MacWorld has a nice article with several upgrade tips that hadn’t occurred to me. I’m not going to go crazy but I probably will do several of these tips.
Continue readingPreparing for Leopard Tips
Post Category → Leopard
Leopard – The Movie
Apple released a nice tutorial showing off some of the Leopard features. I finally got a few minutes to watch and it looks good. I initially thought that TimeMachine would not get used since I have a pretty good SuperDuper system in place. However, it looks very slick. Can anyone say redundancy?
The cosmetic stuff in Mail also looks good. It will make every email you send one big fat Mac add.
Check it out.
300+ Leopard Features
Between dealing with a large case at the office and other challenges, I’ve had very little time to look at all the new information concerning Leopard. This weekend I do hope to take a good look at the apple preview pages including the list of 300 new features. I only spent 10 minutes looking at it this morning but it looks pretty thorough.
Leopard Release and Rambling
Well I’ve had my head down in a case the last few days and finally got a chance to come up for air to find the Leopard release date is confirmed. I know anybody that is smart about these things will tell you to wait until well after the October 26 release date to install it on your machine. I, on the other hand, plan to install it on the day of release with reckless abandon. Furthermore, while it upgrades my system I plan on running underneath a ladder, with scissors!
I’m particularly happy that Apple has stated they will now by syncing notes with the iPhone. Hopefully this will be the case for tasks as well although I could probably live without that since my current system seems to work pretty well.
Anyway, I am looking forward to producing some new screencasts with interesting Leopard features in just a few weeks.
Preparing for Leopard – The Install
I thought I’d do a series of articles as I begin preparing for the Leopard upgrade. This is where my windows bias shows through. I was talking to a very knowledgeable Apple friend, Gabe Wilson, and explaining how I was backing everything up and printing out copies of all my license codes so I could do the “big upgrade.” As he watched me his face showed first dismay, then pity, then humor. Finally he relieved me of my suffering. “Dave. It’s a Mac. Don’t wipe your drive. Just upgrade.”
Huh!?
I’m used to windows upgrades. When you upgrade a windows machine you first remove the hard drive then you drive a stake through it (preferably made of silver). Then you pour acid over it and proceed to make all the necessary incantations (which include multiple recitations of random letters and numbers in groups of four). Finally, you put in the install disk and pray to all that is nerdy that the rest of your PC components don’t declare an absolute mutiny (which will probably happen anyway). You then spend the next two days attempting to convince Microsoft that you should be allowed to re-install Office on the new version of their windows software without spending another $500.
Tonight I listened to Steve Stanger confirm Gabe’s sage advice and I’m sold. I’m not going to do the 3 days of reinstall but instead just going to click “update” and see what happens. If it doesn’t work I can always do the “root canal” version of the upgrade later.
WWDC Revisited and Shots
I sat down over the weekend and watched the keynote video. I also read a lot more of the reviews and media coverage of the keynote and have thought a bit more about it. I think the pundits (myself included) are missing the point. Granted most of the people reading this Blog have already figured out how to make a download folder or discovered great Tiger Applications like Path Finder to give us much of the promised future Leopard features. However, there are many Mac users, my daughter and wife among them, who will not do any of that stuff until Apple hands it to them, through OS X, on a silver platter. At that point we geeky folks will figure out some new hack to make it even more functional.
The other thing that occurred to me is that the next time Steve Jobs gives a keynote, I’m going to have a drinking game where you take a shot every time he says the word “cool”.
Stacks, MacSparky Style
I was watching Apple’s demonstration of the “Stacks” that will be released in Leopard and realized, “Hey, I’m already doing that!” I’m sure this is nothing new for many of you but using a series of smart (and not so smart) folders I already have my desktop set up in a way that drops downloads and other files into my desktop “inbox” for later sorting and action. Below is my desktop.
On the right side of my desktop there is an inbox, which contains a “download”, “media” and a few other subfolders that I find handy along with an “Outbox” which is where I put things that need to be sent off into the yonder. The “files” icon actually represents an encrypted sparse-image drive that I keep confidential work files in (I have a separate one not shown for personal confidential items) and the “Cabinet” is just a shortcut to my parsed set of document folders. I boosted this idea largely from an excellent series of screencasts by Ethan Schoonover on the Kinkless Desktop. Still and all, doesn’t that make me smart for adopting it?
WWDC Recap
It was fun reading the recaps and reports from the WWDC 07. I also really enjoyed looking at Apple’s updated movies and tutorials right here. While several of the changes look nice it really strikes me as incremental more monumental. The stacks are not much different than what I’m currently doing on my desktop with some smart and not so smart folders and the finder improvements are nice but I’m not sure how it stacks against pathfinder. All this being said, I can’t wait to get it on my MacBook Pro.
My wife’s PC is bluescreening pretty regularly and I was hoping we’d here about new iMacs but maybe that will come later.
Addendum … After posting this my daughter asked me about leopard so I watched the videos again with her and she was blown away. Maybe that is the point. These new features are much more helpful/impressive to non-quicksilver geeks like my daughter’s dad.
What the heck is ZFS !?…
The internet is hot with rumors about Leopard and ZFS. Apparently some mucky-muck at Sun Microsystems disclosed that the ZFS file system will be the primary file system in Leopard. I guess it is not as big of a secret as everyone was initially saying however since I’m hearing the alpha/beta testers of Leopard have been saying for some time its already in the build. Regardless, all this speculation led me to the question of what, exactly, is ZFS? I read the Wiki article here and it helped a little bit for my non-tech brain but then I really got a handle on it when listening (as a complete coincidence) to the Macbreak Tech podcast where it was explained along with a few chuckles. I’d give you a link but Macbreak Tech is very new and I can’t seem to find one. Just do a podcast search in the iTunes store and you are set. Now if you want me to explain what I understand of ZFS, that just isn’t going to happen. Monkeys shouldn’t do brain surgery and I shouldn’t attempt to explain ZFS.
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