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Wow, I guess I never got so many comments on one of my posts in such a short time. Thank you for participating and especially thank you for pointing out how to get rid of some of the points I listed in my previous post about Leopard quirks.

Here are the amendments:

  • Cmd+Shift+Tab still works – Apple merely removed the ability to cycle in the task switcher with the arrow keys. The other way still works the same. Thank you to all of the people who stated that!
  • Mounted network volumes on the Desktop – Those can be enabled in the Finder’s preferences under “General”. Thanks to John and Bruno Rodrigues for guiding me in the right direction.

Also re-read the previous post, I just added one more bullet concerning the iTunes Artwork screensaver.

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If you only remotely followed the spreading news around the net, you should already be aware of all the good things Apple’s new operating system brought us. So I’m just gonna sum up the few things that bug me the most.
Just let me state that besides those, I really love the new things OS 10.5 Leopard provides me with.

So here are my gripes:

  • Lack of Bluetooth in Address Book – Why the hell did Apple remove the ability to control my cell phone via Bluetooth from the Address Book application? I just loved being able to answer and place calls and most notably send and receive text messages via a very integrated GUI application. I hate typing messages on my phone keyboard, so this was a really nice addition and I just don’t understand why Apple considered this to be a feature that should be removed.
  • Cmd+Tab doesn’t cycle anymore – In all previous OS X versions, if you pressed Cmd+Tab to switch applications, you could go left and right. Meaning if you where at the first application icon on the left, pressing Cmd+Shift+Tab or Cmd+Tab and Left Arrow you where taken to the rightmost entry. This doesn’t happen anymore. The task switcher stops at the edges, which I find very inconvenient. Now it takes me a lot longer to reach the application I was aming for, most of the time.
  • Network mounts not showing up – This one is still a bit confusing. The new integration of network shares in the Finder is quite good and works very fast. But network shares do not show up as mounted volumes on the Desktop anymore. The only way to get to them and eject them, is by displaying the “Comuter” item in the finder and clicking on its icon. Alas, there are all my mounted network volumes. If Apple didn’t want to clutter up the Desktop, they could at least let those Volumes show up in the Finder sidebar, like mounted DMGs.
  • FrontRow stopping iTunes music – When entering FrontRow while playing music, it stops the playback and you have to navigate to the desired song again. Quite the show stopper when moving away from your computer but wanting to have a nice readable interface from the distance.
  • iTunes Artwork screensaver has a red tinge – If you set the iTunes Artwork screensaver to more than 6 rows, which is necessary for widescreen displays to get rid of the black border on the edges, all the pictures suddenly have a reddish tinge. This is confirmed on two separate installs of Leopard on my MacBook and Ollis’s MacBook Pro.

That’s it for now. I’ll add to this list, as items pop up 😉

Update: Already one more addition to the list: FrontRow stopping iTunes music
Update #2: iTunes Artwork screensaver has a red tinge
Update #3: Some quirks could be resolved via the comments (Thank you all!). Read my follow up posting.

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After reading a tip (and the comments) at macosxhints.com about how to mount a server via the finders sidebar using automator I came up with a very easy way to access my server via SSH in the Terminal.

This method lets you open the Terminal, automatically ssh’ed into your server, via Spotlight, the Finders Sidebar, the Dock, your Desktop or anywhere else you can think of.
The following is a step by step tutorial on how to achieve this.

  1. First you make sure your server is accessible without a password (via ssh public key authentication) for your own convenience. This step can be left out as well but it is much better this way 😉
    Read about how to set this up here. The entry is in german but the steps you have to take are in english, so it should be easy to follow.
  2. Open up TextEdit with a new document and fill in the address to the server in the following form:
    ssh://user@yourserver.comDraganddrop
    Select the text, click and hold until the cursor turns into your normal mouse pointer. Now drag and drop the text to your desktop as shown in the picture to the right (click on it for a bigger view). This creates a shortcut file on your Desktop that you can rename to whatever you want. You can even change the icon on it!
    Now close TextEdit.
  3. Next choose a location for the file in your filesystem. I made a folder called “connections” in my home folder where I plan to keep all my server connection shortcuts. But we’re not stopping here. The shortcut is a normal file as any other in OS X, so you can drag it to your sidebar, keep it in your Dock, search for it with Spotlight or click on it in the Finder.

Findit-1

If you happen to use and love Launchbar like me, there is an even quicker way to open your server connection: Open the Launchbar Configuration ([CMD]+Y in Launchbar) and right click / [CRTL]+click in the left pane where all the different rules are listed. Click on New Rule -> Folder… and in the resulting dialog choose the folder where you keep your connection shortcuts.
Now you can open each of them by just typing the name of the shortcut in Launchbar and hitting enter.