Walt-O-Matic

Today I was forwarded a review of OS X entitled: Leopard is the New Vista, and It’s Pissing Me Off.

I think it’s safe to say that I’m a fan of Apple, in general, as I find their hardware, environment, and tools far more productive for my development, office, and home needs than I ever did using Microsoft or its products.

I think it’s also fair to say that I’m willing to also point out when things don’t work:

• Duplication Menu Item Problems
• Having to rebuild Spotlight indexes, manually
• And, more recently, Four complaints of Leopard
• And very recently, Five Things I Can’t Do With OS X Mail RSS

Oliver Rist, raises some very good points in his treaty on Leopard’s recent similarities to Vista’s screw ups.

Here’s my take on his five points.

Vista Similarity 1: Wait for a Service Pack—Perpetually

Rist is right in saying that “[With Tiger] Everything. Just. Worked. Period.” I’m also quite in agreement that with Vista, even “a year after its shrink-wrapped release” it still has problems, driver issues, and “doesn’t work with 50 percent of new software.”

But I wonder how far back he’s actually recalling. Historically, I recall that each early version of Apple’s OS had serious kinks. Is comparing Tiger 10.4.9 with Leopard 10.5.1 actually a valid Apple to Apple comparison? (excuse the pun)

I’m with Rist if he thinks it should be, but accept the reality it isn’t. In my mind, Apple changed a number of things about the OS that they didn’t have to. Stability, size reduction, and additional hardware support will always earn high marks on my reviews. Unless the new glitz is functional, it doesn’t do much for me; but more on this in a moment.

At the moment, I’m tolerant because historically Apple has made right in reasonable time. By 10.4.3 and 10.4.4, I was quite happy. Given that I suspect Apple’s real purpose was not to make GUI fluff, but to pave the way for resolution independent graphics and new Core Animation, I’m surprised how well things held up.

Microsoft, Direct X improvements aside, gets no such pass, because as a whole, I still have problems with the OS, and it’s been around longer, and had more people working on it.

That said, I’m also aware that a good number of the Microsoft blue screens of death aren’t Microsoft’s fault — directly. When drivers do bad things, it can topple an OS. Of course, this leads me to wonder why Microsoft didn’t manage their kernel layers a bit better.

Knowing this actually provides some insight for Leopard as well. Everyone understood how Tiger worked. Too well, perhaps. There were quite a number of OS resource tweaks that delivered amazing integration and features. I was certainly one of the advanced users.

However, Apple assumes, and I think rightly so, that if you intend to do an upgrade in place, then if you’ve changed the operating system out from underneath them, you roll the dice. A number of people were bit by Unsanity’s Application Enhancer that didn’t upgrade at the last moment before installing Leopard.

Keeping up to date with OS X third-party applications is just as hard as it is on Windows. That’s why I eventually plopped down the money for Version Tracker Pro. Had I not, I would have been one of those that the new install would have taken out. Diligence is king.

Even so, my problems with an Upgrade was slightly broken features, like the password working after a screen save (despite the settings to the contrary), and performance. I later learned that the former was a permission problem on the preference, and the latter was a library extension that didn’t work with Leopard and just tried to keep reloading itself.

My solution was to do an Archive and Install. All of my options were preserved, just like an Upgrade in place, but because the OS was virgin fresh, my system behaved wonderfully.

I give Apple this round, simply because a “fresh install” with Microsoft is so destructive.

Oh, and yes, once you’ve touted something as a “new” feature, like 64 bit, you can’t do it again for the next release. That’s cheating.

Vista Similarity 2: Needless Graphics Glitz

I love eye candy as much as the next guy, and in my operating systems too.

However, I question the real value one gets out of it. As long as it doesn’t get in the way, that’s great. If it communicates more information subtly, that’s great too. Incidentally, what I mean by that is effects, like Genie, which show where your Window is going when you minimize it, is useful.

All these different preview modes, sliding covers, and non-sense, I could really care less about.

Though, I have to admit I’m a closet user of them. Sometimes it easier to quickly view an image to make sure I’ve got the right one, or scan the contents of a document because a poorly chosen filename was used. I’d like to think Apple could have done this without the big production.

