The obvious exception to the rule is if, in the course of the intial communication, you are specifically requested to respond via a different form (i.e. A telephone call requesting you to fax or email a document, or a text message asking you to call when you are on your way to a meeting, etc).

I would suggest that the “Hand gesture” would in-fact be a method of “specifically requesting” a different form of reply as demonsrated in the quoted paragraph above. To follow your logic, I suppose it would also be acceptable to reply to a message you received that was written in Spanish, in German?

As always, we appreciate the feedback.

Why not?

Danny is right when he said “…we as consumers are now having to put up with buying far too many flawed products because companies are rushing to get products out to market and leaving us (the poor saps stuck with the defective product) to road test it properly,…”

Could you imagine the auto industry putting out such products? (snark: “Are you sure you want to deploy the frontal-collision air-bag?”)

How about the hardware PC market? Same consumers- different expectations? Why? Because its [insert platform specific OS monopoly] saying “Embrace the horror- it’s all you’re getting!”

The solution is simple to define, near impossible to implement- we, as consumers need to ‘just say no to untested first releases.’ Maybe the business units from [insert platform specific OS monopoly] will get the message from the consumer better than from their own developers.

* I haven’t noticed any system slow downs or crashes.
* I haven’t noticed many bugs, certainly not like I do on my Vista box
* I’ve noticed better network integration.
* The new spotlight is awesome. I’ve done away with quicksilver completely.
* Time Machine is really useful too.

Now, I think Apple’s thrown some bad design in here. They’ve taken things that worked great before and made them worse by following graphic trends. Unfortunately current graphic trends often are unusable.

Here’s a few examples:

* The menu bar is translucent. That’s terrible. It’s hard to read, especially on dark backgrounds.

* The dock is 3D just to be 3D. There’s no functional reasoning behind it. In fact, the added 3D effects, reflections and highlights are distracting.

* The new folder icons drive me nuts. By “embossing” the logo onto the icons I have to squint to determine what type of folder it is. The Tiger icons were much better.

Overall, I think Leopard is a step in the right direction. Historically, Apple has been faster at patching problems than their counterpart. It’s not perfect yet, but I don’t think it’s realistic to expect a new product to be perfect.