I’m a Mac fan boy, and I’m very tolerant of change. When the Mac using world screamed when they replaced OS 9 with OS X, killing a lot of the nice functionality in OS 9 in favor of a brand new OS, I drank the kool-aid and made the change as soon as I could.

And I’ve been a big fan of each major revision of X — and have run all of them right out of the gate, warts and all. But I’m not sold on Leopard.

The loudest touted features are either useless, or already existed in 3rd party apps for 10.4.
- Spaces is just VirtuDesktops — and a concept I never had any use for. I’d much rather have multiple monitors then multiple “virtual” screens.
- TimeMachine is just a back-up app — granted its well integrated and looks pretty. But the method I have in place now is much less intrusive (not to mention more fire-proof) and doesn’t require me to be tethered to a local external hard drive.

But nothing bugs me more than Stacks…
Stacks kills a feature I’ve used and loved in OS X since they killed the Apple menu’s hierarchical app-launching capabilities from OS 9.

It used to be, in OS X 10.2-10.4, that you could drop any folder onto the right side of the Dock and turn it into a menu by right clicking on it. In this way I could add my very organized Applications folder to my Dock and use it to find applications in a very simple manor (I’ll admit, its kind of like a Start Menu, but come on — its a good way to organize your apps).

In 10.5 that great feature was replaced with either a silly, and surprisingly static, curved list, or a box full of icons. Now that box can contain subfolders — but if you click on them, it opens a window. That’s a window you have to close after you find your application. Unacceptably stupid.

Know what else is stupid? Apparently there’s a massive data loss bug in the new Finder. For years — literally, we’ve been complaining about how awful the Finder is (even compared to its OS 9 grandparent) and this is the fix they offer us?

Damage to the Dock and a bad upgrade for the Finder aside (I do like the new sidebar, btw) Stacks are not what they were supposed to be. A “Stack” was designed as a replacement for (or addition to) the folder concept. It was an organizational item that existed in the Finder, had a single icon that could be dragged around like a file, but expanded when clicked to show a collection of items. There are plenty of UI prototype videos on the web showing what Stacks meant to us before Apple polluted the term.

• Sample of what Stacks were supposed to be

I’m ditching Leopard for the time being. The only feature I really wanted was the improved Front Row… maybe there’s a way I can run it in 10.4. If not, I’ll just hold out hope that Apple gets their crap together with upcoming updates.

Update: Yay! It looks like they fixed stacks… a little bit!