What really gets my goat, however is that Tiger had transparent Windows. Then it went away! That really made me mad, because I was using them since I had a small desktop.

So, that made me go find Virtue, in order to have multiple desktops. My gosh, I loved that product. Where else could you have different backgrounds, on a 3D cube, and get to them by keystrokes, mouse maneuvers, or tilting or laptop or waving your hand over it and triggering the ambient light sensors!

But then Apple went and created Spaces. With no real future, Virtue is going away - - and killing off a fantastic sales tool for me. With no competition, I don’t see Apple adding these things back.

And, only now, are we starting to talk about the transparency I had before. Argh!!!

So, while Vista is pretty, and Apple is pretty, Apple got by for having slightly more than fluff for fluff’s sake. Apple gets to take this round, begrudgingly.

Vista Similarity 3: Pointless User Interface “Fixes”

I’ve got to say, again, I agree with Oliver. The new dock may look pretty, but Apple had an uncanny way of letting me know what was going on with those nice, readable from a distance, black, unobtrusive triangles.

Do I have a way to get them back?

Can I switch an put the dock on the side and get something more acceptable looking? Yes, but then again I don’t want it on the side.

It’s crappy decisions like this that cause people to write utilities to hack the operating system which cause the initial instability problems in the first place.

Using Vista as the example, just because something is pretty doesn’t mean it’s enjoyable to use.

Having said all of the above, I have to admit that many of the things I initially didn’t like, I quickly grew to use. They bother me less.

Let’s just say in this round, the bell rang, and there was no winner.

Vista Similarity 4: Nuked Networking

I groan when I see Microsoft operating systems splinter over stupid artificial limitations like how many network connections can be concurrently inbound or outbound. I shake my finger at any operating system which can’t handle jumbo packet sizes or let me switch between 10/100/1000 ethernet speeds.

But I do accept that Windows shares, using Samba, can be difficult with Microsoft deliberately sabotaging protocols to force a homogeneous network with them being the vendor. Embrace and Extend. Anti-Trust. Bogus interoperability. Halloween Memos. I just can’t take the message that Microsoft is out to help me seriously anymore; too much bad history; too little progress. DRM, WGA, poison pill updates, spying - that’s the reason I left Microsoft.

While I recognize that Apple and Microsoft are in a cat’n'mouse game for accessing Windows resources, I do have a complaint to put on Apple’s shoulders.

And that is: just because I have a network, doesn’t mean I want to network. Unless I’m trying to comb my network’s machines, don’t bring them all to my Finder. I don’t need that. I know what kind of network traffic Microsoft generates.

On the other side of the coin, VNC is now built in. And, well, wow. Apple, you did well there. It’s almost as if Apple knows I’m slowly expelling Microsoft and replacing it with Unix systems.

But that doesn’t change the fact that when I do need access to a Windows box, and I’m using my Mac, I want it to be just as seamless. Just the other day, I tried to copy a file from a Windows share to my local desktop to work with a local copy. Locally. (Sense a theme?)

The Windows box said “that file is in use” (because someone had the network Excel file open) and wanted to know if I wanted a read-only copy. The Mac, however, simply said Permission Error and never told me why.

Apple: I need error messages to not be so abstract. Give me a way to Option-Click on them or something and dump the error.h code; in short, if I’m smart enough to fend for myself, let me. Or, just make it work.

I assume people have already heard that if you Move (not copy) a file from one resource to the other, if the destination is full and aborts the copy, the source file still gets deleted (the other half of the move). I hope that’s fixed.

Now, the sheer fact that Microsoft has a horrible time with other OS’s (and depends on them playing by their rules), the final score for this one goes to Apple. Though Apple got lucky.

Vista Similarity 5: Bundled Apps as New Features That Suck

Oliver and I may start to part ways at this one, although not that far.

All the standard home and media applications Apple bundles with their OS are really top notch in my opinion. In fact, I buy iWork in addition to iLife. It’s Apple’s Pro applications that use a interface that I find very dated. And ugly.

But the feature we all seem to gripe on is Time Machine.

My first experiences with Time Machine were horrible. The system would seize up, and, well to be fair, I have to admit that this all went away after I did an Archive and Install, rather than the Upgrade in place over my existing patched OS Tiger.

