Leopard Review

 

Well it’s been about a day and a half with Leopard, and after reading a few reviews, I’m happy with it.

 

While it has it’s little quirks, and Apple unnecessarily removed certain functionality for some arguably ineffective functionality, it still is a significant improvement over Tiger, and it’s growing on me.

 

Overall there’s no real grand features, but lots of polish, which is still really great. Most of the advancements occurred “Under the hood” at the API and Programming Level, which means while Leopard isn’t SUPER fantastic right now, it will be soon as developers discover the great new technologies emerging.

 

I’ve compiled a list for things I hate and love about Leopard below.

 

Annoying things in Leopard:

 

  • MDS still can’t be turned off (MDS = spotlight service), although spotlight is a lot fastetr
  • iTunes has skipped twice in the past half hour. It never does that. I think it might be the single-coredness of my first install.
  • Stacks are a bit pointless, but fairly useful.
  • Spaces are ok, but are more like switching around too much. I think it will come in handy for when I’m not in full desktop mode with dual display, but I can see using it with FCE and stuff
  • Maudio doesn’t work in any way (yet)
  • The Menu Bar is a bit dark when there’s a dark background, but it’s less distracting, however there’s a “star” right where the application is right now and it’s driving me up the wall. For those of you dying for a hack for this, you can always just make 20 pixels along the top of your desktop background white (or black for a consistent silvery look) and you’re done. No special apps or defaults writing required.
  • Time machine shows a status bar all the time when it’s backing up…maybe that’ll go away, but it’s ticking me off. Also, it didn’t exactly work the first few times, but I think it is now.
  • Notes folder randomly takes time to “Load” (Spinny thing) even though there’s only one note, wtd? UPDATED: I hate Mail notes and Todos. I am not using them whatsoever.
  • They did some weird thing with the bezel interface, making volume controls etc, harder to read. I’m pretty sure the drop shadow is gone.

 

Things I love in Leopard:

 

  • Scrolling background windows
  • The fact that when i’m done this note, I can just hit send. UPDATE: Not really, I went back to stickies.
  • Time Machine is SOOOO awesome.
  • Coverflow is neat, but not as useful as i thought it would be. We’ll see. Ars Technica goes into details about the UI changes in the Finder, but I find it pretty good.
  • QuickLook is excellent. It even does SVG! 
  • FrontRow is better….I guess. I wish I could use the same keyboard shortcuts, and also, I hate that it’s not the fwoosh it used to be. Also, it pauses iTunes when it launches. wtd is that? I don’t like it.
  • Instalations made with Installer now do the iTunes “Complete” sound when they’re done. Also, an obnoxiously large green check mark shows up. Great.
  • Mail.app is like Apple Outlook. I love it. Sort of.
  • The new network preference pane are excellent.
  • iCal, Mail, and pretty much everything is very quick. 
  • Terminal updates are nice, but I still like iTerm
  • My MacBook speakers actually have decent volume now UPDATE: Maybe not, I think iTunes was just preamped.
  • AirPort finally shows secured/not secured in listing
  • AirPort seemed to connect to networks really fast…
  • Not only does “Scroll another window” work, but you can also right click a non active application, VERY useful for when say, you ahve a window on a second monitor, move your mouse over to the window, have something selected and right click to copy it. Amazingly, it works! AWESOME!!
  • Cool feature: the checkbox in todo lists changes to an alert box when it is overdue
  • Photo Booth effects are neat, the hacks are neater.

* Overall very solid.

UPS Flaming

So, I'd like to take this opportunity to flame UPS.

Tracking my iPod, I've watched as it's gotten delayed, then given an ETA (October 24th) and then watch as that ETA came and went, and it is now the 28th, with it not even budging.

The last status update was when it arrived somewhere in Ontario on the 19th. Even if you were DRIVING from there to Edmonton, it wouldn't take more than 2 days, 4 days tops. I could have driven to Ontario and driven back and I would have gotten it faster.

I am not impressed. FedEx delivered my last iPod and it was here within a few days of shipping. Apple estimated the delivery as late as the 30th, and if it doesn't come by then, UPS is getting a phone call.

