Wow. “Stacks” really sucks!
Check out more recent articles to see how I stopped worrying and learned to love the Stacks.
I’ve been enjoying my first few days with the new OS X 10.5 operating system (aka Leopard), and I’m really looking forward to seeing what the development community is going to be able to do with the hundreds of cool new features and API hooks built into the OS. But that said: Does anybody really think that the “Stacks” feature has been well implemented in Leopard?
I was actually looking forward to using Stacks: Along with Time Machine (which it turns out is currently useless on my existing network storage system), it was one of the things that drew me to buy the latest upgrade as soon as possible. But it turns out that “stacks” are just folders — not smart folders, and not “on the fly” collections of files. Just folders. And really, really, really sh*tty looking ones, at that.
I won’t go into details here, as I’m sure anyone looking for more info will find it in abundance elsewhere on the Web (The entire Ars Technica review is a great read, by the way).
In fact, Leopard is indeed a great system, but the two main things that Apple has been using to promote it to the masses — Time Machine and Stacks — have turned out to be sorely disappointing. I’m sure somebody will figure out a way to get Time Machine to work on a networked drive soon enough, so I’m not actually worried about that one. After all, we’ve already seen “fixes” for other features, such as this fix to disable the miserable 3D Dock.
But Stacks? Stacks just sucks.
My first 15 minutes with OS X Leopard
This will be short, as I’m still exploring, but I just wanted to report a few things I’ve noticed in the whole 15 minutes since I installed the new OS X operating system on my MacBook Pro (Keep in mind I never tried a beta version, so this is all new to me):
- jEdit actually looks really nice in Leopard! Apparently, the unified look-and-feel works well for Java apps, too.
- Sherlock is gone. I’m probably the only person in the world that still used it, but I really liked to use it as a small Web-service client. (Sure, I liked Watson even better, but that’s been MIA since Sun bought it from Karelia oh so many years ago). Oh well, all the more reason to write my own WSDL apps now.
- Already, I can tell I’m going to like Spaces and Stacks.
- Not so sure I really dig the shadows and lighting overall. The new icons are reminiscent of classic Mac icons to me (The “Aqua look” is obviously out now), which gives the whole Finder a snappy feel.
- I’ve got to go find that app that turns off the menu bar transparency. That’s just a lot more annoying than it seemed it would be. (Update: How about that? It doesn’t work anymore. Oh well, it was easy enough to fix by adding a white bar to the desktop picture itself..)
- I’ve seen demos of Time Machine, and I want to love it, but… anybody know how to get it to work with a network drive? So far I’m only seeing my USB and Firewire drives in the list. (Update: Looking around on the Web for about 5 minutes, it seems it may not work with a networked drive. Well, ain’t that a kick in crotch?)
- Hour 4 edit: Woohoo!!! Leopard lets me control my icon grid spacing! This is a feature that’s been sorely lacking in the Finder, and I’m thrilled to have it now! (It’s always the little things.)
I’ll probably add more to this post as I find new things, but so far, I like it. I really, really like it.
Almost perfect: ActionScript code browsing with jEdit’s Sidekick panel
I was writing a quick answer to a reader concerning how to use jEdit to browse ActionScript code in a tree view, when I suddenly realized the current solution wasn’t good enough. But after banging around on some source code this evening (and with the help of Ali Rantakari), I think I’ve managed to make an AS 1, 2 or 3 code browser that rivals a few I’ve seen on other platforms. Isn’t open source wonderful?
Warning: This article goes into some depth regarding customizing jEdit, Ctags and the Sidekick plugin. If you want to be spared the details, you can always skip to the end and just reap the rewards: A shiny new code browser custom-made for ActionScript!
A little background
JEdit’s optional CTagsSidekick plugin can be used to parse any language supported by the Exuberant Ctags parser. The plugin uses Ctags to parse through the current buffer and present the defined tags it finds in the SideKick tree.
Unfortunately, ActionScript is not one of the 34 languages supported “out of the box” by Ctags, so we have to do a little hacking to get things to work the way we want. Thanks to the work of a few pioneers, however, it’s easy enough to introduce ActionScript parsing to Ctags, and therefore, to jEdit itself.
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A place to store our stuff
Now that we have context-sensitive help files, a sporty new look and the ability to communicate with the Flash IDE, I figure it’s time to start keeping track of all the goodies we’re adding to our new ActionScript editor.
Thus, I’ve added a permanent page to Turdhead.com to provide direct links to the growing list of enhancements we’ve been making to jEdit lately (otherwise, these entries are likely to just disappear into the archives and remain pretty hard to find later). The “Make jEdit yours” logo at left provides the link from anywhere on Turdhead.com.
Thanks again for all the kind comments and emails, and please let us know if you’ve discovered something you think is worth sharing. Thanks!