Leopard
Thanks to pre-ordering Leopard (it was delivered on Friday), I now have Leopard installed. The installation went very smoothly, thanks in no small part to reading Joe Kissell’s Take Control book, Take Control of Upgrading to Leopard before I attempted it. Joe is a friend, but I’d be recommending his book even if he wasn’t. It’s very detailed, thoroughly researched, and a great confidence-booster if you’re unsure about which of the installation options are best for you. I had a mess of poorly installed Unix applications in /usr/local and /opt which I was beginning to find difficult to keep straight, so I decided to go for a clean slate with the Erase and Install option. I’d made a bootable backup with SuperDuper!, so I was able to use Leopard’s file transfer facility to move all my applications and user files back from the bootable backup. I’m happy to say that it worked beautifully. All I had to reinstall was the TeX distribution and MySQL (more on that later), and I had a clean and fast system.
A lot has been written about the headline features of Leopard, so I won’t repeat what you can read elsewhere, but Leopard is generally wonderful. I’ve been waiting for Spaces for ages, and love it, and Quick Look is addictive once you start using it. For example, I discovered today that it’s perfect for quickly scanning the README files included with installation packages. Time Machine is also beautifully implemented, and makes keeping incremental archives effortless. The whole operating system seems much more consistent and integrated, both functionally and visually. There are more links between applications, like the todos which you can create or view in Mail or iCal, and the data detectors which link together information in Mail messages with Address Book information or events in iCal. Even better, as Matt Gemmell observed, Mac OS X is now an even more superb development platform.
As I mentioned earlier, I used to have a mess of stuff installed in /usr/local, mostly because the versions of Ruby, SQLite3 and so on that came installed with Tiger were rather old. But Leopard comes with fairly up to date versions of Ruby and SQLite3, and even has ruby-gems and lots of useful gems (including Rails, naturally) pre-installed (the full details are available here). That’s why I was able to get away with just reinstalling MySQL and TeX — everything else I needed was already installed. The RubyCocoa frameworks are also installed by default, and integrated with XCode. These allow you to create full-blown native Mac OS X applications (taking advantage of all the native APIs) written mostly in Ruby rather than Cocoa/Objective-C. I’d been curious about it for a while, so I decided to give it a try. I used an example from the Ruby Cookbook to build a stopwatch application in XCode and Interface Builder, and was amazed by how easy it was. That’s pretty exciting, at least to me: if someone with no knowledge of Cocoa, a basic knowledge of Ruby and a few pointers from the documentation can build a proper Mac OS X application in a couple of hours, using only tools built into the operating system, that’s quite impressive.
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MySQL will work again if you follow some simple Terminal mojo.
Fix
I didn't even have to sacrifice a goat or anything to get it working, now as for the new Apache, don't get me started on that, I'll have to look into that some time.
by Harold Bakker @ 28/10/2007 9:46 pm • Permalink •
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Is it worth £87, and is Mail less clunky?
by Jonathan Briggs @ 28/10/2007 10:46 pm • Permalink •
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I just did an upgrade install, and everything went really well. A couple of small apps have problems -- but the developers have said they are not Leopard compatible yet anyway, so the type of install is not the issue. Any other small issues I had have gone away after updating to latest versions, and, in the case of Firefox, clearing private data.
MacPorts wouldn't selfupdate until I installed the new Xcode, and then was fine. Installed binaries are all in place and working fine -- even those in /usr/local/bin are there: unison, growlnotify, etc. TeX runs fine. I didn't even have to do anything to MySQL -- mine is the MacPorts install, with the Lauchdaemon and sock setup as per http://www.paulsturgess.co.uk/articles/show/46-using-macportsdarwinports-to-install-ruby-on-rails-mysql-subversion-capistrano-and-mongrel-on-mac-os-x.
All in all, relatively painless, and all the nice stuff in Leopard is, well, nice!
by Steve Murphy @ 29/10/2007 1:23 am • Permalink •
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Harold Bakker: Except I did an erase and install and chose not to reinstate folders other than /Users from root, so there was no MySQL. That was deliberate, because I wanted to start again and install exactly what I needed in /usr/local.
Jonathan Briggs: I was lucky to get if for less than that courtesy of the Apple Education program, but I think it depends on what you're expecting. There are a few big new features (like Time Machine), but otherwise it's a series of small but very nice improvements. It also depends on what you found clunky about Mail. I'm a plain text kinda gal, so the stationery isn't going to get used, but integrated todos (which sync with iCal and notes are quite nice).
And the data detectors are really surprisingly useful. I've used them 4 times today to quickly set a meeting or seminar appointment, and they work very well. It seems like a small thing, but being able to make an appointment from an email without having to switch to iCal is a great timesaver, and stops you losing focus. I was also amused to notice that it tries to find a location for an appointment elsewhere in the email. I got an announcement for a leaving do for a couple of colleagues. It picked up the date and time fine, but also inserted 'Glasgow' as the location, even though that had been mentioned some distance from the date/time. Of course, they were leaving for Glasgow, so it wasn't the location of the leaving party, but it was a nice try, and I was impressed by the parsing!
If you're happy with Tiger, I would wait and see how you feel in a month or so. Unless you don't back up properly, in which case, Leopard is probably worth it for Time Machine alone.
Steve Murphy: Yes, it was pretty smooth. Apple's upgrading mechanism has improved a great deal over the years, and with a bootable backup, it's pretty much automatic.
by bsag @ 29/10/2007 7:48 pm • Permalink •
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Illustration - On Saturday I recieved an e-mail on my Dell Laptop via Outlook Express, it didn't pop up in Mail on my Mac Mini until Sunday, so I assume that Mail was too lazy to go and collect it! It's not the first time, but it has never been that marked before.
All this geek-speak about myQED and missing bits of this and that frighten me to death, and leads me to think I'd better "Phone a friend" who knows Macs before I attempt to install Leaopard, though I rather think most of its subtleties will be wasted on me.
by Jonathan Briggs @ 29/10/2007 11:59 pm • Permalink •
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Is there a chance we can get a screenshot of your application?
by Sam Griffith @ 01/11/2007 4:09 am • Permalink •
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Jonathan Briggs: You don't need to worry about MySQL or anything else I mentioned in that line. You won't have it installed, so the installer should take care of upgrading everything for you without manual intervention. As for the email issue, is this a .Mac address? Because I sometimes find that my .Mac email gets delayed, and it's nothing to do with Mail.
Sam Griffith: Well, it really is very simple, and just taken from the Ruby Cookbook, but here it is.
by bsag @ 03/11/2007 2:05 pm • Permalink •
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would you offer your app for dowload? That would be great.
by excogitationist @ 30/11/2007 6:26 pm • Permalink •
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