Summersault Blog

I’m not usually one to rush into upgrading an operating system, but Apple has made the act of upgrading it’s OS X OS more of a pleasurable experience than most any other software upgrade process I know of in my experience with Windows, Unix, and Macs combined. It’s the difference between going to hospital to have a major organ extracted, dropped on the floor, dusted off, and replaced (all Windows upgrades, FreeBSD upgrades that involve kernel recompiles, etc.) and going through an outpatient procedure where you eat cheese and sip wine while they work on you, and you leave you with a fresh set of eyes, an extra arm with a cutting edge accessory attachment, and about ten years added to your life (Mac OS X upgrades since my switch in 2002). So I didn’t mind putting a central tool in my life - a PowerBook G4 Titanium - on the line for a little bit of surgery when Mac OS X 10.4 Tiger arrived yesterday.

After doing a pre-upgrade “repair permissions” and backup, the upgrade itself went without a hitch - about 45 minutes in total, unattended after the initial configuration choices. A few things I’ve noticed since:

-I appreciated that the installer did a media check on the install DVD. I have had installation experiences before where the CD had bad data, was scratched, or where the drive itself was having trouble - the result being a half-installed system that didn’t work too good. Verifying that you can read the whole thing and that it has what it’s supposed to on it is great.

-I really like the improvements to the iChat interface. I’ve not gotten to try out the multi-person video and audio conferencing yet, but just the way the groups are worked into the buddy list is exactly the kind of thing I’d been wanting for a while. I was also able to uninstall a bunch of third-party hacks I’d had running, since the equivalent functionality is now mostly incorporated in the software itself.

-Spotlight is pretty cool. Seeing as how I’ve only been running this OS for 12 hours, I haven’t had any moments yet where I’ve thought “if I could just do a one-stop search for…”, but I feel the power pulsing from the little blue magnifying glass in my toolbar. And the original estimate of 6 hours to index my 30GB drive only turned out to be about 50 minutes. Oh, and even though Damon is spreading lies about how the Windows world has had this forever, I really don’t think there’s a reasonable comparison to be made.

-My hard drive is making some new kinds of clicking noises that it didn’t make before. I’m not sure if I should be scared about this or not - hard to imagine that a software upgrade should have changed how the hardware components sound. Hmmm. Just a bit ago, all my apps pretty much froze as the disk started thrashing away for about 5 minutes. I have to say that when the thrashing stopped, everything was working normally again and actually felt a little faster, so I’m going to chalk that up to some sort of amazing new self-improvement device that will become more subtle in future point releases.

-Safari is fast, sweet, rockin. But without the ability to use the Adblock extension, no official support for it from NetSuite, my RSS needs handled beautifully by NetNewsWire, and a few other interface niggles, I’m still a Firefox user for now. Sorry, cuz.

-Mounting Samba shares with a password is just outright broken. Booo.

-The Dashboard does weird things on my dual monitor setup. The slick float-in is stuttered, and there’s no cool flipping of the widgets. At first I thought it was a preference one could set (as Damon yelled curses at Apple for false advertising, which he later withdrew), but I guess there’s a whole class of things that just behave weirdly when you have two monitors and one desktop stretched out over them.

In general, things feel fast and smooth and nice. I guess some of this could just be the cleansing that comes with an upgrade (I did use “upgrade” and not “archive and install”), but I’m going to give Apple a lot of credit for their consistency in creating quality software that just works.

This entry was posted on Tuesday, May 3rd, 2005 at 10:23 am and is filed under Desktop Software. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.