My leopard upgrade experience was extremely positive. Thankfully, I didn’t experience any of the difficulties some have had – this account by the veritable Wincent Colaiuta filled me with dread, but thankfully none of his woes were visited upon me. I was cautious about upgrading, and waited a couple of days so that early bugs could be found by early adopters, I’m glad that I did, since I did have APE installed (although by what, I have no idea) and I made sure to run disk utility’s repair function on the install disk before attempting the upgrade.
That said, there are a few observations I’ve made:
Mail 3.0
I decided to do a clean install of Mail, since most of my “archive” mail is still sitting on a machine in Japan, and all messages in the local instance of Mail were kept on the server. I also decided to use this opportunity to switch to IMAP exclusively.
The IMAP imports went well, though took an awfully long time, during which Mail.app refused to quit.
I imported my RSS bookmarks from Safari, since I’d prefer to not be distracted by them during web usage. The import went well, though updates of the feeds seem unreliable and it sometimes takes a couple of restarts to “force” an update. Another unexpected behaviour of RSS in Mail.app is its desire to automatically download all attachments in an RSS feed – leading to quite a surprise as it proceeded to start downloading every single railscast from the entire railscast feed, well over a gig of movies, and refused to quit while in process. I had to force quit mail and delete the Railscast archive to avoid the massive, and slow, download.
MacPorts and custom compiled software
I switched to MacPorts some time ago, reducing the need to custom compile software and, more importantly, eliminating (in theory) the dependency hell that custom compilations can sometimes launch you into. I decided to take the opportunity to nuke /opt and reinstall from scratch – the old repository was, well, old, and I was getting the occasional weird error from the still very much in development macports software.
But now – I have a problem. Apple’s taken the laudable step of upgrading the version of ruby installed with the OS. They’ve got a new build of subversion in there too, and even included rubygems – and Rails! What to do? For example, there are two good ways to install MySQL on this system – port install mysql-server, or download and install the binary. Because I wanted to go with Apple’s pre-install of ruby and rubygems/rails, I thought it maybe better if I installed the binary version. But then gem install mysql, for the native ruby mysql bindings, bombs out. Great, dependencies – exact what I’m trying to avoid, and so early in the customisation process, too!
Anyway, for now I am using the Apple installs, mindful of the possible need in the future to just go ahead and port install duplicates over the top of the bundled software. Furthermore, Ruby 1.9 is supposedly around the corner. What will be the recommended upgrade path then?
I can’t really work out why Apple isn’t going with MacPorts officially here. The project is amateur, but it’s certainly “blessed” by Apple – so why not build it into the OS? There are now 3 ways to go installing a lot of open source software on MacOSX – use the included but rapidly outdating and dependency-locked installs, install manually from source, or use the supposedly official MacPorts package management system. All three leave software in different places. Which one gets used will come down to your $PATH. It’s not exactly elegant, and seems like a recipe for hard-to-troubleshoot problems in the future.
That said, I got everything up and running with no real problems, although postgresql refuses to build in the current Port incarnation.
Interface
A lot of what I think about the interface has already been written in the unbelievably long ArsTechnica review of Leopard, but I’ll save you the 2 hours reading that and list my general thoughts:
- I don’t like the unpredictable, uncustomisable, ugly icons of the new “collection” folders in the dock.
- I don’t like the loss of the “drill down” folder browsing mode
- The new dock wastes space and is gratuitous in its eye candy – eye candy which is, if anything, functionally inferior to the preview incarnation
- I don’t mind the new translucent menubar
Favourite App updates
Safari, Terminal and Mail are hugely improved, and I think this will make most of the positive difference in my daily work with the OS. I like Spaces, too. Spotlight is also much, much better – basically, Spotlight in Leopard is what it should have been all along, which allows me to jettison QuickSilver.
to be continued ..
