I took the plunge today, as I was handed the Apple OS X v10.6 install disc with the nice Snow Leopard on the cover. Long story short, I think the big cat ate part of my soul and I wish they would have pushed the release date back a bit further.. though it seems I’ll come out of it alive.
The actual install went OK. Popped in the DVD, waited about an hour, and I’m back and running with most of my programs.
Finding Dvorak-Right
Snow Leopard finally now supports Dvorak-Right natively.. something that Windows has done since.. shit, apparently since MS-DOS 5.0! The workaround for OS X 10.5 and lower wasn’t too crazy, though it involved finding a third-party solution on a website created very long ago, hidden in a dark corner of the Internets. This “solution” also differed from the standard Dvorak-Right layout in the placement of the Q, Z, and some number keys, so I am now having fun re-adjusting to what should have been there in the first place. Moreover, the Snow-y Leopard broke my 10.5 solution, making the transition even more spooky than I wanted until I found the proper place in System Preferences.
It is worth pointing out that OS X and Apple in general does promote itself as a pioneer of accessibility. Having only one hand to type with, however, I find this to be a grossly inaccurate picture in comparison to any other system I’ve used, especially Windows which has been rather faithful to Dvorak-Right since I can remember using it.
Broken apps and drivers
I have a device from Apogee, which I love heartily and which was flat out not recognized when I connected it to my machine. Just needed a driver update from the manufacturer, so no big deal.
Cyberduck, a file transfer program I really like a lot, does not work in Snow Leopard. There is a beta which supposedly works, however their website seems to be down today and I’m shit out of luck until it comes back online. Not Apple’s fault, of course, though that isn’t making my SCP’ing any easier for today.
Apple AirPort Extreme file sharing: seriously?
I may be wrong on this particular point, though it seems to me that sharing my disk via my Apple AirPort Extreme to Snow Leopard was broken. It worked, sometimes, though about half of the requests failed and data access was just not good. Why? It looks like a problem that I had with the naming of the AirPort router. I had a colon (i.e., “:”) in the name of the router, and 10.6 seemed to want to truncate the name at this character one half the time, and be OK with it the other half. I renamed the device to not contain the special character, and it seems to be working much better now. I understand that there are bugs in the world and it can be hard to find them all, but not being able to use my Apple device with my Apple computer running the Apple operating system because of a problem with string parsing .. that doesn’t seem like good QA to me.
Some positives
Not all that sure why I needed an upgraded OS to remove the crap I didn’t need in the first place, though having an extra 10GB of space on my currently crowded drive does make me feel better. My system load does also seem to be a bit lower in general, with less swapping and slightly enhanced graphical capabilities. It is not clear to me as to whether this is temporary, or if it’s significant, though I suppose time will tell.
I’m sure there are a lot of good things that Apple has done with 10.6, but the truth of the matter is that at the end of one day of use, I am certainly more frustrated than I am happy. For an operating system being out for more than a month, with one patch already, it does not seem to me that it is ready yet. For an operating system, that, to me, is a pretty bad thing to have to say, and by the end I would certainly recommend holding off unless you have a burning desire to spend $30 to have parts of your core system break.
Is it 10 gigs real space or is that the “benefit” of apple switching from base2 to base10? personally, hard drive manufacturers and apple can fuck off, no reason to change something that everyone who needs to understand, does, and has. especially with hard drives as cheap as they are now–I’m running two terabytes pretty much just because I can. it’s like a 7% difference. fucking apple.
good news on them implementing dvork-r, though. i always thought that language bar in XP was useless and a waste of screen real estate until I saw how quick it made it for you to change your keyboard setting. really made me appreciate how much thought microsoft has to put into things I would never even consider. Honestly wouldn’t have a clue how to enable it in Gnome (through menus, anyway), and if a regular mac user like yourself had to hunt for it in 10.6, it can’t be super easy there either.
anyway, also meant to ask, is there a WAP or whatever addon for wordpress you can implement easily? looks like shit on my phone, usually don’t notice because you update this one fairly late at night.
Wow. Did not realize the base 2 -> base 10 update. Sort of fucked up, really. Still not as much as I got back, though.
I’m going to be unscientific here and say that there’s something about the way they rewrote the libraries, which partially takes into account that there’s no more PowerPC support, which cuts down the size of the base system a fair amount. I’m sure it’s hidden somewhere in the 23 page Ars review.
Re: Dvorak-R in Linux systems, it’s the difference of a ~/.Xmodmap file for X, and some keyboard mapping program whose name I forget in the terminal. I just carried around my custom .Xmodmap and am good to go. I often kept it on the web, too, though I haven’t done that for a bit now. Doing as much can also fix problems with delete vs. backspace, etc., depending on the environment / keyboard setup, which is also rather handy. Not sure what they have done w/ OS X, but it definitely is more complicated than the general format of that Linux file.
re: WAP versions, am looking into this. I previously had this neat hack (which works for the rest of rlaskey.org and other sites I templated myself) whereby if the browser is mobile then the CSS file just adjusts in a few ways to have it display nicely. It doesn’t seem, from what I can tell, that WP will support this quite as nicely, though I should be able to get something working without too much hassle.