Well wha’ d’ ya know, Apple DO listen to us when we complain. They’ve removed the excessive transparency in menus, they’ve made the translucent MenuBar optional, and they’ve added some nice options to Stacks. If, like me, you thought that having a pile of icons super-imposed upon each other was a terrible way to represent a Stack, then you’ll be happy to hear that there’s now an option to have a stack be represented by the icon for its folder. If you used to like the way Tiger let you navigate a folder in the Dock then you’ll love the newly added ‘List’ view for Stacks, it basically lets you do things the way you used to. Another nice usability improvement is that addition of a MenuBar icon for TimeMachine. This means you can it out of your Dock where it wastes way too much room IMO and just work off the MenuBar. You can now see when TimeMachine is working its magic at a glance and also easily stop an on-going backup or trigger one at any time. Needless to say there are also a myriad of bug fixes, security updates, and a few other tweaks. You can get more details in the uncharacteristically detailed release notes from Apple. 10.5.2 is like a Microsoft Service Pack, it gives the OS a really significant update.

Oh, BTW, if, like me, you were too impatient to wait on Apple to fix the stupid MenuBar transparency and applied the fix I suggested a few months ago you’ll notice that toggling the new checkbox for MenuBar transparency doesn’t work. To roll back that change just issue the following command in the Terminal and then reboot (courtesy of John Gruber on Twitter):

sudo defaults delete /System/Library/LaunchDaemons/com.apple.WindowServer 'EnvironmentVariables'

[tags]Apple, OS X 10.5.2, Leopard[/tags]