The New Cat
So, I’ve been running Leopard for two days now, and I figured I’d join the crowd on MystBlogs professing my first impressions…
- After doing a full Archive & Install that took less about 45 minutes to complete (eat it, Windows…), I launched into Leopard with a shiny new never-been-used user account. I decided to start my account from scratch because I’d accumulated plenty of cruft over the past 2 and a half years, and I didn’t want to spend hours cleaning out the garbage on a brand new system. Plus, there were some glitches I was hoping a new system would help resolve. In under 4 hours, I was back up and running completely, with all of my mail, bookmarks, RSS feeds, and Keychains back where they belonged. It wasn’t without a few glitches along the way, though…
- Mail 3.0 apparently doesn’t like importing Mail 2.0 mboxes using the Import Mailbox utility. I ended up just copying my old mailboxes into the ~/Library/Mail folder and having Mail run an upgrade on the mboxes the next time it launched. All is now back to normal.
- I forgot to enable Web Forms & Passwords as remembered items in Safari, so I spent the better part of a day trying to figure out why my keychain was all janky.
- It’s not exactly a “New Mac [in] my Mac” as Apple’s marketing professes, but it is a very worthwhile upgrade in terms of performance. Everything seems to load a bit faster and behave a bit better than before, with a few notable exceptions… namely:
- Photoshop 7, which actually alerted me upon install that I didn’t have a Classic environment set up, fails to make it past “Checking Preferences” in the splash screen before failing in an “unrecoverable” fashion. While not entirely surprising given the age of the software, it’s kind of annoying for obvious reasons. Have I mentioned how much Adobe has started annoying me lately?
- Unity 2.0, the software IDE I’m using to do game development, crashes after attempting to launch the demo scene at startup. Unlike Photoshop 7, however, this is an issue that will definitely be fixed, and hopefully be fixed soon.
- Safari’s a bit crash-prone, but for reasons that I don’t think have anything to do with the app itself. More on that momentarily.
- Apple’s move to try and nullify InputManagers has fortunately not left Inquisitor and SafariStand out in the cold for now. Unfortunately, either one or the other is currently causing some problems with the browser, but I’m not sure which. All I can say is that Safari seems to really hate the flash banner on the MOUL forums now, and it crashes intermittently while browsing the forum. I really don’t want to get rid of either tool, though, because I continue to be baffled by Apple’s insistence that a tabbed browser doesn’t need a “New Tab” button (which SafariStand adds), and Inquisitor is a highly useful search extension tool for me. If I had to guess which one was causing problems, though, I’d probably have to say SafariStand. Anyone else know of a free InputManager that adds a New Tab button that hopefully won’t crash Safari as much?
- The new 3D Dock is shiny, both literally and figuratively. In a departure from my MO in Tiger, I turned off magnification, because it seems to “read” better when the thing isn’t scaling all over the place.
- Despite what seems to be an overwhelming case of molehills-made-mountains over this feature, I rather like Stacks. Granted, I don’t have a dozen folders sitting on the right side of the Dock either, but that’s just not how I organize myself, so it doesn’t bug me.
- I have no problems reading the translucent menu bar and freshly de-pinstriped menus. On top of that, I like the slight gradient to the highlighted menu item, and the rounded corners are a nice subtle touch.
- Help Search is the greatest thing since sliced bread. The animated “here it is!” arrow that points out the menu item you’re searching for is equally super-useful, especially in cases where the documentation for an app tells you the name of the menu item, but fails to correctly tell you where it’s located (I’m looking at you, NetNewsWire…).
- Spaces is very nice, and so far I haven’t had any problems with apps misbehaving as a result of having 6 desktops set up (3×2 grid, top row for web development/browsing, bottom for game development). The only odd part of Spaces is that launching a collection of apps that span several spaces can be a bit disorienting, because Leopard will fly you to the relevant space as each app finishes loading. It’s kinda fun doing it on purpose sometimes, actually.
- With Classic gone, hopefully that will put more pressure on either Ubi, Cyan, or some contracted third party to actually develop a release of Myst, Riven, and Exile that actually works correctly in OS X on multi-core systems (Exile’s Bink codecs are old and don’t play nicely with multiple CPUs unless you run in Classic, which obviously you can’t do now…). I’m not holding out much hope for that though. Alas.
- Nice as it is, the default desktop background didn’t stand a chance against a Portal-related desktop set that Ash found for me. Oh well, space is still cool.
- Windows file and printer sharing is slightly janky and doesn’t seem to be behaving very well. Especially the printer sharing. More diagnosis is needed.
- Something is still causing my entire system to spontaneously shut down while playing certain AVIs in Quicktime using Perian. Strangely, this behavior is completely inconsistent: not every AVI will crash, not even two AVIs with identical encodings, and the AVIs that do crash never do so in the same place twice. I’d hoped this was something at fault with my cruft-filled Tiger install, but that doesn’t seem to be the case. Anyone have any thoughts?
- MySQL, while somewhat of a pain to start and stop, works fine, as do the new versions of PHP and Apache I’m running. Development on DPWR is unhindered by the update.
- While I don’t have a drive set up for backups just yet, I got to play with Time Machine at the reseller during their Leopard release party. It is made of pure sex. The interface is gorgeous and far more crisp than even the guided tour implies. I’m saving pennies for a FireWire 800 drive to use for additional storage, so the USB 2.0 drive can be relegated to backup duty (my thinking here is that the additional storage drive would be used more regularly and for longer periods than the backup drive, so having the extra bandwidth for active file transfers will be more useful than leaving the bandwidth to the backup drive).
November 1st, 2007 at 3:15 am
On Windows at least, you can replace the DLLs for Bink with newer versions and it normally causes no ill effects to the program. I normally do a mass-replace whenever I buy a piece of software with a newer Bink DLL included in it. Doing it to an old copy of Might and Magic IV I have actually significantly improved the quality of the game’s FMV sequences due to them having developed better postprocessing and scaling features in the 5 years that had past from the old DLL to the new DLL. I have no idea how Apple systems work or how the Mac versions of various games work, but if it’s similar, you could try replacing the old files with new ones and seeing if that fixes the problems.