Random Leopard Notes and Observations

• I did an upgrade install.
• When the machine boots up after the install is finished, there is a delay before going to the login screen.
• After the install, go to the the Installer DVD, and then Optional Installs->Xcode Tools->XcodeTools.mpkg to install the Developer tools.
• I had to delete some Help Viewer cache and preference files, otherwise it would crash when doing a two word search. This only happened with my primary user account on Hyperion (my MacPro).
• Spotlight has to re-index the harddrive. This takes a while (you'll notice the high disk I/O). On my laptop it took a couple of hours.
• The stuff in my KeyChain was missing. Fix is to just double click on Library/Keychains/login.keychain. Apple may a fixed this with an update.
• Sherlock is gone. No big deal since most of the functionality is in the Dashboard.
• I don't like the Grid setting for Stacks. Fan seems better (although it shows less). I have it set to sort by Date Added so I can quickly go to my last downloaded item.
• The indicators in the dock for running applications seems to be less noticeable due to the reflections. It's probably not a problem if the dock is running on the left or right since it doesn't have reflections in those places.
• iCal now shows the current date in the dock even when it's not running.
• CoverFlow view in finder is neat in certain situations (like browsing images or documents).
• Screen Sharing is nice (vnc://hostname). It's a little flakey via iChat (seems to spontaneously disconnect). I'd recommend only allowing certain users to have access to Screen Sharing (via the Sharing systems preference).
• Spaces seems to work pretty well. Can't set different backgrounds for each virtual desktop, though.
• Macs on the network have icons that represent their actual machine assuming they're running 10.5 (i.e. a MacPro looks like a MacPro, G4 looks like a G4, and a PowerBook looks like a PowerBook). Windows machines are represented with a computer monitor that has a blue screen.
• You can no longer scrub audio/video files directly in the finder (although you can still play them). But, you can hit the space bar or Command-Y (Apple-Y) to see the file in QuickLook. Quick Look is a floating window panel, so if you select something else, it'll replace whatever is currently in the window.
• Dictionary can now search Wikipedia (in multiple languages). There is also a Japanese<->English Dictionary.
• Drive icons on the desktop stay put between reboots.
• Going to the printer options in the Epson drivers for my ancient Epson Stylus Photo 780 printer causes the application to crash. These are really old drivers from Epson that only work on PPC Macs. The ink status utility works fine, though. There are GimpPrint and Gutenprint drivers that come with the OS, though. I'm not sure how well they work.
• Repairing disk permissions takes a really long time (compared to 10.4).
• Time Machine is actually a pretty nice way to do incremental backups. It takes a long time to do the initial backup. You can tell it what drives/folders to ignore. It uses hardlinks to preserve space (unchanged files are hardlinked instead of copied).
• Firefox and Camino need new themes to fit the new window colors (a darker shade of gray).
• Applications which use the OS's built in spell checker can also take advantage of the built in grammar checker.
• I haven't really looked at the Developer tools, but it appears that there is a lot of sample code for writing Cocoa apps in Python and Ruby. Interface Builder is different, so older tutorials may not be very helpful.
• The Mosaic screen saver is really neat. Only thing I don't like is that it creates the mosaic with photos from your entire iPhoto library (instead of just a selection).
• There is a new voice called Alex which sounds more realistic.
• In Safari, you can make a Web clip and use it as a widget in the Dashboard. This only really works if the thing you are clipping has a fixed size.
• There are different themes for terminal windows.
• Some software updates install after you click the restart button (during machine shutdown phase). Also, some system caches are rebuilt during shutdown (which sometimes causes the shutdown to take awhile). I think in prior versions, these caches were built at startup.
• There is now an optional Guest user account. It gets wiped when the guest user logs out.
• There is a silly iTunes Visualizer in Developer/Examples/Quartz\ Composer/Compositions/Music\ Visualizers. Copy "Club Lisa.gtz" to your $HOME/Library/Compositions directory (you'll probably have to create the directory). You can actually edit the visualizer in Quartz Composer and make the Allessandro and Peter dance around by tying the Audio Peak Output to their X and Y translations.
• Sandbox rules (in /usr/share/sandbox) are written in Scheme.

At Ars Technica, there is a really good article about what is new:
http://arstechnica.com/reviews/os/mac-os-x-10-5.ars/1

Giving people something better

Here is an interesting article in the New York Times about Apple gaining PC market share and future OS upgrades.

One of the more interesting parts of this article is the bit about how the Apple development team was worried that the multitouch user interface on the iPhone wouldn't work out. If they would have just listened to users, Apple probably would have developed some fairly ordinary smart phone using a stylus as an the input method. Instead they took a risk and tried to do something different.

I think this is a good quote that describes their development philosophy:

"Giving people what they want is fundamentally and disastrously wrong. The people don't know what they want...[Give] them something better." - Samuel Rothapfel

Russian Pirozhki

Russian Pirozhki
Originally uploaded by jgrande

Here are some Russian Pirozhkis that I made using a recipe that was given to us on the cruise. They are stuffed with apricots and raisins.