Things Falling Apart
I love and adore Apple, every day I smoke Kali before the Sacred Shrine and think Happy Thoughts, letting all the badness spiral away to oblivion, or land upon Micro$oft's doorstep.
However... There are some ISSUES, many/most of which did not exist in 10.4 or 10.4.1. Ever since installing 10.4.2 and making heavy use of it, the following consistently rear their heads.
- Fonts. Font rendering is fucked up. Not always, not even most of the time, but at seemingly random moments (by which I mean to say, it is not being affected by how many apps I have open, how much memory is free or inactive, or seemingly anything else I have yet discovered) the letters in whatever font I am using (and it doesn't matter which one) pick up little dots. This depends on the font color and background, they little dots change color accordingly, it's like fuzzy halo's of static surrounding all the letters.
Continuing with Fonts, ever since the last security update, de-selecting Font sets is also hosed. I have repaired disk permissions, I have even run disk warrior, but no matter what I do, when I enable all SYSTEM fonts, and choose to make use of Apple's Helvetica, as soon as I reboot, my choices drift away and vanish, and suddenly I have Adobe's version going.
I need Adobe's version to exactly match certain clients who make use of it. Apple's is slightly different, yet, alas, Mail.app defaults to Helvetica, and when Adobe's is automagically loaded, the headers look awful and broken apart.
I fix it, the computer resets it with each reboot and re-breaks it.
- Spotlight. In 10.0 and 10.1, I was able to drag entire FireWire volumes to the non-indexing tab, and have it STOP indexing disks which are nothing but exact duplicates/mirrors (and in one case a RAID), of disks which I allow it to index.
It adds 'em. But much like the font issue, it forgets this choice the moment I reboot. This behavior is reproducible across 3 different systems I use, all different (one is a PowerBook, the other a Dual G5, the last a Mac Mini). Permissions have been repaired, it finds no problems; with every new reboot, it reverts back to what I don't want it to do.
I realize the 10.4.3 uber-update is supposed to fix billyunz and billyunz of problems and already weighs in at 100MG give or take, and I certainly hope it does so.
Mac OS/X is sweet. Namely because it's elegant, melty, and definitely an enriched environment that allows me to be creative and USE the computer instead of endlessly dicking around with the settings just to make it work, when I'm not in the mood to explore and play with the machine for its own sake.
Sadly, this is no longer the case, and the little issues, in various apps, keep popping up, all of which adds up to a no-longer seamless user experience. It's like every App has some kinda MINOR brand-new gotcha, buried somewhere within.
The issue of mounting DiVX/3VIX codecs, and having the mysterious HELP HELP appear in apps like QuickTime and Automator, still hasn't been resolved, and since the last update, for the first time since I've been using it, Safari has starting crashing. A LOT. In fact, at this point, I've switched to the "unstable, experimental" WebKit version, because unlike the "polished, ready for prime-time!" official release... the beta branch has NONE of these issues. It Just Works and... doesn't bloat up beyond belief after leaving it open for a few days.
I mostly use a PowerBook with 2GB RAM, Safari should not be eating as much memory as it does -- don't even get me started on bloating widgets (those released by Apple, not the 13 year old down the block who is learning to program by releasing widgets).
I'm mostly done now. Well, almost. iTunes 5.0 makes me happy, it finally has FOLDERZ! The Motorola/Apple phone is hideous and awful and I get the feeling Steve wanted this to happen in a RAZR form-factor (since the RAZR was prominently displayed in Apple's slide-shows as the "coolest phone on the market" while he didn't even let the camera zoom in on the phone he was using "we can't show you the phone on camera, but you can hear it!" yet, they had no trouble zooming on the Nano) and the endless delay was Motorola refusing to do it, and sticking iTunes support into ...the ugly piece of crap they finally stuck it into.
The the other hand, the iPod Nano is pretty groovy and very pretty.
That's it for right now.
However... There are some ISSUES, many/most of which did not exist in 10.4 or 10.4.1. Ever since installing 10.4.2 and making heavy use of it, the following consistently rear their heads.
- Fonts. Font rendering is fucked up. Not always, not even most of the time, but at seemingly random moments (by which I mean to say, it is not being affected by how many apps I have open, how much memory is free or inactive, or seemingly anything else I have yet discovered) the letters in whatever font I am using (and it doesn't matter which one) pick up little dots. This depends on the font color and background, they little dots change color accordingly, it's like fuzzy halo's of static surrounding all the letters.