The New Handheld on the Block

So lately I've been reading way too much of "43Folders":http://43folders.com and becoming increasingly frustrated with my Axim X51v and my various syncronization methods.

I've noticed that I've been having the need to write things down. I'll be doing something, and I'll have an idea, or realization, and need to write it down right away. No problem, pull out the Axim X51v, hit the note button and away we go.

However there is a problem with this. The screen has been getting a bit scratched or maybe it's just a piece of junk, and the digitizer doesn't align with the screen anymore. Plus the usual problem of "don't let your hand touch the screen or it will blow up the pen stroke." So overall, writing notes is completely inefficient on a stylus touch screen.

But what about when you do get that note in there? Well it will site in my Notes folder or crowd my Documents folder with such descriptive names as "Note1.awd" and "Note2.awd." Of course the reasonable thing to do would be to simply properly name these notes, but isn't the whole point of making a handwritten note so that you don't have to use the ridiculous onscreen keyboard, or worse: the character recognizer?

So what I end up having is a dozen "NoteX"s that I never actually look at other than once a month, and the ideas die off and I usually can't recall what I meant by the note in the first place.

So it comes down to, what do I even use my Axim for? Sometimes I'll use it for checking mail or browsing the web when I don't have my MacBook on me (which is increasingly rare during the school year) or for keeping track of my calendar. The problem is, the calendar doesn't exactly work very well. Because I'm too cheap to buy OggSync Paid, I can't sync more than one calendar. As I get busier, I would like to seperate things like TV shows, School, Church, and Work into different calendars, as usually I end up with an overloaded Agenda that can't even be seen in it's entirety in the calendaring application.

So how do we solve this? We eliminate the Axim. With the soon to arrive iPod (Which is a blog topic in itself), I will have my entire calendar in it's seperated glory in full color. I'll be able to see my events in the future. As for Adding events, I keep a notepad on me at all times. (I happen to have a nice pleather Dell one, so I still feel like I'm carrying my Axim with me.) Every night I write down my agenda for the next day, and leave a space for new events that need to be added that pop up throughout the day.

I can also write down any thoughts I have, draw diagrams, doodle, and it's 100% crash proof. Now that's thinking like Merlin Mann.

Leopard a bit ducky?

Well, I'm waiting for Leopard to (re-)install and surprisingly (or not) couldn't think of anything to do while I'm waiting. So I decided to blog, here in IE6.

You're probably wondering why I'm REinstalling Leopard. I just finished installing Leopard, and was enjoying some of the greater unadvertised features or bug fixes, what ever you want to call them. First off I noticed right away that my MacBook speakers were back up to par with some of the other laptops. Many many people were crying on the forums about how the MacBook's dinky speakers delivered lame-o sound, and it looks like Leopard resolves this issue. Yay! No more distortion with iTunes pre-amping.

Photobooth background effects are also cool.

That's all I tried out until I started to realize that it wasn't really getting up to speed. Usually computers take a few Application launches and other time to load and cache stuff, but it definately wasn't doing this. In fact, it was freezing. Spotlight was MDS'ing it up in the corner, and was occupying all my CPU.

Now after reading all about how Leopard was much faster, thanks to it's more multithreaded processes etc, I was thinking, wasn't this the exact problem they were trying to fix? Process hanging on single core-ness?

So then I look down in Activity Monitor, and sure enough only one of my cores are doing any work. That's odd. Maybe just an activity monitor bug. Nope. In System Profiler, OS X is only reporting 1 core. Crap. So after being frusterated with the overburdened, slow, and lack-of-password-remembering Apple forums, there doesn't seem to be anybody reporting this issue. I'm doing an archive and install right now, and hopefully that resolves the issue. More on that later…but next up, my new organizational system

Duck Podcast Delayed

Kevin and I have been extremely busy with a major a/v production, and probably will be catching up on homework in the next few days, but we very much hope to have a new Duck Podcast episode out by Tuesday!

Thanks for your patience!

Duck Podcast Episode 3

For those of you not already subscribed to the Duck Podcast, we just released a new episode this evening! Be sure to check it out at duck.jole.ca .

And of course every week we try to improve the audio quality, this week it is really good!

