11.06.07

Lolcat

Posted in Appleology, Rants at 5:34 am

So, I’ve had some exposure to Leopard now. I managed to install it on both of my Macs– the Basroil (the Intel MacBook) and KOS-MOS (the PPC Mini what serves as my media center PC). To be completely honest, my initial expectations were totally wrong. The Basroil suffered a little bit of a slowdown, and KOS-MOS actually doesn’t suck anymore. Let me go into a little bit of detail here.

Like I said, the MacBook did get a little bit of slowdown, but not to an extent that makes it unusable. The graphical upgrades made the system a little bit flashier; I honestly don’t see the horrible problem with the translucent menubar. I DO have a problem with Stacks, and not just because I don’t use the Dock; I have my Dock set to magnify and auto-hide, and when a Stack fans out, the Dock returns to normal size and the currently selected icon in the Stack doesn’t magnify. It’s an inconsistency that forced me to set my Stacks to grid layout, but I probably haven’t actually used it since then owing to the fact that I’m just so used to using Quicksilver to launch stuff. I actually do like the “shelf”-style Dock, but I’m also of the opinion that the glowing dots indicating running programs could be a bit more prominent.

The thing is, though, most of the smaller, less-obvious additions to Finder and the interface are what I really wanted. I like icon view, which dumps me into a minority, so the re-integration of custom spacing of icons into Finder is a real blessing. Cover Flow for Finder is something that I was initially reluctant to go for, until I decided I wanted a new desktop background image; I’m hooked on it now. Once I figured out that the spacebar opened Quick Look (and not just Command-Y), I started digging that, too– it has some glitches with OpenOffice files but nothing game-breaking, and I totally love that I can browse a file without opening the really heavy NeoOffice. Oh, and I totally missed multiple desktops, and they’re essential on the low-resolution Basroil, so props for Spaces.

The slowdown is mostly in dealing with certain occasional elements. The AirPort menu integrated a lot of things that I’d paid $8 for with WiFind (incidentally, WiFind is incompatible with Leopard, which I learned the hard way– there’s no upgrade available yet as the developer has seemingly dropped off the face of the Earth) but it comes at a cost of speed; it’s faster than it was before but it’s nowhere near as agile as it could be. On the other hand, the wireless networking setup is far and away improved, and it actually remembers my network preferences outside of my house now god dammit why didn’t it do that before. I can only imagine how much slower the system would be if I had not added the RAM to the machine, as I’ve been running up against the 600-700MB mark in memory used more often; but, at the same time, I’m noticing that memory is freed up far more often owing to the new memory management systems in the kernel (yes, I did read the Ars Technica review and practically had a geekgasm when I read about the under-the-hood improvements).

So now we move to KOS-MOS, the Mac Mini that got me into this Appleology thing in the first place. When I’d picked her up in late 2005, I’d made mention that I’d gone into it as a productivity tool, and then I scuttled that by getting a gaming PC at roughly the same time. I made an effort this past month to start relying more heavily on the Macs, and to use the Basroil as my main PC with KOS-MOS just being the media center machine it had served as since the middle of 2006. Still, I wanted to put Leopard on the Mini because of the screen-sharing feature. While VNC was one of the alternatives, the Apple client is very, VERY robust, and far more responsive than my previous favorite (Chicken of the VNC, for reference). Networking in general is much better, and I no longer have to go through ridiculous hoops on either Mac to connect to the Windows machine (when I have that one on). So, as a conduit to my TV, I’m pretty happy with Leopard on the Mini.

Here’s the thing, though, and that’s that the Mini– a stock machine with only half a gig of RAM– runs faster and smoother than it did before. Even without a new version of iTunes, KOS-MOS no longer chokes as badly when I switch views from one playlist to another. More to the point, I can actually have iTunes running in the background while I fire up VLC Player to watch something. Couple that with Screen Sharing, and I’ve got a nicely-done remote control setup. Now I just need to get the audio system wired up so that I don’t have to get up to change from TV to games/DVDs, and I’ll be completely happy. (I’ve resigned myself to the fact that I have to physically go to the TV to switch between game systems, but I have to be there anyway to put the disc in, so no big deal.) The speed increase could be attributed to the fact that the Mini doesn’t use some of the flashier interface bits– the menu bar isn’t translucent, for starters, and I didn’t enable Spaces on it (because the LCD has far more resolution than I need, thank you very much).

As for the data-loss bug that was discovered last night, I haven’t run into that, namely because I rarely move files across systems for that precise reason. I’ve gotten nailed by similar problems in Windows as well, and I’m more religious about backups now than I was before (which is part of why I do and don’t like Time Machine, at any rate– I think it’s going to make me lazy about backing up). Am I surprised that it showed up? Yes. Do I think it’s indicative of any huge flaw in OS X? No, no more than the same bug showing up in Windows would. It’s a bug. Bugs happen. Patches also happen. Get over it.

Overall, I’m happy with Leopard. I do use KOS-MOS often enough (daily for the iPod syncing) that the speed increase offsets the slight decrease on the more-commonly used Basroil. And in actuality, the times that I do run against the delays on the Basroil are few and far between. So, no worries, really.

We’ll go ahead and give a real update on the writing tomorrow.

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