Tiger problems


The OS feels a little undercooked.


fig1. Fuzzy icons after minimising apps to the tiny Dock (iStumbler and Safari).



fig2. A bigger Dock, and sharper icons after reminimisation; but the old icons are still low-rez.



fig3. The Dock is made tiny again; the old icons (iStumbler and Safari) that were minimised when it was big stay sharp, but the ones newly minimised to the Dock are again fuzzy.



The niggling problems with Tiger continue to erode my faith in the resurgent Apple.

The latest include the DVD player constantly crashing -- just lots of little spinning beachballs and some screens that refuse to render, appearing just as a lot of corrupted graphics. The controllers also lose their alpha channels and antialiasing when Expose kicks in and all windows are reduced in size. You can even see the original bounds of the controllers' graphics. At the same time, the pointer gathers to itself some weird horizontal artifacting.

The other annoyance is the Dock. Minimised icons appear blurry or as if they are rendering at a lower resolution when the dock is small. They only appear sharp -- but not as sharp as they did under 10.3 -- if the Dock size is increased. Even if you increase the Dock's size (hold OPTION while clicking and moving the vertical line in the Dock to maintain a regular increase in size) the icon will stay fuzzy until it is again maximised and then minimised. (You can see thie results in the example above where the icons for iStumbler and Safari are sharper with a bigger Dock and reminimising, but the other minimised icons that haven't been redrawn still look awful.)

This is just crap, frankly. And it smacks of a QA team asleep at the wheel. This is something that should have been noticed within moments of the problem appearing.

Let's hope the 10.4.2 maintenance update fixes these screwups.

Posted: Sat - June 18, 2005 at 09:53 PM          

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