Just about two months ago I identified two visual bugs in Leopard that were annoying me: application switcher icons were darkening, and Mail wasn’t properly changing the font color of quoted text. I’ve come up with a reproducible case for the former and a workaround for the latter.

I haven’t the faintest idea why, but if your cursor is in motion over the application switcher while it’s appearing (we’re talking fractions of a second), the application icon over which your cursor was moving will be darkened. Here’s a video demonstrating the oddity. While I hesitate to call this a 100% reproducible case, I am able to trigger the bug on my machine reliably at any time. Reports from readers such as yourself are, of course, appreciated.

And for getting properly-colored indented quotes in Mail, you have two options. First, the workaround: cut the offending text and any leading or trailing whitespace and paste to an empty text document in your favorite editor, and then cut it from there and paste back into Mail. The text will have lost whatever it is that causes the color issue. This is, admittedly, ridiculous. Thankfully, your second option works just as well and is a lot easier: just ignore it. It may display incorrectly before being sent, but once sent, the quoted text in your delivered messages will not stay uncolored, so you don’t need to worry about your recipients seeing something unexpected.

Minor offenses though they may be, attempting to find the cause of bugs like these is a valuable exercise for the developing and curious alike. We’ve filed bug reports through Apple’s Radar Bug Report system for the switcher and Mail issues: #5671975 and #5671970 respectively. Though 10.5.1 brought no cure, we can always hope for a fix in future point releases.

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