damien stolarz blog

The problem with leopard is so many of the enhancements are subtle. I’m not used to that.

What i’m beginning to like…

1) it knows what’s on my network, without searching, without flashing a flashlight icon for several minutes.

2) It seems to have integrated screen sharing! Whoa! did not realize that! Found it by accident…

3) now that i’ve shared to my TV imac, i can show you what has completely made it all worth it

Yes, that’s what I’m talking about…

No more hacks, it’s built in…

Yup, it plays DVDs right off the hard drive…

Or 1.5TB fileshare full of kids movies, if that’s how you roll (which as a matter of fact is how I roll).

$199 for the OS X family pack. Family pack, indeed.

Thank you Apple. It (finally) “just works”.

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Was advising a friend on how to shop for laptops. I buy only high end mac laptops so this won’t be useful if you buy $699 HP/dell/whatevers.

1) try not to buy generation one, but if you must, just buy extended warranty.
2) max out the CPU speed, if they offer several models, because you’ll never be able to upgrade that
3) leave the ram stock. don’t buy the extra ram. You’ll be able to upgrade it from kingston or crucial later for much less
4) leave the hard drive stock. you’ll pay a premium now, but in one year you’ll be able to upgrade beyond the original.

Basically, this way, I get the laptop, use it for a while, then it ’starts to feel slow’. I upgrade to the latest OS, it gets a bit slower. But then - I max out the ram for cheap, and I pop in a huge hard drive - whatever the latest and greatest laptop drive is. Voila, new feeling computer.

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Here’s a nice article with an analyst estimating the costs of running facebook.

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I’m really disappointed with the stability of Leopard for me personally. I’ve never had a rougher OS X UPGRADE experience.

the OS itself is great. And if you buy a new computer - or do the “archive and install” (replacing, not upgrading your old OS) everything is rosy.

but for guys like me who’ve been carrying the same /Users/myname folder for years, it can be a little hard…

My brother upgraded from 10.4 to 10.5, which resulted in an unbootable system - ironically, it reverted to a stable Windows machine because he could only boot to XP.

I said “Pshaw, bad karma, brother - it’s not that unstable”. I installed over my 10.4.

Just highlights:

1) on first boot, finder routinely crashed. Wouldn’t start. Had to force quit finder to open a window.
2) Mac mail crashed 5 times trying to import my mail. I had to use webmail. Anticipated 2 hours importing my mail. Finally i started it holding down option or something - now i have all my new mail on my imap servers, but none of the archived mail, which i’m going to have to manually import. No end user would know how to do this.
3) iCal - oblivious to my calendar. It’s gone. No where. At least it didn’t crash; on the other hand, i’m now trying to make appointments and … I have no idea when i’m available. I’ve tried importing some calendars strewn in ~/Library - but there’s a bunch from 2 years ago, and then a bunch of folders filled with hundreds of .ics
4) iCal forgot all my calendars AGAIN on last boot. A day later, now, they’re back. There were NO calendars listed. A reboot fixed it - but not after i had pretty much given up on using the calendar feature.
5) increased multi-lingual-screen-of-death (the OSX BSOD) - if i run parallels, spend 10 minutes booting it and getting word going, then close my laptop (sleep) and then wake it up, it almost always crashes the machine hard.

Sad huh? Besides quick-view, I’m not seeing much in the way of killer features.

Help me believe!

Technorati Tags: leopard, OSX

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