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I recently tried Leopard on my system. I didn’t need Leopard, but I felt that if I didn’t make the jump then I’d be forever falling behind the state of the art. It installed easily over Tiger as an archive and install. I made sure first that most of the applications that loaded at startup were temporarily disabled and one or two that were deemed actually dangerous to Leopard were removed altogether.

So, the installation went smoothly, and everything worked as advertised. But there were one or two nagging things that eventually caused me to change my mind about the upgrade: One was that the system was simply working too hard now for my liking; even though I have plenty of ram installed, the Finder was constantly rebuilding its cache of preview icons in order to drive Coverflow — in fact it was rebuilding even in list view. It worked, but it just wasn’t snappy any more on this G5 machine.

The second problem was that several of my favorite add-ons weren’t ready for primetime use under Leopard. They included PithHelmet, Mega Zoom, Sogudi and Menu Master. All told, the loss of these — and a couple other helper apps — made for quite a step back in productivity.

I knew I had to wipe the drive to go back to the previous system. I didn’t have a backup drive available to stow all my data so I decided to take the opportunity, while reverting to Tiger, to take stock of which data was essential and which was superfluous. I threw out everything that was there just for entertainment and managed to archive the rest (the really important stuff) on just a dozen or so CDs.

My plan was to wipe the hard drive, then install Tiger from the original disks, then rev it up to version 10.4.10 (10.4.11 was too buggy in my opinion). This I did, followed by the installation of all my archived data and my essential apps.

Then BANG, it broke.

It booted to the Desktop and everything I did in the Finder was fine, but every app that launched immediately quit, including System Preferences. I recalled reading some Apple forums where it was theorized that Leopard was writing to the disk in some low level way that the earlier Tiger OS wouldn’t recognize, even after a simple wipe; now I was thinking that theory might just be right. I started again with the Tiger install, only this time I had it write zeros to the whole disk to completely blank it before formatting it again.

Second time was a charm and over the next couple of days I slowly built up just the system that I wanted. Then BANG, it broke again. It was that sickening “Engine splutters while flying over open water” feeling you get with a totally random kernel panic. It took me back to a time when I went through three dodgy logic boards in six months (thank God for Apple Care).

Two more panics, and some hardware testing and swapping out of RAM showed that one of my two pieces of RAM was faulty somewhere in its higher regions; chucking the RAM (leaving me with one gig) fixed the glitch. Was that RAM always faulty and I’d never used that region before now? I don’t know.

I do know that it seems to run just as well as it ever did, with just the one gig. Maybe with the two gigs in the past, it was constantly correcting for the error and not running at optimum speed. Is UNIX that clever? Like I say: I don’t really know.

On top of all that, my internet connection was down for the past few days. So it’s been quite a week. And what has all this taught me?

I like Leopard a lot. It’s great, but I can wait a few months before attempting the upgrade again, until more of the bugs are ironed out. Even then I’ll think long and hard as the current setup is just so “right” for what I do. As with previous gadgets and systems I’ve adopted, I think I’ve reached a point where I’m more or less at the top of the curve as far as enhancement to the experience goes; more tinkering now is just for tinkering’s sake, and could be a little dangerous (I say that now…).

The other thing this experience taught me is that I was too ruthless in what I chucked out. I went past lean, to rudimentary. I now miss being able to, with a couple of clicks, call up some old TV episode, or piece of music, just for the hell of it.

Next on my wish list: That external drive…

I’m always a little nervous when it comes to OS updates. On the one hand it’s always nice to be up to date, but on the other, why risk breaking something that’s so stable in its current state.

When I looked at the specs of the 10.4.11 update the list of fixes looked very arcane, and not particularly exciting or relevant to my situation. But there also was included the final and supposedly stable version of Safari 3; and this was the only way to get a hold of it. I bit the bullet, induced by the prospect of exploring the new Safari.

I installed the upgrade and had no problems at all with the OS side of things; it was Safari itself that caused what grief I had. None of my SIMBL driven hacks liked it; several keyboard shortcuts had been changed — screwing up some of my Butler macros, and to me, it seems slower. Worse still, it was now here to stay (shades of the whole Microsoft IE embedded into the Windows OS brouhaha, but that’s another story).

This is the price one pays for tinkering, I guess. I don’t mean tinkering as in doing the upgrade; I mean tinkering as in having a pimped Safari to be upgraded. When I think back on all the software platforms I’ve used, PC, Mac and handheld, there was always some third party add-on that made each one “just so.”

