iWork ’08 not resolution-independence ready

I downloaded the iWork ’08 trial yesterday just to have a play around and have been very impressed with what I’ve seen so far. Certainly the new contextual format bar saves a lot of time switching between the tabs in the inspector. They’ve also added a whole load of useful little features like Proofreading (a taste of what’s to come with Leopard’s system-wide grammar checker?) and – finally – the ability to count the number of words in a selection rather than the whole document.

With under 3 months to go until Leopard’s launch, I thought I’d have a dig around in the application bundles to see how all these icons were being stored and, to my surprise, Apple’s still using TIFFs for everything:
iWork ‘08 TIFFs

Since it’s been 20 months in the making, I was expecting Apple to be leading the way with resolution independence. I thought these apps would be brimming with PDF-based resources (or even with buttons drawn using CoreGraphics) and 512×512 icons ready for Leopard, but apparently not. Perhaps we’ll see a resolution-independent-ready update before the year’s out…

Also, incidentally and a little bizarrely, there are 3 movies in the Numbers ’08 bundle promoting what’s new in iMovie ’08. Wonder how those get there!

iTunes 7.3 changed sort order

I just noticed that iTunes has changed the sort order as of version 7.3. After the update, the band “…And You Will Know Us By the Trail of Dead” no longer appears at the top of my library and instead appears where they would be if they dropped the ellipsis from their name. Similarly, 2 Many DJs, 3 Doors Down and their ilk now appear at the bottom of the list.

The changes in sorting are documented in this Knowledge Base article. From the way the article is worded, it would seem as if the sorting order is fixed in iTunes and doesn’t honour the “Order for sorted lists” (see image below) preference in the International preferences pane, but I haven’t had a chance to verify this.

System-wide sort order

Overall, I think the new sorting makes a lot of sense — numbers are sorted numerically, leading space, punctuation and articles are all ignored and numbers are placed after the alphabet. Good stuff. In many ways, iTunes 7.3 was a solid upgrade even if most of the changes were quite subtle.

The most hideous Apple screenshot of all time

I haven’t posted much about Leopard since WWDC, but I just today felt compelled to post this:
Leopard Spotlight menu
It’s an absolute interface abomination on at least three counts:

  • the menu bar is transparent, which is a pretty bad idea,
  • the Spotlight icon is still black despite the menu being selected and
  • while the actual menu highlight is blue, the space surrounding the Spotlight field is graphite (I wonder which setting is actually active in the Appearance pref pane)

Such interface anomalies are, of course, to be expected in beta builds of software, I was just so surprised to find this particular one gracing Apple’s website.