Macworld Expo '09

On the whole I thought this year's Expo was about average. There was a smattering of fairly interesting product announcements, but nothing earth-shattering. This has become pretty par for the course at Macworld for a while now. Still, there were a few things worth commenting on. I think the new 17" Macbook Pro battery is astoundingly cool. It makes me want one, though I'm holding out 'til I need one. The 17" Macbook Pro may someday become my über-computer though, replacing once and for all the tower machine I've always kept. And, frankly, the fact that the battery is not replaceable is, in my opinion, completely mitigated by the fact that it's so awesome: 1000 recharges? 8 hours of life? Why would you ever want to replace it? Apple has substituted a crappy battery that you'll want to replace with a good one you won't. And it's the non-replaceability that's made the high battery quality possible. Brilliant! And the right way to go, as far as I'm concerned.

iLife '09 also looks like a worthwhile, if not terribly compelling, upgrade. In particular, I'm wondering if iMovie '09 will be good enough to replace the aging Final Cut Pro in my workflow. Final Cut Pro — once my absolute favorite piece of software — has grown somewhat long in the tooth. It's slow, ugly and a bad multi-tasker whose interface hasn't been significantly updated in, well, forever. iMovie, on the other hand, is just the opposite: constantly being updated, which can have its downsides as well, I realize. But unless Apple makes some serious updates to Final Cut Pro, I'll be looking for a simple, speedy replacement. I did this with Pro Tools a couple years ago; I got so sick of installing and maintaining Pro Tools on my system with diminishing returns that when GarageBand became capable enough I switched entirely. I now use GarageBand for all my songwriting and music recording. It works great and it works seamlessly with my $450, 24 bit Pro Tools hardware. Better than Pro Tools itself, in fact. And since that switch I've bought the unbelievably affordable iLife with every new release. So I'll be there with bells on, this year with an eye towards iMovie.

But perhaps the most interesting — or at least the oddest — part of this year's expo, for me anyway, was trying to follow MacRumors' live coverage of the keynote. About halfway through the event strange messages began appearing in their feed:

Eventually their site went down altogether. Obviously, MacRumors' feed got totally hacked. I've never actually witnessed anything like that before, believe it or not. It was a bit surreal. A bit jarring. And certainly odd. Too bad, too, 'cause I'm actually quite fond of their coverage. Fortunately, less hackable — though not auto-updating — feeds could be had at Ars Technica, TUAW and Engadget, so I finshed out the last half hour with obsessive command-r's and tab-switching. Fun stuff!

So, another — and the last — Macworld Expo keynote has come and gone, with, from my chair, something squarely in between a bang and a whimper. But then, that was pretty much what I expected.

UPDATE: I almost forgot: For online music purchases I've been using Amazon, but Apple's new DRM-free policy, announced at yesterday's keynote, might put iTunes back in the game for me. Either way, this is a good thing that will allow customers greater freedom of choice when buying music online.

The Case of the Changing Case

Try copying two items whose names match in every way except case from a local drive to another local drive in the Mac OS X Finder and you'll see something like this:

This makes plenty of sense. The Finder (actually, the filesystem on which the Finder resides, in this case HFS+) is not case-sensitive by default, so it sees the file "intro.mpg" as being identical to "Intro.mpg" and therefore simply alerts the user of the presence of a like-named file and asks him how to proceed.

But the other day I got the strangest alert I've seen in a while when trying to copy a file named "Intro.mpg" from my networked home account to a local folder with a file called "intro.mpg":

Seems that, all of a sudden, we have some case issues. Now why would that be?

It appears that if the originating file comes from my network home, and if that network home lives on an NFS mount, and if the filesystem that hosts that network home is case-sensitive — all of which in this case is true — the Finder kinda freaks out. Or at least alerts the user in a very strange way. I mean, what's with that wording? I don't think I've ever read a more convoluted sentence in my life. And the options spelled out in that sentence — "skip" or "continue" — are not reflected in the language used by the buttons — "Stop" or "Skip." Tsk, tsk! And "some of these items?" Dude, it was only one item. I swear.

Actually, this last one I think I understand: Though I was only copying one Finder item, as users of non-HFS filesystems might be aware, copying between HFS and non-HFS filesystems will cause the creation of dot-underscore files, which are there to preserve HFS-specific data about the file in question. These files automatically get created and follow the file around invisibly, transparently to the user. I believe the Finder was taking these additional files into consideration in the alert. This may or may not be true. I can really only guess. But that's my hunch.

Nevertheless, this alert is abominable, if somewhat amusing. Apple still has some work to do when it comes to the wording in their alerts.

