Better minds than ours have commented on the Leopard Dock, including Craig Hockenberry and Rory Prior. We've privately shared in their disgust with many of the unnecessary changes which represent steps backwards in usability, but haven't felt the need to comment ourselves.

However, I was ranting to a friend about 10.5, and used the screenshot to the right to demonstrate the problems.

I've yet to see any other comments on the Dock being used on the side of the screen. This may be because those who've tried it have been stricken instantly with vertigo and had to go lie down for a bit. I'm powering through the nausea, however, in an effort to make you sick too.

It really isn't an exaggeration to say that it may make you dizzy. Like an M.C. Escher acid trip, there appear to be several perspectives at once. I have lots of questions, including:

• What's keeping those icons on (in?) the Dock?

• How did they simultaneously make the "Currently Running" lights so difficult to see, and yet so distracting when you do notice them?

• Is that a crosswalk in my Dock?¹

• Did they nail the Trash to the wall?

• Why is the Dock reflecting the desktop background?

• For the love of pete, why is it reflecting a window? How does that help me?

• And finally, what's the keyboard shortcut to turn on Dock hiding?²

In a word, it's just awful. I really can't find anything redeeming about the new Dock and I can only hope someone at Apple will notice just how bad it is. This has been snarkily filed as Radar Bug ID#5446676 ("Expected Results: The Dock should NOT look awful on the sides."). You can submit your own duplicate!

Footnotes:
1. It's actually the separator between Applications and Folders/Documents.↩

2. That shortcut is Command-Option-D. I've kept my Dock visible for years, but this might finally convince me to hide it.↩

Mike Ash: Performance Comparisons of Common Operations

Most of the time at the aforementioned C4 was spent indoors, but on a brief coffee break, Gruber snapped this photo of Daniel Jalkut and me.

You can find it on Flickr, there are some great comments. Based on Scott McNulty's comment, Daniel and I are in preliminary talks to star in a new type of buddy action flick. With the relative failure of Rush Hour 3, studios are looking in other directions.

"They're taking out the Trash and cleaning out the /tmp. In theaters next fall, it's...The Cleaners."

According to Gruber, who will be writing the screenplay, I'm "the mastermind - calm, cool, and collected. Jalkut's the hot-tempered thug". We've also got John August attached to direct (Gruber's got connections).

While at C4[1] this weekend, I had several developers thank me for the posts on Macworld San Francisco I wrote up back in January. I'm happy to help and provide this information. It can be hard to find without doing it yourself and I know I wish we'd had these sorts of details when we first started exhibiting.

If you're saying to yourself, "What Macworld articles?", or if you're considering exhibiting at Macworld in 2008 ('tis the season to be considerin'), then this post is for you.

Part 1: Costs - This first article is perhaps the most useful, as it provides an overview on just what it costs to exhibit at Macworld. Floor space alone is expensive, but there are plenty of other less visible costs that are worth knowing about.

Part 2: On The Show Floor - The second article in the series provides an overview of what to expect from your time on the Macworld show floor.

Part 3: Decisions, Decisions - Booth or kiosk? What about handouts? Deals with some of the decisions that need to be made when signing up for Macworld.

Part 4: Odds & Ends - The final article in the series ties things up with several scraps that didn't make it into the first three article.

I hope the series helps a few more developers make informed decisions about exhibiting at Macworld.

For all our non-developer readers, Rogue Amoeba will be at Macworld 2008 in booth #2738 of the South Hall. I believe we'll have free passes to give out in the near(ish) future, so be sure to watch this blog or sign up for our mailing list. The show will be January 15th through the 18th, and we hope to see you there!

An update to Airfoil For Windows, version 2.0.1, is now available. This new version of our AirPort Express enhancer is free for registered owners of Airfoil for Windows and includes several networking bug fixes for improved communication with the AirPort Express units.

If you missed the original Airfoil for Windows 2 announcement, version 2 brings several great new features, including the ability to send to multiple units and play local audio in sync with remote audio.

If you're using Airfoil For Windows already, grab 2.0.1 now. If you're not familiar with our tool for sending any audio to Apple's AirPort Express, click to get information on the Windows or Mac version.

TechCrunch has a story about how the PHP source code to Facebook's front page was leaked (by an Apache configuration bug, apparently).

The write up goes right into rather breathless speculation about it:

The first (ramification) is that the code can be used by outsiders to better understand how the Facebook application works, for the purposes of finding further security holes or bugs that could be exploited.
...
The second implication with this leak is that the source code reveals a lot about the structure of the application, and the practices that Facebook developers follow.

This I find amusing, as you can infer very little from just the front page of a site. The front page is normally a complete one-off from all the rest of the pages. It's unlikely that it implements any important functionality that could be exploitable. Furthermore, the architecture of Facebook could probably only be described in many pages of written English. The code here would only reveal a small fraction of it.

But even though I don't think this "leak" is anything important, I do enjoy seeing code from such a large website. It gives you a brief glimpse into what the actual work they do is like, in all its messy hackiness, something you otherwise never see.

Given all that, I've decided to "leak" the source code to the front page of rogueamoeba.com, right here (it's even less interesting than Facebook's). But perhaps you'll enjoy seeing it.