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A few random bits of brain cruft.
Leopard
Mac OS 10.5 (Leopard) is out, and as per usual I’ll be holding off a few months until all the kinks are worked out. There’s always things that slip through QA in any large software development effort, and the longer a project takes, the more of these bugs there are.
I’m also a bit bummed that the days of “Mac OS 10 upgrades running faster on old hardware” are over. 10.1 to 10.2 to 10.3 all saw performance increases. 10.4 was a mixed bag; It ran like crap on my old G3 iBook but held up find on my G4 PPC. Early reports of 10.5 indicate that older G4 machines are running slower, although the jury won’t be in for a few more months. It’s also not clear if it’s processor speed, RAM, or the graphics card that’s the bottle neck.
This presents me with a dilemma. My home workstations is the aforementioned G4 tower (1.2something GHz). I’m not sure how it’s going to handle 10.5. My laptop is a Intel 1.8GHz MacBook, which I’m reasonably certain will handle the upgrade. I like the “home computer is hub, laptop is accessory” model1, but I’d rather not run two different OS versions. I also don’t want my home computer experience to be chug-a-lug. 10.5 also brings some crazy cool developer features that software makers are sure to rely on, meaning there’s going to be a lot of 10.5 only applications.
Fucking future, “forcing” me to buy a new computer.
Speaking of hardware coercion, I find the heavy promotion of Time Machine (backup utility in OS X) to be interesting. Most nerds think this is about helping to get users on the backup train.
That may be why the engineering-focused backers of the feature put it in here, but the reason Time Machine is getting so much play is it creates an up-sell opportunity in the Apple store. Primarily, they can start selling external backup hard-drives to people who normally wouldn’t even think about it. It creates a whole new market to sell to.
I wouldn’t be surprised to see Apple start selling it’s own hard-drives in the coming months.
Taskpaper
This one was a nice little surprise. I’m currently digging on Taskpaper, a simple to do list/workflow application. I’m usually opposed to specialized software for this, but Taskpaper seems like it was built specifically for me. It mirrors, almost exactly, how I currently manage my stuff, but with a bunch of extra features you don’t get easily in a plain text editor. (single-click strike-through, single-click tag filtering, etc.)
1. Mainly because if something goes screwy on a Desktop, there’s a chance I can fix it myself, whereas with a laptop, it’s almost certain I’ll need to send it in for repair. There’s also the storage issue; You can always get a bigger hard-drive in a desktop.