For The Two Or Three Of Us, Another Mac Topic

[dmauro]

But the whole point of the launcher programs is to use your keyboard instead. For using the mouse, you've got the dock. :?

[FortNinety]

You know, Minimal Mac would be so much more awesome and useful if they skipped the retarded "inspirational" quotes and boring desktop pics and stuck with stuff like this...

http://minimalmac.com/post/215618199/via-mnmal-this-is-nothing-short-of-awesome-im

[FortNinety]

When I first installed Snow Leopard, I was generally pretty happy with all the little fixes here and there... despite all the other little things that got broken. Which I assumed would be addressed with an update. Which came and caused even more problems...

I'm now at the point in which I'm seriously thinking of wiping out my OS and going back to regular Leopard. I'm so fucking tired of shit like Spaces working when it wants to, all the dumb kernal panics, and stuff like Preview... which never had a SINGLE problem since, oh, 10.0 back in 2000... now not working properly. Jesus fucking Christ...

[FortNinety]

I'm not a Mac zombie, but I am a big fan of Jonathan Ive...

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=K8zL7WYze58

[dhex]

installed cs4 at work today. runs great! no issues so far.

[FortNinety]

I've heard that Photoshop CS4 is really different. True or not?

[dhex]

outside of the interface, it's far more optimized for dual core operations. but other than that? the tabbed documents are awesome, but that's the whole cs4 suite.

edit: the lost of the pdf presentation automation really fucking sucks it.

[FortNinety]

As there needed be even more proof that Snow Leopard is the worst release of OS X thus far...

http://discussions.apple.com/thread.jspa?messageID=10500056

... Basically, a lot of people's CPUs began overheating when the time changed for daylight savings. Seriously. wtf indeed.

Thankfully I don't have that issue, but my Preview and Expose woes are driving me so nuts that I'm seriously considering downgrading back to 10.5. I just hope the new update, which is LONG overdue, fixes the problem.

[FortNinety]

So apparently that bug I've been complaining about is actually a new feature... and perhaps the stupidest ever at that...

http://www.tuaw.com/2009/11/04/snow-leopard-bug-prevents-opening-groups-of-recently-downloaded/

[FortNinety]

So 10.6.2 is out, and apparently, it fucking sucks...

http://www.tuaw.com/2009/11/09/mac-os-x-10-6-2-is-on-the-prowl-plus-security-update-for-10-5-u/

... Just check the comments section. Most folks at TUAW are pretty sensible. At least as far as Apple zombies go.

Like one person put it best, Snow Leopard is officially Apple's Vista.

[B coma]

Glad I resisted the urge to upgrade at first since Digidesign screamed from atop the mountain not to, at least while they were getting their ducks in a row with the Protools 8.1 update.

[FortNinety]

Well, I installed 10.6.2 simply because my system had become so unstable. Thankfully, it feels a tad bit tighter, but all the stupid quirks are still there. Awesome. And it still feels like my Mac is ignoring the fact that I have 4 gigs of ram. I swear, my G3 with 512 mb felt zippier in certain regards.

I've also spent a great deal of time talking with folks about these issues and am officially keep my mouth shut on that front. As previously noted, there's nothing more aggravating when discussing a computer issue and some other person goes "well, I certainly haven't had any issues" with the underling tone being "you're an idiot/you're making this all up", which is something that's across the board regardless of platform. But you'd think Mac users, who one would assume are more artistically inclined or more used to a production environment, would understand how, when attempting to open 100 jpgs and only 82 of them pop up, is a fucking headache and a half.

[B coma]

at work we have a pretty wide range of mac desktops, and I have to say the two "ancient" G4's we have running 10.3 feel waaaay zippier and more stable when doing the day to day stuff than the (technically more powerful) PowerPC G5's.  Though this is due in part to these G5's being tortured with with rendering  video projects all the time.  The Intel G5 has been problem free.

I've had my low end macbook since I purchased it new in Feb of this year, and it hasn't give me shit yet. which is a pleasant surprise!

[FortNinety]

Dude, Panther was the mother fucking bomb. Is it any surprise that it was what finally won over all the last lingering OS 9 hold-outs? That and it was getting officially long in the tooth.

On a side note, I spent a few hours the other night in the Classic portion of Apple's tech support message board, and the one thread where someone asked "why do you folks still bother with OS 9?" was pretty interesting. Granted, it was hardly perfect, but there was something about it that was just awesome, in a "it just fucking worked" kind of way, assuming that you know what the fuck you were doing. Everyone complains about their systems freezing up all the time, and getting the dreaded bomb icon, but in all the years I had my iMac G3, that happened like only once!

I think the most telling observation, when arguing against OS X (and perhaps most modern operating systems as a whole) is the idea of "I want to be the master of my machine, not vice versa". Referring to the permissions song and dance that all OS X users are pretty much used to.

Anyway, earlier this weekend I finally got a portable hard drive (a second one, the first one died in three hours, as noted elsewhere), backed up my shit, wiped the internal out, did a clean install, and... 10.6.2 is still as stupid as before, but it does feel a tad bit tighter still, so I guess mission accomplished. Gotta say, Time Machine is a God send; Apple does do some shit totally right.

I also decided to switch back to Safari from Firefox, when I realized that a good deal of my sluggishness, even more than I initially realized, was due to 3.5. Though some state that the problem has been there since 3.0. I really miss how tabs are managed, and it's auto-fill tricks, but man, they did a great job of making Safari 4 as fast as 3.

[B coma]

I shouldn't be surprised to hear that there are still OS 9 loyalists, but yeah that is a pretty interesting argument. I still us OS 9 from time to time at work and I love how speedy it is, but the GUI has always seemed to be somewhat of an obstacle for me when I'm in a hurry.

it's actually nice that the snow leopard upgrade is so inexpensive but I think I will hold off until the itch really comes back.  I think I used up all of my good fortune with the successful (so far) Windows 7 upgrade on my desktop.