And, while I applaud the concept of Time Machine, I don’t like that I can’t force it to kick off when I want. Or that I can’t easily point it at a common server. Or use it wirelessly.

But my biggest beef is why in the world Apple just didn’t hold off, wait until ZFS was working the way they wanted, and delivered something that managed things directly with the filesystem itself.

In addition to Time Machine, I find myself using SuperDuper and Carbon Copy Cloner to make quick, efficient backups, that are also bootable.

What I think Oliver might have missed is a subtle difference.
- With Time Machine, everything is backed up.
- Not that Time Machine backs up everything.

Let’s cover that a little closer. Time Machine does do a full backup, but then everything from then on out is incremental. And intelligently so. In fact, you can even go wandering around the files on the backup disk directly, should you choose to.

The way I’m reading things is that the review gives the impression everything is always backed up. That’s just not so.

Would I like to be able to tell Time Machine to only back up what I want it to? Yes. Please.

Would I like to only delete the things I intend to? Of course. But, realistically, it’s when I delete an important system file, and Time Machine has a copy, that I’ll suddenly become more forgiving of why it does what it does.

All his GUI gripes with Time Machine are dead on. However, when you get Time Machine working (via a clean Archive and Install - which keeps your preferences, data, and applications, btw), it does work as advertised.

It’s close. Time Machine’s integration is trivial. But over all, I think Vista’s backup, is better in the long run. Vista wins this round.

Oliver, I think, in this case was guilty of throwing the baby out with the bathwater. To be ticked off at the first version of a new application that could have been better, is justified. To extend that assessment to all bundled apps, as he does in his title, is not.

What the world hates is that after buying the OS, you still can’t do much with it. With Apple you can. And, with most Window machine purchases, you get a lot of crapware. Apple, you don’t.

In fact, I think Apple misses the mark. QuickTime Pro should be bundled with the OS, and if they were really on top of things, iWork as well. I’d gladly even pay the full retail price rolled into the cost of the machine. Why? Because can you image if everyone’s machine out of the box shipped with software that could do Office related stuff? You’d have a killer do-all platform from time the machine was powered up. There’s no way Microsoft could do that.

So, while Vista won this round, I’m gonna give Apple half-credit, since I think it was an unfair contests.

Walt’s Final Score

Apple 3.5 / 5; Vista 1 / 5.

I’d still rather use OS X Leopard than Vista any day of the week.

Walt gives OS X Leopard a thumbs up, even though it still needs some work.

I notice with OS X 10.5 (Leopard)’s new Mail integrated RSS reader, once I have a feed there’s a few minor annoying limitations that aren’t available.

1) While I can review what the RSS feed URL is by hovering over it, I can’t copy it to the clipboard.

2) If the RSS feed location changes, I can’t change the feed’s URL.

3) I’d love to be able to drag the RSS icon to a browser and have it open the page.

4) Or, I’d like to be able to right click the feed and have it open it in a browser or my default RSS reader (NetNewsWire).

5) Drag the RSS feed icon, or an article from the feed, into an open Mail message to share the URL.

I hope Apple will enhance the feature capabilities soon.

Those who know me have come to terms that I’m interfaced into the Internet almost in real time. eMail is always the best way to reach me. When I’m sitting in front of a terminal, whether for work or pleasure, numerous chat clients are active in the background. Even away from a machine, my phones and automated scripts keep some kind of virtual presence active of one form or another. As a result, friends, family, and co-workers can see my status, location, and reach me with impressively short response times.

Today something interesting happened.

Last night, I was working on a fairly complicated piece of code and had set up a rather complex environment that I didn’t want to have to reinitialize in the morning. Rather than shutting down the machine, I took all my instant messaging clients off-line, and this morning I didn’t start them up, relying on the built-in chat facilities of Google’s GMail.

However, as I was researching, I accidentally closed the GMail window unknowingly, and to the Internet, I went dark.

I had not realized how connected I had become, using chat and emails as a primary means for others to reach me. Well, that was until a co-worker came rushing in to see if I was alright with genuine concern.

