.

Also, at Apple Discussions it seems quite a few users are unhappy about the change to the Help window's status.

Can anyone confirm problems 1 and/or 4?

Kind regards.

Dave Bourke · Post by **Dave Bourke** » Sun Feb 17, 2008 8:08 am

On further investigation, iTunes has this file dialog focus problem as well. As do Final Draft, Final Draft Tagger, Screenwriter, and TextWrangler.

None of the other Apple apps show it, nor do Scrivener, NotePad, Bean, or Little Snitch.

Kind regards.

Dave Bourke · Post by **Dave Bourke** » Sun Feb 17, 2008 4:29 pm

The developer of Graphic Converter has now emailed me to say he believes that this is an Apple bug with Carbon applications. Which means it should manifest with Digital Performer as well.

So, 52 views so far, and no one else here has these problems? Maybe more people use the mouse than I had imagined?

Oh, and here's another wrinkle on Problem 1: as I stated, when I boot the machine and the Desktop appears, neither of my Finder windows have focus. Command-`(Cycle Through Windows) should tranfer focus from the Desktop to the windows, but nothing happens until I click the mouse. Only then can I change focus from the keyboard.

But if I have Spaces enabled, Command-` works twice after I've clicked the mouse, then focus disappears into the depths of Spaces from whence it never returns to Space 1.

At this stage, I don't think there's any way I'm gonna put this on my music machine...

Kind regards.

monkey man · Post by **monkey man** » Mon Feb 18, 2008 2:04 am

Hey Dave, it does seem odd that nobody's responded.

FWIW, if I have a number of Finder windows open, COMMAND-` only cycles through two or three (at best) of them.
This is frustrating, but so basic an issue I figured Apple would have heard much about it.
I also find the lack of navigable dock menus frustrating - apparently that feature's already been given back to us in 10.5.2.

Seems to me a little real-world feedback for Apple will pressure the smoothing out of some of these inconsistencies.
Well, we can only hope the dumming-down process slows somewhat.

Timeline · Post by **Timeline** » Mon Feb 18, 2008 6:49 am

I'm watching the thread but my machine does not arrive until end of week.

Dave Bourke · Post by **Dave Bourke** » Mon Feb 18, 2008 2:09 pm

Thanks for responding, guys. I'm even more depressed than I was. The Graphic Converter developer emailed me again this morning to say that he had now actually tested for my problem ••“ and found that focus on file navigation dialogs is NOT lost on his setup.

At his suggestion, in further testing, I have now removed Little Snitch 2.0.2, MainMenu 1.7.2, and ClamXav 1.1.0 (because they install icons in the menu bar). Unfortunately, the problem is still present in all Carbon applications on this iMac.

Just one small piece of good news: the problem with lack of any Finder focus on boot-up has been resolved by removing the three apps mentioned above. Now I have to reinstall them one at a time to find which one's causing that particular problem. I suspect Little Snitch myself.

In the meantime, I'm totally fed up with Leopard. It's easily the most troublesome version of OS X I've ever installed. And I'm not even doing music on this machine ••“ word-processing, graphics, and internet only. Stuff I had no problems doing on a Quadra 650 running Mac OS 7 back in the early '90s. Isn't progress wonderful?

I may have to toss Leopard completely and install 10.4.11. Which would be a total PITA since I ordered a 1 TB Time Capsule last week thinking that Leopard would be a shoo-in on both the iMac and the Mac Pro.

With regard to reporting problems to Apple, that's no longer really possible for end-users apparently. You have to be a developer to log a bug (and the bug-reporting system is itself buggy), and they just don't bother to read the Discussions, although sometimes they've been known to delete critical posts/threads (including mine).

Nicky, you didn't happen to try my test with iTunes, did you? If not, don't worry. I know you have your own problems with this mangy cat.

Kind regards.

YouTube · Post by **James Steele** » Mon Feb 18, 2008 2:42 pm

Dave Bourke wrote:In the meantime, I'm totally fed up with Leopard. It's easily the most troublesome version of OS X I've ever installed.

