That’s what was wrong with my Leopard install. I was using (an uncompatible) hack to run Witch, a really nice power tool (which I hope, once they update, will remain Leopard-compatible)

My take on Leopard, now that it works:

• New Finder really beats the pants off the old one. Not a hard task, but an important one.
• You can almost feel the underlying API changes (I recompiled MacVim from SVN because of this)
• It’s a little more shiny. Stupid blue folders are gone, though I’m not a huge fan of the Tango-esque ones.
• Stacks are genuinely useful.
• They got Spaces wrong. I mean, this one should have been hard to mess up, given the precedent, but they did. It’s a fine virtual desktop manager (a feature in the X11 world for AGES) but it could use a few more keybindings — it’s great that I can switch desktops logically, but why must I use the mouse to move applications around? (Needs a Move-Current-App-in-Direction key combo)
• Also, closing a program will switch Spaces on you. This is wrong. It should work it’s way down the apps in the current Space, not bounce all over based on last-usage. arg.
• Time Machine is about as useful as Dashboard — which is to say, oh, it’s cute, but it’s disabled and apt to stay that way.

So you may wonder “What’s the point?” if I just kinda shot down the big features.

It’s for developers.

They’ve added official Ruby/Cocoa bindings. Python TK apps no longer require X11 (as I found out from running Pacman). Both of these are at the current version and include many nifty non-default libraries (Rails, Twisted, NumPy, etc, etc…). Not to mention all the optional dev tools (I recompiled the latest MacVim, as stated earlier. This is UNIX thinking). I’m thinking that interpreted-languages-as-second-class-GUI-programs is coming to an end. Ruby is the new Java. Make the devs happy, and they will develop for your platform.

MS is doing it too. Visual Studio Express was no accident. And today I hear about F# — which is essentially Microsoft OCaml (as C# is Microsoft Java)

The real power of Leopard — as with the real power of Vista — is yet to be seen. It comes down the line, about a year and a half from now, when the freelance dev masses come along. Vista arguably added a number of genuinely useful API stuff — the .NET 3.0 backings come as an obvious example. Microsoft, logically, is backing it’s own horse. Apple knows the flaws of writing in straight Objective-C and so opens up to more casual devs and UNIX devs by backing open, interpreted languages.

In fact, I bet they added PyObjC by default, instead of giving a user guide to it…

Python 2.5.1 (r251:54863, Oct  5 2007, 21:08:09)
[GCC 4.0.1 (Apple Inc. build 5465)] on darwin
Type "help", "copyright", "credits" or "license" for more information.
>>> import objc
>>>

Oh look….

The first write was slow. This rewrite is shorter and much faster. Sure, it basically scrapes the page, but hey, it’s kinda cool.

Cheap hacks FTW.

Check out the source here