Month: October 2007

Quick test from TextMate on Leopard

Posted by David – October 31, 2007

This is just a quick check to see if TextMate's blogging bundle can still post to my blog correctly in Leopard. Category retrieval appears to be messed up with 1.5.7's default blog bundle, but Fetch Post works so I want to see if Posting does too...

If you can read this, it does. ;)

Putting the big cat through its paces

Posted by David – October 27, 2007

As I mentioned in a recent entry, OS X 10.5 went on sale last night. I ran up to the Apple Store after work to get a copy (and my free t-shirt, naturally :)) and got it installed last night. So far, I'm pretty happy with it.

What's good:

  • Everything seems a little snappier. Firefox, in particular, appears to be running faster than it used to... and in my experience, Firefox was the slowest of the various Mac browsers.
  • Time Machine is a great idea, and I plan to get an external USB drive set up for that purpose. I've never been particularly rigorous about scheduled backups and that's something I should probably change before I get burned by it.
  • Finder improvements. Apple gave the Finder some much-needed "teh snappy" in spades. It's much, much improved and much more pleasant to use. I've had it installed for a bit over 12 hours and I'm already finding QuickLook to be a massively useful feature.
  • Spotlight. Apple put in a lot of work on Spotlight and the results are rather nice; it's much faster and quite pleasant to use. I haven't yet felt a need to reinstall QuickSilver since all I used it for was application launching, and I can do that easily enough with Spotlight now.

What's not-so-good:

  • 3D Dock. This doesn't really affect me so much since I keep my dock on the right hand of the screen, but imo, it's kind of ugly and the running program indicator doesn't show up clearly.
  • Stacks. I've always kept a reference to my applications folder in the dock so I can get at it quickly. With 10.5, that becomes a stack and I don't think it works quite as well, especially because you can't easily get at sub-folders like you could in 10.4. I'm not sure why Apple made this change.

All in all, I think it's a good upgrade. And since no review would be complete without a screenshot of the new shiny:

Random things, Wordpress

Posted by David – October 18, 2007

Another fun entry in which I ruminate on various random crap! Also, I just installed the Wordpress 2.3 upgrade and want to make sure posting works properly.

Apple has announced that Mac OS X 10.5 ("Leopard") will be available for purchase on October 26th. I've been using my MacBook more lately, so I plan to join the early adapter crowd and pick it up. I doubt I'll do the Apple store on Friday night, but I'll probably head up to Lyndhurst on Saturday to pick it up. Hopefully they still have some t-shirts to hand out or something. ;)

Speaking of OS X... one thing that sometimes annoys me a bit about it is that it's very mouse-oriented sometimes. For example, if you minimize a window to the dock, there's no way to bring it back up short of mousing to it... or is there? I did a bit of digging and discovered that if you enable Universal Access, you can hit CTRL-F3 to highlight the dock, then navigate it using the arrow keys. It's quite handy... I found a nice list of OS X shortcut keys here. I mention this here primarily for my future reference.

Work continues to go well, although it's been insanely busy lately as I've been working on a bunch of customization stuff for one of our clients. The deadlines are pretty tight, which is a nice motivator, but it's also a little stressful at times. I've been burned out pretty much every evening this week, and am hoping I can escape after lunch tomorrow to enjoy a nice afternoon off, as one of my good friends will be in town for my roomie's 30th birthday party. He's officially a broken-down old man. ;)

I must say though... I'm becoming somewhat dissatisfied with C# and ASP.Net. Now, I used to work in Visual Basic.NET at my old job, and compared to that, C# has been wonderful... but I can't shake the feeling that for a lot of applications, it's just too heavyweight. Also, the page lifecycle is massive frustrating, especially when you're using numerous user controls to reuse functionality. The one plus in that area is that they've announced a new System.Web.Mvc namespace that will apparently be quite similar to Castle Monorail. Still and all, though, ASP.net development has more overhead than I'd really like sometimes, and the compile step can be really annoying sometimes when it decides to bog down. Playing around with Ruby on Rails has spoiled me a bit, what with not needing to recompile. :)

Anyway, I think that hits all the major points...