Hope everyone's having a good week!

[school start:]

Well school is starting. Tomorrow. Sigh…

Here's the results of the summer:

  • Launched tarabrodin.com
  • Visited the Apple store NYC
  • Did a bit of work on elderadvocates.ca
  • Registered jole.ca
  • Found out engineering was probably for me
  • iPhone was launched
  • jServer held it uptime through the summer

And a few other things, but overall it's been a pretty good summer. I would have liked to go on a midnight run with my Dad, but there have certainly been some awesome times, and definitely a summer I won't be forgetting any time soon.

Looking ahead to school, I think thing will be pretty awesome. Good luck everyone going back to school and back to work!

The Duck Podcast!

Super exciting you guys!

The Duck Podcast is now live! You can check it out there, we just released our first REAL episode (don't even bother with the very first episode, it's crap) but you can subscribe in iTunes very soon, so subscribe and enjoy!

Thoughts on Software Developers

One reason why I like the Mac platform as a whole is that Mac developers communicate properly.

OSS

In the open source world, if you have a software problem, you go into the land of mailing lists or forums and try to ask someone who happens to know anything for an answer. 50% of the time the project has gone dead and no one's around to reply to your messages. The other 25% of the time the developers are "too busy" to help with support, or they are just a bit on the snobby side. You also end up with tutorials and FAQs that are completely overtechnical or underwritten and hard to follow. You end up with nothing but trying to figure out the problem yourself, which, can happen, but not always. Not to downplay OSS, I use it daily and love it, but "support" can be an issue.

Windows

Most "proprietary" or freeware !OSS software are explained insanely elaborately. For example, video converters (mostly shareware) are all ducked up with 5 paragraph long explanations of functions in some humongous Windows help file. It takes you 10 minutes to find the help article you were looking for, and then you have to spend 10 minutes readnig the whole thing only to find out "oh, it's in the TOOLS menu" or something of the like. Overdocumented.

Mac

On the Mac however, it's more or less shareware-esque companies. They understand Apple KISS philosophy and explain things as straightforwardly as possible. Help files are clear, and if you DO ever have a problem you can email them and they'll send you a friendly reply. If you bought the software, you get what you pay for.

I just noticed this after a few issues with GNU screen. I wanted some information on how to use it and the GNU Homepage about it is laughable. It gives this weird technical explanation for it and then the "more information" link leads you to some random GNU-Land page that was clearly written by an Open Source evangelist. Your best hope is to find a random blogger who wrote a GNU screen primer about it, which I did.

I've used Windows and have been baffled by some freebies out there. Either there's absolutely NO documentation or way too much, and on the Mac I've had few complaints.

New Website!

So yeah I guess I forgot to blog about this.

  • New Domain: I finally registered jole.ca and I'm enjoying it quite a bit. For all those Canadians out there who want to register one, beware that you'll have to face CIRA first, this ridiculous Canadian organization that manages all the dot ca's. I encourage the idea of having Canada manage it's own TLDs but they seriously need to resolve some issues.

First of all they don't put any glue on any of the NS servers, so you can't use your own domain to create your nameservers. Plus they limit your number of NSs to 2. I would prefer having 3 NSs at least, but they don't allow that. Sigh…at least once you have a dot-ca you have the option of becoming a member of CIRA, so I suppose I could recommend this to the board, but what a pain.

  • New Website Design: In celebration of the new domain, I redesigned the site a little bit. I know I just updated it, but the whole misaligned left bar and everything was really annoying me. I designed this all myself using the awesome fluid guide from [CSS Tinderbox http://csstinderbox.raykonline.com/] It's fully fluid, and I pulled a few tricks to get that header image to be fully scaleable and still look great. In case you haven't noticed, it rotates through a few different pictures of mine.

Also I changed the directory structure up a bit. I now have everything in folders. (I would use mod_rewrite but I'm way too lazy to figure it out.) For anything jole just add a slash. All the feeds and stuff should still work in legacy fashion but you may have to update a bookmark or two (if anybody bookmarks my site…)

And of course if you're sitll using jole.ahtr.net it will still work, but make the move to jole.ca!

Hope everybody's having a great summer!

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