As for your Finder window issue, I’m not sure this will help at all, but you can set custom grid spacing. Open the window you want to space differently, and press Command (Apple key) – J. This is not automatic, of course. But at least you can set frequently accessed windows.

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(1) Saving dialog screens scrolling past the dock where you can no longer see the buttons. Try saving a script in Script Editor, for example, on a 13″ Macbook.

(2) Custom icons for folders that used to serve as reminders for you now no longer show in the dock — just a stack of the documents inside.

(3) How about advancing to the 22nd century by making the spacing of finder windows or saving files windows actually “auto configure” to the size of the file names in those folders? I’ve had a save-file-in-which-location-screen pop up in the center of my screen the size of a YouTube video. There is no screen size that small. It just makes more sense to auto-configure these things based on the user’s primary screen size or the length of the file names — rather than having to scroll the columns to the right — every time! — just to see the names of the files.

Just my two cents.

Sure. It works on any recent PPC Mac, so no Intel user is going to be unable to run it. It’s running fine for me on my G4 Mac Mini. I did up the RAM to 1 GB some time ago, though, and that’s just as well: IIRC, Leopard does require a minimum of 512 MB.

Good piece, Chris. Leopard is a very nice OS, but, though UI inconsistency is perhaps a minor thing, it has to be said that Leopard is still too inconsistent even though it is a step in the right direction.

I think the stopwatch is some horrible holdover from the awful old Mac OS. iTunes is definitely a port from the pre-Unix-based OS X and is written with the Carbon toolkit not the more modern Cocoa. However, iTunes doesn’t necessarily have the oldest UI in all respects. It has more frequent releases than other applications — perhaps because of its multiple and cross-platform functions — and it looks to me like Apple tries out new looks on it first. The rather subfusc scroll-bars appeared in iTunes first, but have now appeared in iPhoto. They may possibly be in the latest iterations in some of the other “i apps”, too. (I don’t know, because I haven’t installed them all.)

Making the toolbar-background consistent was good, but Apple should decide which scroll-bars they want, too, and standardize the toolbar button style, as well.

One of many problems with vista was that you basically needed all new hardware.

I’m one of many doing the transfer to OSX from windows. When the last windows machine dies so does windows in my house.