Re: In the distant past

On Sun, 30 Dec 2007 12:19:32 -0600, Snit wrote
(in article <C39D2F44.9F7F0%CSMA@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>):

I find a lot of small changes that make a better computing experience:
* quick view

It's nice, but I don't really use it much. If I want to view a
document, I view it in the app intended for it. I choose
descriptive file names for any files I care about, and so it
isn't a huge deal either way. It's an improvement, but not a
noteworthy one /for me/.

* better iCal (though I do not like how the editing works)

I don't use iCal much, other than to pop up a reminder about
someone's birthday, so I haven't noticed.

* Safari is much improved

Safari 3 is better than Safari 2 overall, to be sure. I even
like the little deal that lets you turn part of a web page into
a dashboard widget, although there is a bug where if you grab an
entire page body, and it is variable length, you get a dashboard
widget bigger than the display. Then, when you hit the little
'i' thing to turn it over, the whole widget disappears. :)

* the new sidebar

Are you talking about the finder sidebar?

* Time Machine - been *excellent* for me

I'm happy for you, although I wouldn't become too dependent upon
it just yet. Backup really critical data in at least one other
way for now.

* Spaces... a bit rough still but OK

It's laughable. The freebie solutions were actually better.
Luckily, I don't "need" it, or I'd be more upset about it.

* Tabbed terminal - I do not use it much but it comes in handy

I liked tabs for web browsing, but although terminal programs
I've used on other platforms (like Linux) usually support tabs,
I've never really used them much. I prefer multiple windows,
usually because I am cutting/pasting or reviewing code in
multiple files, and I find that works better. Depending upon
the usage, I can see how others would like it. The main issue
with terminal it just doesn't get the attention that it does X11
platforms, because they don't expect many people to use it. I
recognize that and can deal with it.

* New text services

Whatever that means.

* Spotlight improvements - makes a *big* difference

I had spotlight completely disabled in Tiger. I haven't
bothered yet to do that with Leopard, but I've never been a fan
of it, because it won't index things reliably that are system
level, like OS configuration files, plists and such, or if it
will, it never seems to match them. That makes it pretty much
*** for me, but I can see how people that have trouble finding
their own documents would love it.

* better networking

I haven't noticed any networking changes that I'd call better,
the only demonstrative change seems to be the inability to get
a lasertjet printer to work remotely anymore.

* better organized contextual menus

The bug with "open with" where you'd get duplicate or multiple
entries for the same app over time seems to have gone away, but
I need to run it longer to be sure. When I right-click on a
photoshop psd file, and say click open with, I get a list that
fills an entire vertical screen size on a 1920x1200 monitor. I
guess that's organized for some, but not for me. Photoshop
would be sufficient. :)

* better iChat

iChat is quite nice, but I only started using it recently, after
some relatives bought macs of their own. Haven't used it enough
to make any claims about it relative to Tiger.

And on and on... even Stacks are good - though I look forward to 10.5.2
where they give back some old functionality (and improve on it).

I don't see the point really. Invariably I wind up using the
open in finder button, or ignoring them completely. People that
have difficulty keeping data organized on their systems (the
same people that love spotlight I suspect) probably think
they're cool.

Okay, I'm going to list these as I think of them, so no implied
priority:

Fair enough.

1. Many apps, both built-in and added to the system are less
stable than they were with 10.4, with what /appear/ to be random
lockups, app crashes "would you like to send a report to
Apple?", and the need for using force quit more in the last
month than in the previous 2 years. After making sure I had
"Leopard versions" of the apps installed, I'm still seeing
unexpected app instability with Safari, Firefox, Mail,
Quicksilver, and even dashboard widgets.

Odd - I am not seeing any of that. I did with Safari until I got rid of an
add-on I had. Have you checked the logs / reports to see what the problems
are?

Initially, Safari was breaking very badly, and I did have an old
add-on (that I didn't even remember being there) that was a
problem, and I removed it on one system. I didn't have it on
the other two systems, and the problem is intermittent on all
three now. I don't think it is Safari per se, think something
else is going on at a lower level, since a number of apps that
used to be stable are no longer. I doubt it is Safari's fault
alone.

Usually it's intermittent enough that you can't reproduce it on
demand, but on a heavily used system, at least a couple
unexplainable events a day, coming from a system that running
tiger had maybe one or two a year.

Post some of the reports when you get them. I can see where that would be
completely unacceptable, but I do not think it is Leopard in general. Have
you tried working from a different user account? Off the cuff guess - maybe
you have some corrupt fonts... I have seen reports of all sorts of nastiness
from that.

Corrupt fonts are possible I suppose, but only on the G5 where I
have added fonts above those that come with the system. The
other two systems have never had a font added to my knowledge,
and font book seems to think everything is golden.

2. Time Machine: Major letdown from what I expected. First off,
the whole "can't use it for network attached storage" thing is a
bummer. Everybody with a laptop wants to be anchored to an
external drive, not. More importantly, I've had TM "forget"
that a drive containing TM backup data was a TM drive, and been
forced to reformat and re-backup data to it. First, on my
Powermac G5, I did normal TM backups with an external 500GB
firewire drive.