Continuing with Fonts, ever since the last security update, de-selecting Font sets is also hosed. I have repaired disk permissions, I have even run disk warrior, but no matter what I do, when I enable all SYSTEM fonts, and choose to make use of Apple's Helvetica, as soon as I reboot, my choices drift away and vanish, and suddenly I have Adobe's version going.
I need Adobe's version to exactly match certain clients who make use of it. Apple's is slightly different, yet, alas, Mail.app defaults to Helvetica, and when Adobe's is automagically loaded, the headers look awful and broken apart.
I fix it, the computer resets it with each reboot and re-breaks it.
- Spotlight. In 10.0 and 10.1, I was able to drag entire FireWire volumes to the non-indexing tab, and have it STOP indexing disks which are nothing but exact duplicates/mirrors (and in one case a RAID), of disks which I allow it to index.
It adds 'em. But much like the font issue, it forgets this choice the moment I reboot. This behavior is reproducible across 3 different systems I use, all different (one is a PowerBook, the other a Dual G5, the last a Mac Mini). Permissions have been repaired, it finds no problems; with every new reboot, it reverts back to what I don't want it to do.
I realize the 10.4.3 uber-update is supposed to fix billyunz and billyunz of problems and already weighs in at 100MG give or take, and I certainly hope it does so.
Mac OS/X is sweet. Namely because it's elegant, melty, and definitely an enriched environment that allows me to be creative and USE the computer instead of endlessly dicking around with the settings just to make it work, when I'm not in the mood to explore and play with the machine for its own sake.
Sadly, this is no longer the case, and the little issues, in various apps, keep popping up, all of which adds up to a no-longer seamless user experience. It's like every App has some kinda MINOR brand-new gotcha, buried somewhere within.
The issue of mounting DiVX/3VIX codecs, and having the mysterious HELP HELP appear in apps like QuickTime and Automator, still hasn't been resolved, and since the last update, for the first time since I've been using it, Safari has starting crashing. A LOT. In fact, at this point, I've switched to the "unstable, experimental" WebKit version, because unlike the "polished, ready for prime-time!" official release... the beta branch has NONE of these issues. It Just Works and... doesn't bloat up beyond belief after leaving it open for a few days.
I mostly use a PowerBook with 2GB RAM, Safari should not be eating as much memory as it does -- don't even get me started on bloating widgets (those released by Apple, not the 13 year old down the block who is learning to program by releasing widgets).
I'm mostly done now. Well, almost. iTunes 5.0 makes me happy, it finally has FOLDERZ! The Motorola/Apple phone is hideous and awful and I get the feeling Steve wanted this to happen in a RAZR form-factor (since the RAZR was prominently displayed in Apple's slide-shows as the "coolest phone on the market" while he didn't even let the camera zoom in on the phone he was using "we can't show you the phone on camera, but you can hear it!" yet, they had no trouble zooming on the Nano) and the endless delay was Motorola refusing to do it, and sticking iTunes support into ...the ugly piece of crap they finally stuck it into.
The the other hand, the iPod Nano is pretty groovy and very pretty.
That's it for right now.
Comments
What strikes me is that everyone appears to have different problems.
The only problems I have is Excel and Word sometimes stall but only on the odd occasion. I find Apple software no probs. Its like that with Windows, in fact even more so due to bad programming. I feel Tiger is getting better all the time and I do hope 10.4.3 will truly be the system that Tiger 10.4 should have been.
Two areas I think should be tackled are
1) GUI should be more standardised.
2) the widget manager should be a lot better to use especialy in regards of installing new widgets.
I find spotlight excellent and I rarely use Finder at all.
What do other users think should be the two most important issues which need tackling?
Anything beyond that list is basically gravy, but I would take a proper replacement for HFS Plus (Reiser4 would be very cool) and a better Spotlight with a new UI to replace that weird hyperlink thing they have going, plus full file system integration a la BeOS.
Originally posted by jimbo123
Heavy post!
What strikes me is that everyone appears to have different problems.
The only problems I have is Excel and Word sometimes stall but only on the odd occasion. I find Apple software no probs. Its like that with Windows, in fact even more so due to bad programming. I feel Tiger is getting better all the time and I do hope 10.4.3 will truly be the system that Tiger 10.4 should have been.
Two areas I think should be tackled are
1) GUI should be more standardised.
2) the widget manager should be a lot better to use especialy in regards of installing new widgets.
I find spotlight excellent and I rarely use Finder at all.
What do other users think should be the two most important issues which need tackling?
