Things I Love About Leopard #1

Posted on November 15, 2007

Drop down menu (courtesy of Spaces). Notice the window behind it. So subtle I almost missed it before. The blurring of the background window is awesome, gives the menu a slightly translucent effect. Very cool.

Installing gOS in Parallels

Posted on November 15, 2007

Today at MacFags, we’re going to try an experiment. Everybody and their blog has written about the hawtness of gOS, so I’m going to give it a try in Parallels. In the name of science, of course. I downloaded the ISO via Bit Torrent (using the fabulous Transmission by the way) at record speeds (for my crappy cable connection anyways). Boot up Parallels, make some basic settings decisions (Typical Install, Other Linux, more power to the virtual machine), select the ISO file and away we go.

So far so good. We’ve got ourselves a nice little start up screen. Let’s select “Start or Install gOS”.

A little text mode before it starts up the graphical environment, that’s cool, always good to keep tabs on what’s happening.

And crap. After attempting to start up the graphical environment it spits this message out. For those with wonky eyes, it says: “The display server has been shut down about 6 times in the last 90 seconds. It is likely that something bad is going on. Waiting for 2 minutes before trying again on the display :O.” For the record, the display server was shut down four times. But who’s counting.

I tried again using the Safe Graphics mode, and had the same problem. Anybody out there actually get gOS to run in virtual yet? Or should I stick with ignoring my other Linux VMs, instead of ignoring my gOS VM?

Leopard First Impressions

Posted on November 1, 2007

Over at Wind the Frog DB asked some questions about Leopard. I was going to post answers to his and others’ questions in the comments section, but some how it turned into a whole fucking essay, so instead I’ll just post the thing up here.

The dock on the right or left…works ok?
Yes the look of the dock changes when you’re side dockin’. It reverts to a transparent dark bar similar to the previous dock. Check my Skitch for a screenshot. There’s a hidden preference if you want the dock in the bottom but prefer the new-old transparent dark bar. Oh, and when you’re side dockin’ stacks doesn’t fan out in the cool manner. But that’s livable.

Anyone test the audio/video quality with iChat?
Haven’t done video/audio chat yet, I’d have to do my hair first. I am tempted though because I want to test the new chat recording feature. iChat still disconnects randomly but at least now it automatically reconnects.

Coverflow/Preview work ok? Or is it real dodgy?
I haven’t used Coverflow either, because the only use I really see in it is browsing porn/random images folders. For seeing what documents are I hit space bar and that brings up QuickView right away. Which is another awesome feature. Works like a charm. Preview.app has gotten a lot better at loading quickly and handling multiple documents/images at once. And you can resize images within the app now. About f’ing time.

On the Intel machines, can you tell it is faster?
The OS on the whole does run faster, though that’s always been the case with OSX. The newest version always runs a li’l zippier than the previous. Also: Me and my MacBook Pro are rockin’ 64-bit I was just impressed how fast the installation was compared to installing Tiger and Panther.

Anything else you would like to add?
Safari resizes images to fit the window and zooms to full size with a double click. That is a feature that I rather missed from Firefox. Now if somebody would make proper adblocking for Safari so I don’t have to look at NSFW ads on FaceBook (which I’ve already complained to them about). And I totally love resizable text input boxes. Perfect for when WP gives you a small space to type in and I have to write up a big post like this.

Last.fm’s client needs to be updated because you can’t switch off showing it in the dock, and it hangs when you quit the program fifty percent of the time which annoys me, but I’ll get by ’til they update it. Also, InDesign was totally borked thanks to the upgrade, although I’m hopefully going to be finding a workaround for that next week.

Paul said: I read that the iLife was a backwards step for iMovie and/or iDVD in terms of functionality, otherwise I might be upgrading too.
Yes you can still get the previous version of iMovie after the upgrade, or if it’s already installed, ‘08 leaves it on the system. I would say that it’s not so much a step down for iMovie as it is a step left. They completely rewrote it so that it’s a different program. I think they’re trying to push iMovie as the program for the unwashed non-tech saavy masses who know nothing of video editing, and want to push the more experienced people (i.e., the people complaining about iMovie ‘08) to upgrading to Final Cut Express. iDVD isn’t so much worse as it is that Apple hasn’t really upgraded iDVD in the past two revisions. They just pack in a couple new themes and call it good. I’ve only used iDVD once in the past three and a half years of owning a Mac.

I think that’s all I got for now. I might have more later, or possibly a video of a monkey washing a cat. Who knows!

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