Lucida Grandε.
This has been itching me ever since I installed Leopard. Lucida Grande, the ‘default’ font for much of OS X’s UI has been ‘upgraded’ to version 6.0.
This wouldn’t be a problem (or even noticeable) if the new Lucida Grande hadn’t replaced the glyph for the hellenic character epsilon with the ugliest, most striking version ever to grace my Mac. Since Hellenic is my mother tongue, I frequently use it and was immediately striken by the new glyph although it took a while for me to realise what it was that bothered me. Take a look at the following two samples of Lucida Grande 5.0 (from Mac OS X ‘Tiger’ 10.4) and Lucida Grande 6.0 (from Mac OS X ‘Leopard’ 10.5).
Old:

New:

Ugly? Very much so. I suspect they changed it so that those that use Hellenic for mathematical/physics notation can get a more ‘appropriate’ epsilon. To them I say: Use LaTeX for Typography’s Sake! At least the rest of the font is still as beautiful as ever.
Apple likes showing off. In Leopard lots of things are improved, the UI is more consistent and polished. Yet there are a number of completely ridiculous aspects of it that go quite a long way towards demolishing Apple’s reputation as a leader in UI design. Take for example the new Dock, which besides completely pointless is also an ergonomic nightmare, heavy on resources and ugly. Did I mention pointless? (Thanks to the_unknown_Apple_dev for the no-glass option!).
The linked blog entry more or less sums up most of the things I found completely, utterly stupid while looking at Leopard images and videos online. I’ve got some more, such as the relatively dark gray ‘platinum’ look (I prefer the lighter gray of the ‘inactive’ windows), CoverFlow (mostly useless in the Finder if you ask me), the proliferation of etched text among others. [via daring fireball]
Update: As usual, a really good and thorough review of Leopard by John Siracusa, can be found at ArsTechnica.