Interesting. Drives home the whole "Your Mileage May Vary" concept, because Leopard has been pretty great for me. Go figure.

sdemott · Post by **sdemott** » Mon Feb 18, 2008 2:43 pm

Dave-

#1 & #2 are behaving as expected for me (10.5.2 on 17" MBP and white MB).

#3 right, the new help system doesn't seem to launch an app so much as bring forward & add windowing to a resident task already running. I get the same behavior in all apps that don't install their own help engine (MS Office, for instance acts oddly in this respect).Wouldn't call it a bug by any means, just a new paradigm for Help. I think I like it better - it's a lot faster than the old way.

#4 I haven't quite taken to spaces yet, so I can't say one way or the other. In my playing I found it to be a bit troublesome...but that was when using Parallels Desktop to run XP in one Space in full screen mode. It seemed to forget which space I was dragging windows to in the other 3 spaces, making life very confusing.

sorry I can't be much more help.

Dave Bourke · Post by **Dave Bourke** » Mon Feb 18, 2008 4:48 pm

Many thanks for your input (and encouragement) on this, James and Steve. Here's where things stand right now:

No. 1 (no Finder focus on bootup): The culprit is MainMenu 1.7.2 ••“ when you set it to launch at login, it steals focus from the Finder. I've disabled this preference and put it in the Dock instead. So that's solved for the moment.

No. 2 (focus disappears from certain file navigation dialogs): My initial reports were not entirely accurate. This actually happens 100% of the time with all file system navigation windows that belong to Carbon applications. It also happens with iTunes alone out of all the Apple applications and utilities.

Uninstalling MainMenu, ClamXav, and Liittle Snitch has made no difference. The only possible culprit I can think of now is the PACE Anti-Piracy installation (version 5.5.1) which comes as part of the Screenwriter 6 application. So that's next for trashing.

No. 3 (the Help Viewer): I don't like the floating window personally because I find it gets in the way and I can't hide it ••“ but I can live with it.

No. 4 (Spaces): The Help is quite sparse on Spaces so I'll have to do some more exploring. But I can't help feeling that in its present form it's just not there yet.

So, really, the only joy-killer now is No. 2. If I can solve that I'll be a laughing boy.

Thanks again, guys. Your support is much appreciated.

Kind regards.

monkey man · Post by **monkey man** » Tue Feb 19, 2008 1:36 am

Dave, you asked if I have done/could do the iTunes test.
I haven't even run the app yet!

Putting on a brave face and persisting with trying to get my sd2s to, well, act like audio files.
Between my permissions issues, which were pretty amazingly severe, and the UE's taking over my computer thing, it seems I fall into the Dave Bourke camp of Leos.

It does seem prudent to avoid MM for the time being; the app must need an update.
It was one of 3 apps that I narrowed the cause of the permissions problem down to.
You might want to look around and check your permissions, Dave, just to be on the safe side.

Dave Bourke · Post by **Dave Bourke** » Tue Feb 19, 2008 1:30 pm

Hey, my permissions are very clear. If my mammy says I'm not allowed, I'm not allowed. It's for my own good. She knows best. So she tells me anyway.

Although I had this dream last where I met this gorgeous blonde and told her (I kid you not) that she was "the love of my life." And she melted into my arms. What the hell is wrong with me?

Kind regards.

monkey man · Post by **monkey man** » Wed Feb 20, 2008 3:17 am

Gee Dave, I had several periods last year where I dreamed this sort of thing nightly.
Unfortunate that the glorious, ecstatic highs of finding one's life-love were balanced by the empty longing that often took me days to recover from.

So, MainMenu's off the menu?
I do like the app; I sure hope it's updated (assuming this is what it needs) soon.

Dave Bourke · Post by **Dave Bourke** » Wed Feb 20, 2008 12:38 pm

Love is a chemical. Oxytocin. Designed by nature to keep us from devouring our young. Personally, I don't need it. I hate pork.

Kind regards.

monkey man · Post by **monkey man** » Thu Feb 21, 2008 5:22 am

I thought you might have been over reacting when you said, "What the hell is wrong with me" earlier, Dave.

Now, I'm not so sure.