It worked fine for about a week. Then, as an experiment, and
being careful, I shut the system down properly, removed the
drive, and brought the system back up without it. I used it for
about a week without the TM drive attached, much as a macbook
pro user on a road trip might do. When I reconnected the drive,
it came up with the drive being showed on the desktop like a
conventional drive, with the very "professional and non-geeky"
icon for a raw hard drive component we are so familiar with
instead of the new "Time Machine drive icon" with strange
backwards spinning clock logo on a green drive enclosure.

"Uh oh". I launched Time Machine from the dock, and instead of
showing me the normal view going back in 'time' of file system
changes, it took me to the setup screen, and told me I had no
Time Machine backup drive configured. If opened up and viewed
the contents of the external drive, it had time stamped folders
containing hard drive directory and file changes, just as I
expected it to have.

I attempted to point TM back at the drive again, and it told me
it had insufficient free space on it for a backup (because it
already /had/ TM backup data on it, and it had insufficient
space for two whole copies of my system data + changes on it.

Finally, I gave up, reformatted the drive and then pointed TM at
it, at which point it started a complete new backup, which of
course took quite a long time. I no longer trusted the ability
to intermittently connect TM to the system, although it claims
to support this. So, I decided to try to reproduce it on my
macbook pro, with which I use a smaller "pocket sized" external
firewire enclosure. The first time I did a full backup, and
left it running on a desktop without disconnecting the external
drive for almost a week, until it had a reasonable number of
"changes" stored, and I did some test restores getting old
versions of files, or deleted files back. Then I disconnected
the drive and used it for another week. Then I reconnected the
drive, and it worked fine. At this point, I was thinking maybe
it was a fluke, or some bug that only happened with PPC macs. I
resolved to just leave the powermac drive connected all the time
and hope for a patch. I stopped worrying about it too much on
my macbook pro. Then I took it with me on a trip out of town
for about a week, but left the drive at home. When I got back,
I wanted to backup changes since I had left, and I plugged the
drive in, and boom, the same issue as I had with the G5, Time
Machine no longer believed that the drive "belonged to it", and
would not use it as a backup destination until I reformatted it
and reconfigured it again, then waited for the entire base
system snapshot to be taken. That is complete bull***, and now
I don't trust TM at all anymore.

Odd - and again unacceptable. I have had no such thing, but I leave my
external drive connected most of the time.

Yeah, and I suspect most people that were involved in testing it
probably did the same thing, or only removed it for brief
periods. But, since it doesn't do it every time, even if you
do, it could easily be missed in a naive test matrix.

3. Beachballs. I get them very frequently now. With 4GB of
RAM in my G5, and 2GB in both the iMac and the macbook pro, I
had grown happy seeing them only /very/ rarely on these systems.
Now, I see them quite often, launching an app, opening a new
window in an app, or even quitting an app.

See comments on #1... these things might be related. Bad fonts again? Not
sure.

I'm suspicious that some background process is going ape***
periodically, and manifesting itself as application problems.
Here's hoping for a .2 or .3 update that magically clear it all
up. If it takes too much longer, I'll go back to Tiger
(although going back will probably be a painful chore) and be
happy with that level of functionality for a long time. There
was nothing wrong with it that I couldn't live with for 10 years
or more.

4. Printing - an HP Laserjet that was used for all three
systems, attached to the iMac, and had been working fine both
locally and remotely there, and previously on the G5 before the
iMac was purchased suddenly ONLY works locally, and can not even
be seen over the network as a print destination. You can print
to it locally, but since putting Leopard on, about 75% of the
time when you start a print job, it puts it in the print queue,
then says the printer is "stopped". I have to power the printer
off and back on to get it to print. I can not get it usable on
either the G5 or the MBP over the network. At the same time, an
Epson Stylus Photo 2200 color printer attached to the G5 /can/
be seen over the network by both the iMac and the MBP. I didn't
have to touch printer settings at all after the update, it just
continued to work both locally and remotely just as it had with
Tiger. I have attempted to check every possible firewall,
permissions, sharing and printer setting between the iMac and
the G5 to see why one printer works remotely, and the other does
not, and can not find any excuse for the issues on the iMac, or
the reason the printer is not even reliable locally without
powering it off and back on with Leopard. So far, no joy.

I have an HP printer and I did have problems, too. I removed and
re-installed the drivers on the "host" system (10.4) and on my 10.5 system.
No real problems since, though I do have a "backup" method I created before
I did the re-install: I have a shared folder on the "host" Mac with an
Automator action set as a Folder Action so that when a PDF is added to it it
prints the file and then deletes it. I then added that folder to my PDF
Services folder - so now any Mac can easily print even without the HP
drivers... Pretty cool that I could do so quite easily - annoying I had to.
As I said, once I removed and re-added the drivers it was not needed.

I'll be forced to continue jacking with it I suppose, I really
don't like pouring expensive ink into a photo printer to dump
documents about which I don't care have color or not. I'm
actually leaning towards buying a new laser printer than Leopard
is happy with, but an old link that has a list of supported
printers on it no longer works, so I'm not sure how to guarantee
that isn't a waste of time.



--
Lefty
All of God's creatures have a place..........
..........right next to the potatoes and gravy.
See also: http://www.gizmodo.com/gadgets/images/iProduct.gif

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