He was fairly certain I was in the next room, his email didn’t get a near instant reply, and there was no way to reach me interactively. For anyone else, this would have been no big deal. However, my heart was warmed by this sincere response.

Yes, folks. If my Borg-like collections goes down, please check on me. I might have died or be in need of immediate medical attention.

Well before Vista was even real, I wrote about the problematic issues, bad practices for customers, and locked in formats that would make Apple Mac a highly attractive option. Pretty much most of the things people said couldn’t or wouldn’t happen have. It’s no wonder that the US Government would rather keep XP than move to Vista, that students on college campuses are reporting terrible problems interfacing with the IT departments and campus infrastructure, and that even Office formats are in dispute.

Even in our own offices, Vista has been one disaster after another, causing us all kinds of heart ache and productivity loss.

We thought the nightmare was over when we found a clever hack to make Vista think our networked HP LaserJet was a local printer (and we’d given up on being able to even use sound). However, we’ve been getting terrible disk performance on a laptop with Vista installed. Turns out the drive is badly fragmented.

Obviously, an XP user would simply run Disk Defrag and let that be that.

Not so with Vista. Sure, it has the program, but it provides no indicator of how much work needs to be done, and no visual interface at all about what’s being done. All you get is a stupid message that says the operation could take minutes to hours to complete.

So, we let Vista run overnight. And performance didn’t improve. At all.

You’ve got to see the conversation over on the Microsoft Developer Network about Vista’s defrager.

It seems that Microsoft expects you to leave your machine running all the time, and at some time like 2am on Wednesday, it will run the defrag automatically for you. Whether you want it to or not. And it will do the same crappy job.

If you’re running an enterprise service, you do not want to take an I/O channel hit “just because.” If you’re an IT administrator, you don’t want to screw with scheduling. If you’re a laptop user, you don’t want to leave your machine running.

Now I know I said I wasn’t going to give Microsoft support anymore. But I occasionally will share tips.

Grab the free version of Auslogic’s Disk Defrag. It will impress you. It’s clean, crisp, visual, astoundingly fast, and most importantly: it solved our fragmentation problems.

Today’s trick will give you an astounding performance boost, while at the same time make you just shake your fist at Microsoft.

First of all, to start with, let me say that my Dell Precision 470 (2.8Ghz Dual CPU with hyperthreading on) and 2GB of RAM running XP Pro is …slow. I mean the kind of slow where clicking the Start button takes several seconds to draw the rectangle for the menu.

I have a dual monitor system. I’m using a Dell 2005FPW via DVI at 1680×1050 60Hz as my primary monitor and a Dell 1907FP via analog SVGA/XGA at 1280×1024 60Hz as my secondary. Both are driven by an ATI FireGL V3100 using the latest drivers from ATI’s site for XP Professional, and hardware acceleration is set to full.

I first noticed the severity of the problem when using iTunes 7.3.1.3’s music visualizer. Here’s how playing a simple CD turned into a fantastic diagnostic tool.

With the iTunes visualizer running on the primary monitor, I noticed that when I put the mouse on the secondary monitor the visualizer ran at full speed and was completely fluid. When I put the mouse on the primary screen, even when I wasn’t moving it, the frame rate dropped to about two frames every second (music, however, played fine).

Task Manager, after a violent killing spree, showed a minimal number of processes and services, idle times in the high 90%s, and no interesting page or interrupt activity — but the behavior continued. Opening additional applications didn’t affect performance, as long as the mouse was on the secondary screen.

When I showed this behavior to a friend of mine, Brian Busch, he suggested I turn off mouse trails. And, to humor him, I did. Instantly my system sprung to life and the problem was gone.

That’s when it struck us. Windows XP’s mouse pointer options don’t use hardware acceleration. And to confirm it, I pressed the CTRL button, which showed the location of my mouse. As the little target was drawn around the cursor, the frame rate dropped. When Microsoft’s little visibility animation ended, the system resumed at full speed.

Why was mouse trails on? Because Dell still hasn’t fixed the jumping mouse problem. But I don’t love them enough to kill my system’s responsiveness. Laptop users, beware.