And they clearly have some work to do when it comes to dealing with conflicts on non-HFS volumes as well.

UPDATE: I've changed this post slightly for clarity.

Spotlight Sort Options

While Spotlight in Mac OS X 10.5 is greatly improved, there is one area in which it has regressed to an unusable state. Sort options in Leopard's Spotlight are limited to only three fields: Name, Kind and Last Opened. Uh... This is bad, guys...

For most quickie finds I'll usually turn to the Spotlight menubar item. And this usually gets the job done. But every now and then I need to create a more complex search, and for that I'll typically turn to the "command-f" Finder method. Again, there are many useful advantages in Leopard over Tiger when it comes to this sort of search, most notably the nested search properties. These allow Spotlight in Leopard to create searches of Byzantine complexity. Astoundingly, the results will only be sortable by the aforementioned criteria. Need to look at your "Date Created" search by "Date Created?" Too bad. Guess you're shit out of luck.

Smart folders never looked so dumb.

This has been posted about The Internets for some time now, mentioned recently in this fine MacOSXHints post, and now listed as one of that site's author's most glaring problems in Leopard. I must admit, I haven't needed this functionality until recently — very late in Leopard's release — which is why I'm only noticing it now. But boy, when you do need it, it's shocking to discover this constraint in an otherwise greatly improved tool.

It kills me when a company takes one step forward and another back like this. I really hope Apple fixes this shortcoming sooner rather than later.

It's About Time (and Dates)

I bitched about this almost two years ago, and it's finally fixed with the new del.icio.us redesign, which, I must say, I really like a lot. You can now sort your del.icio.us bookmarks, either alphabetically, or by "Most Recent," by which they mean "most recently added," I believe.

Oh, and I guess it's just "delicious.com" now. They went and killed the dots.

Anyway. Thanks delicious! And nice work!

Leopard Bugaboos

As big a fan as I am of Leopard, there's always room for improvement. And, though I've covered my major gripes already, I've recently discovered some additional buggy behavior in Leopard.

Application Switching

For some time now, Mac OS X has had the ability to switch between applications using the handy command-tab key combo. This works in Leopard as it always has, but I continually encounter a UI problem when doing this. Let me describe an example: I open an application, and, as it opens, I command-tab to another one. When the first application finishes opening, its windows are now on top of the active application's windows. That is, it's possible, through command-tab application switching, to get into a state in which the active application's windows are completely obscured by a recently opened application's windows. The easy solution is to quickly command-tab between the two apps. But it's pretty annoying when this happens: suddenly I find myself unable to work in an application I've just switched to. Is it a bug? I'd say yes.

UPDATE: I've just discovered that this happens not just when a new application has been opened, but also when switching to an app that has a recently activated process. For instance, in Firefox, I open a new window and then immediately switch to Mail, then back to Firefox again (hit command-tab twice rapidly). While Firefox attempts to open the window, it will appear to remain in the background, though the menubar will now clearly show that Firefox is, indeed, the active application. It seem like, during the time when Firefox is opening that new window (which on my aging Powerbook, takes a second), the OS can bring the app to the foreground, but is somehow unable to display the app's windows, and thus simply displays the windows of whatever app was up last. Ugliness!

Install and Keep Package

In Software Update there exists an option to "Install and Keep Package." When choosing this option, Software Update will download any selected updates, install them on your system and then save them to your hard drive for use later. I've often needed to do multiple installs of an update, and it's much faster to do so from disk, so I've used this as my preferred method of update. But this excellent feature just doesn't work for me in Leopard. In past versions of Mac OS X, these downloaded updates were stored in /Library/Packages. That folder is now gone. When I first installed Leopard, I noticed that "Install and Keep Package" downloaded updates to a different folder in /Library (perhaps /Library/Updates or /Library/Downloads, I don't recall). Then, for a time, the option downloaded updates to my ~/Downloads folder. But now choosing the option seemingly does nothing. The only way I can duplicate this functionality now is to use the "Download Only" option, and then, once the downloads are complete, choose the "Install" option. Using "Install and Keep Package" installs the software, but downloads nothing. Not a deal killer, but still frustrating.

Now I should mention that I keep my home folder on its own, separate partition. It's very possible that this is what's confusing Software Update, particularly considering the fact that Software Update now wants to download stuff to my home account (where it used to go somewhere globally accessible, i.e. in /Library). Still, given that this always worked flawlessly in Tiger, and that the "Download Only" option continues to work properly, I'd have to classify this as a bug.

Or at least a bugaboo.