Speaking of upgrades, have you noticed that Apple is more and more in the habit of adding some gift with each one? All of the iPhone and Touch updates, and the latest revisions to iTunes, have been primarily designed to stomp the latest hack, but they all add some new cool functionality that (probably) should have been there all along.

 
Spooky flashback time. Above is Leopard’s icon for a connected PC.

You Guys…

Mac applications tend to keep all of their components in one place; namely, their application packages (the icons you see within the Applications folder). You can normally discard an unwanted application simply by dragging it to the trash. However, there are normally some small configuration files left behind on other parts of your drive, like preference files. They are mostly harmless and quite tiny.

If you are really fastidious though, you might like to try AppDelete. When you drop an app on AppDelete’s icon in the Dock, it takes that application and any associated support files that it can find and moves them to the trash.

Afterwards you can leave AppDelete running while you check that other apps haven’t been affected by the file system changes. You can then simply press the Undo button to reverse the operation.

Even in the unlikely event that you encounter glitches further down the road — you will find when looking in the trash that AppDelete has stowed the suspect files in neat folders that represent where they were removed from.

All in all, a handy and safe method of removing all traces of an un-wanted app.

Learn more about AppDelete

OSX is famously proficient at keeping itself in good running condition. I’m not an expert on these matters, but I’m told it’s so efficient as a result of having been built on the very robust UNIX core.

Part of this UNIX legacy is a set of Cron scripts that run every day, week and month, completely in the background. They do things like clear away temp files, rebuild databases, free up memory; stuff like that.

Only problem is, they run at, like, 2:30 in the morning. It is possible to jump start these scripts and run them any time you like though. Why would you need to? A case in point might be when you rip a DVD using HandBrake; after the job (which is very CPU intensive) your CPU fan might be humming away and you’re left with only 30 megs of free RAM, instead of say, a gig of free RAM. This RAM will free up eventually but if you want things ship-shape now, you likely have three choices.

You can press Ctrl-Eject and choose to restart your Mac; do this though and you then need to launch all those apps you always like to have running and then re-open your documents.

You could invoke the necessary Cron scripts using the Terminal. When I was a Windows user, Mac people would scoff our DOS prompt, and I did too. When I switched I swore that I’d never look at a jaggy font with a flashing cursor in a command line window ever again.
 

 
Or, you can use something like MainMenu. As you can see, it does all of those arcane system chores, through a nice clean menu. To be honest, I’m scared to try most of the commands that it offers, but I do get great mileage from my Mac by running the daily, weekly and monthly maintenance scripts — from that menu — while my Mac is running (which it almost never is at 2:30 in the morning).

FolderGlance has a really helpful often overlooked feature that I thought I’d mention here. Its main party piece is the way you can “Glance” inside folders and other packages such as applications. The often overlooked feature is that if you right-click on documents and other such files, FolderGlance presents you with an extended “Open With…” Menu.

The standard OSX “Open With…” menu shows apps that are officially registered to open the selected file type. FolderGlance lets you populate its menu with any app you choose; you simply designate an “Open With…” folder and then for each of your favorite apps, you make an alias and then drop it there.

Andrew’s Mac Tips — Quick Review — FolderGlance

Funny thing about rounded corners. You either love them or you hate them; I’m quite schizophrenic on the subject. When I first built the Andrew’s Mac Tips site everything had rounded corners.
 

 
Lots of people liked them and wanted to know how I did it. I liked them too, otherwise I wouldn’t have gone to the trouble; but eventually I decided that they didn’t really serve any purpose, and they looked a little too “whimsical.”

Then I went all sharp edged and simple and square.

Mac OS windows have rounded top corners as a rule and I can understand that; there’s a lot of history to them, and they — in a subliminal way — suggest that if you want to resize a window: don’t look here, do it at the bottom-right corner.

As for the menu-bar: I was a little peeved — when I first saw Macs — that it too was rounded, but I came around. When Panther gave way to Tiger they went for a shiny title-bar, but it looked (and still looks) more like a smudge than a sheen to me.

Now Leopard has a new title-bar; all the focus has been on the fact that it’s semi-transparent. But look! No more rounded corners!
 

 
The Mac OS just lost its trademark. If the new title-bar reminds me of anything, it’s the title-bar of the iPhone. Are we slowly transitioning to the iPhone paradigm — one notch at a time?

If you don’t want to launch iPhoto just to show off your latest images it’s very easy to set up a smart folder in the finder that will show just those images, and give you a one-click slideshow solution.
 

 
Notice how one of the parameters is “Keywords.” If that wasn’t there then the smart folder would also include iPhoto-generated thumbnails and duplicates and they would spoil your quick presentation. So, make sure that all your images have at least one shared keyword.