Performance Recommendation: Go to Settings / Control Panel / Mouse, select the Point Options tab, and in the Visibility section uncheck ‘Display Pointer Trails’, ‘Hide pointer while typing, as well as ‘Show location of pointer when I press the CTRL key’ and press OK.

I’ve recently bumped into a problem where, on occasion, I get duplicate menu items in my right-click pop-up on the OS X desktop, when I select Open With.

Turns out this is merely an indicate that the database for LaunchServices needed to be fixed.

And, in fact, this was covered over at Mac OS X Hints a while back. But, given that I had need to look up the command more than once, I present it here.

Inside Terminal, enter:

You don’t even need to enter your administrator password, nor do you need to reboot.

OnyX allows you to also rebuild the LaunchServices by going to the Maintenance / Reset panel. Though there are a number of other ways to reset launch services for each version of OS X.

While working on some XML and XSLT stuff, I ran into some strange problems where transformed XML content was making Firefox spin its wheels forever and Safari was having problems rendering XSL variables.

I wasn’t engaged in a browser war shoot out, I just wanted to know that the XSLT was correctly transforming the XML into the desired output. As various tools were slowly slipping from my fingertips, I figured I might just have to go back to the command line.

But then I discovered XSLPalette. It’s a “free, native, XSLT 2.0, XPath 2.0, and XQuery 1.0 debugging palette” for OS X (and it’s a Universal Binary).

All I have to say is that, as a developer, I’m impressed with the ease this tool provides for trying different XSLT engines. I does basically one thing, and that one thing very, very well. I like that in developer tools.

You give the palette an XML file, and XSLT file, select the engine, and it does the transformation, showing you messages along the way, in addition to the transformed output, a collapsible view, and a browser-like rendered view.

Walt gives XSLPalette a thumbs up!

This list of over 55 hand-picked OS X applications represents what I consider the best-of-the-best software for the Apple Macintosh. And it all runs on the new Intel systems.

Believe me, there are many more applications that did not make the cut. This is not intended to be a comprehensive list, but a Walt’s personal favorites that have shown high quality, value, and utility. This is the ultimate selection in Walt’s Desktop for OS X.

I cover productivity, security, customization, photography, multimedia, movie production, drawing, business applications, browsing, communication, file sharing, astronomy, cameras, cataloging, and software development. Everything the ubergeek would want.

Please note, I have not limited the software to just free, shareware, or open source. Commercial packages are included as well, and I recommend supporting them, obtaining legal licenses - they’re worth it.

Enjoy.

Walt gives the software on this list a thumbs up.

…if you happen to have a favorite package that you think is better than what I’ve posted, perhaps I don’t know about it. Drop me a line.

Back in the good old DOS days there were several software packages that would provide system information such as what hardware was in the machine, what drivers were running, what TSRs had crept into memory, and what applications you had. My all time favorite was SYSINFO, it was the magical hardware probing that I was after. I’d create a special boot disk and instantly be able to tell what was in a friend’s machine.

Problem is, as Windows got bigger and “better” that kind of direct hardware probing became forbidden by the operating system. I’ve been searching for its equal ever since for the Windows world.

Sure, there’s a handful of tools that come with Windows or Office, but all seem to be lacking, and nothing that just generates a single pretty report. systeminfo and msinfo just don’t cut it for me.

A friend turn me on to Belarc Advisor. This thing is amazing. It will do everything from tell me what kind of memory is in which slot on my motherboard to exposing the software keys to the software I have installed. It produces a sleek report viewable by any HTML browser, very nice.

Walt gives Belarc Advisor a thumbs up!

If you happen to know of any other favorites that do the same kind of thing, I’d love to hear from you.

Tired of Windows bubbles that tell you that you have updates waiting, that tell you that your firewall may be wrong, or that your antivirus isn’t up to snuff? You are if you know what you’re doing, and you hate these little pop-ups that appear in the bottom right of your screen.

Here’s how to turn them off.

Start / Programs / Accessories / System Tools / Security Center — then select “Change the way Security Center alerts me” (it’s in the text on the left). Uncheck the boxes you don’t want, and click OK until the dialog boxes are gone.

Note, if you don’t find Security Center there, it sometimes appears under Start / Settings / Control Panel / Security Settings.