Yeah, the weird thing is that everybody seems to have DIFFERENT minor problems as you said. I've never had Word or Excel crash, but on the other hand I live within CS2 and Apple's Pro Apps not Micro$oft Apps. On the third hand, no wait, I've run out of hands, I've actually had ZERO major problems, and experienced none of the weird issues that pop up on MacFixIt or people ranting on the Apple Discussion forums.
I've also had zero problems with CS2 grinding my machine to a halt, like seems to happen for a lot of people, or anything MAJOR. Just... lots of minor problems which have somewhat trashed the previous "seamless" user experience.
As Electric Monk mentioned, resolution independence would be very useful. I don't have a major feature list I want from Leopard, what I would VERY MUCH like from Tiger is:
- Fix the myriad minor problems that exist. According to ThinkSecret which is right at least as often as it's wrong, the current 10.4.3 update has already addressed more than 400 bug fixes. I get the feeling it won't be adding too many new features.
What I would like to see in TIGER:
- Save the window sizes/positions for different screen resolutions (not quite asking for as much as resolution independence). Using a PowerBook with dual heads is already a pretty slick experience. They've thought of nearly everything, it's excellent. EXCEPT... when I open anything under a 23" Cinema Screen, and then need to use it on a 15" PowerBook, all the window sizes are screwed up. I would like for it to save different sets of screen positions/settings, and remember them for whatever display I have plugged into the PowerBook. This really wouldn't be hard to do and it would make life for many of us who need portables, yet also need to be able to edit graphics or video and plug into full-size monitors, MUCH simpler.
- FIX THE STUPID "HELP HELP" (doubling of the Help system), under various apps effected by this bug, which installing DivX and/or 3ViX causes. A short list is Automator and QuickTime. It DOES NOT happen with most apps, just a few.
- Get Q2DE going already. I get the feeling it's been dumped until Leopard, or will crawl out of beta around 10.4.8. It does get less unstable with each .dot release, but it's still not quite there and turning it on full-time causes random screen redraw problems in different apps.
- Better iSync integration with non "Apple" cellphones. iSync mostly works with the RAZR, BlueTooth assistant is very hit and miss when trying to transfer files directly to the phone. iTunes support was there briefly and then mysteriously vanished. The RAZR is perfectly capable of playing mp3s, video, etc. But not using any tools Apple provides. Usually when I want to transfer data from the phone TO an Apple box, I need to initiate the transfer from the phone. This causes the process table to fill up with 100 instances of "OBEX" which never go away and just sit there, literally accumulating until hundreds of the processes are just hanging there until a reboot.
I'm outta here, probably I could go on for at least another 20 paragraphs though.
Originally posted by RichardH
- Better iSync integration with non "Apple" cellphones. iSync mostly works with the RAZR, BlueTooth assistant is very hit and miss when trying to transfer files directly to the phone. iTunes support was there briefly and then mysteriously vanished. The RAZR is perfectly capable of playing mp3s, video, etc. But not using any tools Apple provides. Usually when I want to transfer data from the phone TO an Apple box, I need to initiate the transfer from the phone. This causes the process table to fill up with 100 instances of "OBEX" which never go away and just sit there, literally accumulating until hundreds of the processes are just hanging there until a reboot.
I'm outta here, probably I could go on for at least another 20 paragraphs though.
In apples defence - MANY MANY cell phone cariers, all except Cingular AFAIK go to huge lengths to prevent BT/USB contact/appointment/mail/SMS syncing that is built into the phone - they want you to pay their exorbinant data rates.
With the DMCA being what it is, Apple has to whatch where they step - break or bypass encryption or a lock via reverse engineering...that is now criminal.
If Apple were to aquier the schemeatics to the phones from the manufacturer that they have a great relationship with (see motorola, and to a much lesser extent, sony) thus gaining the knoledge to bypass the locks...that seems legal to me, but no one can be sure.
DMCA RIDES AGAIN! YEHAWWWWWW!!!!!!!!!!!!
Boot to CD abd repair disk and repair permissions. Almost always fixes things up for me. If that doesn't do the trick, download yje combined update from apple and reinstall it.
Always repair permissions after doing the upgrade if not before also.
Responsible for the investigation and tuning of the time and resource requirements throughout the Mac OS X operating system. Duties include identifying significant opportunities for improvement, regressing issues during the development cycle, and undertaking in depth investigations, developing creative solutions on tight schedules and seeing them through to a successful conclusion.
I saw this advertised online at hotjobs.com.