Minor Interface Annoyances

There are a few things that seem off in Mac OS X. I had a bit of a hard time finding other people who were similarly annoyed by such little things, but in case anybody else is as well I thought I'd link to them here. I should add that these are annoyances that are fortunately easy to fix.

• The Firefox icon, either the pre-3.5 version or the current version, is too big next to the other icons on the dock. This isn't Mac-specific, either; while using Ubuntu, I used the "stretch icon" function to shrink the Firefox icon on the desktop, and gave up on the panel icon altogether. In any case, Adam Betts created a replacement icon which still works well.
• Apple changed the metrics for the Lucida Grande font in Leopard. I don't care for it myself. The cap height is higher, so numbers, capital letters, etc. look worse than before. It's one of the many off-by-a-pixel-or-so problems in Leopard. Flickr user sometoast has a before-after comparison. Fortunately, the solution is easy: copy the Lucida Grande font from Tiger and be done with it. No idea how this affects Snow Leopard, which is reported to have done away with the dfont format but seems to keep the strange new metrics.
• I find the shiny Leopard dock to be a little tacky. The fix is again quick: Agua System icons, used with CandyBar. I had used them in Tiger as well, and was happy to see a Leopard update that also "fixed" the dock. It's one of those rare interface enhancements that is subtle and actually improves on the standard setup.

Last modified 2009-07-09.