Sunday, 2007-10-28; 05:19:00

• What's with the colorful Applications, Desktop, Documents and Movies icons in the Finder sidebar, but monochromatic blue icons on the actual folders in the view?
• Automator really can record actual UI actions! UI Browser might be rendered obsolete with this, or at least non-essential. In Tiger and earlier, UI Browser was an absolute need if you wanted to make UI AppleScripts.
• Control click on an account in System Preferences, and select "Advanced Options..." -- in here you can change the user ID of a user, the short name, the login shell, the home folder, and even add aliases (presumably other short usernames that also point to this user); very, very useful. Question, though: changing a UID used to involve a lot of headache because you needed to change the permissions on all files that apply to that user, because the system internally stores permissions as UIDs. Does Leopard do this automatically when you change the UID via the Accounts prefpane, or has the subsystem been changed so that changing the UID doesn't mess with the permissions? (Also, BTW, the NetInfo database has supposedly been completely excised in Leopard.)
  
  
  
• Crash reports now have three tabs: "Comments", "Problem Details", and "System Configuration". In addition, crash reports now report hangs, and since there's no crash report for a hang, the system automatically takes a sample of the problem app/process! Very, very cool!
• Two mail bundles, AttachmentScanner and MailWidescreen, get automatically disabled once you launch Mail 3.0 the first time.
• HOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOLY fucking crap Spotlight is fast. Whereas before searches took minutes to complete, now they literally take seconds. And this includes such ludicrous ones as searching for "e" in the contents: literally within 10 seconds, the search stops and 10,000 search results are returned (that's the max that the Finder displays in a smart folder, at least in Leopard). There are a few problems (beachballs, crashing) when the Finder tries to display the final results sometimes, though.
• Weird. I mounted a server and it didn't show up in the Finder sidebar even though the Finder prefs said it should and I unchecked and checked it a few times. (Showed up immediately in a save panel, though.) Quit and relaunched Finder, and then it appeared in the sidebar right away at the next connection.
• Of 121 bugs reported because of Apple Bug Friday, at least 24 have been fixed in Leopard. This is in addition to the 22 reported bugs that were already fixed as of 10.4.10. And I still haven't fully investigated all of the bugs that I've reported, and Apple has said that some of those are also fixed. So there's likely some more bugs to be added to that 24 figure. (And remember that 17 of the non-fixed bugs specifically apply to iTunes, and therefore wouldn't possibly be fixed with an OS update, even though the app is still under Apple's control.)
• I've noticed some occasional smearing with regards to scroll bars in both Xcode and Preview. It's nothing widespread, though, but I haven't been able to pin it down.