Plaintive Mewling

I’ve upgraded my personal Mac to Leopard and am mostly pleased with the changes. Major props for making the window with focus stand out visually a lot more; that was something I didn’t like about Tiger’s UI. Spotlight is fast enough now, and is good enough at guessing what I want, that I might stop using Quicksilver. A few minor glitches from Tiger are gone, e.g., the odd loss of resolution on images in the screensaver, and Terminal is much nicer now.

But please, someone tell me how to make the menu bar solid again, or at least less transparent! I know from reading a bunch of Leopard reviews that I’m not the only one who finds that particular bit of eye candy a detriment to usability. Maybe I’m getting old, but it absolutely takes me longer to read the menu bar when the text is splattered with different light and dark blotches from whatever image the “choose a random iPhoto picture” wallpaper mode has chosen to put on my screen. So far the only workable suggestion I’ve seen on the net is to edit all my images and put a solid-color bar at the top. Um, no thanks, not so interested in defacing all my vacation photos. (A little bird from Cupertino tells me that the translucent menu bar was not something Apple’s UI people wanted, but they were overruled from above. Listen to your UI people next time, Apple.)
The Mail application is now almost at a point where I’d use it instead of Thunderbird, but not quite. The IMAP folder subscription feature seems to be completely broken; I have yet to get it to show me a list of folders to subscribe to, and it ignores my existing subscription settings in favor of showing me all my folders. There is no way to set the names of the various folders it uses for internal purposes (”Sent Messages” and “Deleted Messages” — I’d prefer “Sent” and “Trash”) though I imagine someone will come up with a “defaults write” I can use to tweak that stuff.

My upgrade wasn’t painless. I let it do the default upgrade process and was left with the “blue screen of death” when I rebooted after the install. I spent a while bouncing in and out of single-user mode trying to diagnose it, but never did figure it out. I ended up reinstalling with the “Archive and Install” option and everything was good after that.

Hopefully there are answers to the above nits (and if so, I’ll update this article for the benefit of people who land here via search engines).