Tiger installed
I’ve managed to get Tiger installed, and for the most part everything seems fine. The only oddity is something that cropped up after I had been running everything with no problems for a while. In certain applications (but not others), I get doubled spaces or characters when I type. This is most disruptive in Mail. I find that I can’t type any spaces at all in a new mail. As soon as I type a space, I get a system error beep and I can’t add anything else. Pasting text in to the document seems to work fine. On some of the other applications where I had this problem (like Safari), trashing the preferences seemed to sort the problem out, but it didn’t work for Mail.
I have a hunch that it might be related to the Spelling facility in some way, as I remember getting similar problems years ago when I had Spell Catcher and cocoAspell isntalled. When I try to select the “Spelling…” dialog, nothing happens, so I can’t check what language it’s set on. The red underlines also don’t appear. However, I don’t have any of these running, and I’ve also disabled Typeit4Me in case that was causing issues. Has anyone else come across this?
Other than this—-admittedly very irritating—-problem, Tiger is great. Spotlight is fantastic, and I love the Smart Folders in Finder. I’ve got one set up to look for all files in my home folder modified today, which is really useful for quickly locating active documents. I’m also finding the Dashboard widgets surprisingly useful too. I’ve already translated some French text with it, converted measurements and looked up words in the dictionary. I didn’t think I would be using them much, but they are pretty cool. And that ‘ripple’ effect when you add a widget to the screen is pure eye candy.
As for last night’s adventure, I didn’t make it to the front of the queue before I had to leave for the party. I trudged sadly past the Apple Store, looking longingly at all of those people trotting happily in to the shop and felt very jealous. As compensation, the party was great fun, and I’ll go to the Store when it’s less busy. I could even make my own Apple T-shirt, though it wouldn’t be quite the same thing. Queueing was actually quite fun, particularly overhearing the incredulous remarks of people walking past and finding out that thousands of people were queueing to get in to a computer shop. The best quote was from a couple of lads, said in a rather dismissive way: “Pfft. Geeks.” Yep, we’re geeky and proud of it, baby.
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One to look out for.. but I've found that the Translation widget has a memory leak on my machine. I had a Dashboard widget using up 30MB of memory and climbing so I did a process of elimination and it was the translator. Also a bit miffed as to why Apple couldn't be bothered to give us widgets that work with UK locations The weather and yellow pages ones are useless. I can't work out how to get the FTSE 100 on the stock tracker either, despite using its proper international reference(s).----- That's a cool bug. I haven't seen that in my 43 (and counting) installs of Tiger. Have you tried switching to a different system-level user account to see if the problem persists? Or doing a Safe Boot? Those things should provide some clues, at least. If not, I know where you can reach an expert for some advanced troubleshooting.
by Joe Kissell @ 30/04/2005 8:05 pm • Permalink •
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Peter, the weather widget works fine for any location that has a weatherstation. `try Amsterdam, Netherlands.
by nednieuws @ 30/04/2005 11:05 pm • Permalink •
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Peter Cooper: I'll watch out for that and only launch it when needed then. Yellow pages doesn't work with UK data, but as nednieuws says, weather does. I have mine set to Birmingham (overcast right now, naturally
). The trick---which took me a little while to discover---is that you need to enter a city, then hit enter (not the 'done' button. It will check the database and give you a list of cities with that name from which you pick one. I also had an issue with it until I closed one instance of it and started another one, configuring it immediately.
Joe Kissell: Yay! Sorted out! I tried creating another user as you suggested, and spelling and Mail worked fine there, so I knew it was a system level thing. I had a suspicion that cocoAspell might be to blame, but I could have sworn that I had tried searching for it with Spotlight, but didn't find anything. Anyway, a new search found an active instance of Aspell.service in ~/Services, so I removed that, logged out and in again, and all is well with both spelling and Mail. Interesting: Tiger Mail must be much more dependent on the AppleSpell process than before. I notice that there's a preference to spell check on send now. It seems that if spelling is broken, Mail breaks in all kinds of nasty ways.
Anyway, I'm just relieved that everything is working OK now.
by bsag @ 01/05/2005 6:05 am • Permalink •
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My computer was heavily bogged down and I noticed memory leaks as well. I don't know if Translator in particular was doing it, although it was one of the last to quit. The Weather widget on the other hand, oh boy. When I finally went to activity monitor I see the thing going up to 160+ mb real memory. I quickly(as soon as it would go through anyways) removed all my widgets for the time being.
by Matthew @ 03/05/2005 11:06 am • Permalink •
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I would also like to know how to get FTSE stocks on the stock widget. Seems a bit of a pointless one otherwise.
by Matthew @ 03/05/2005 5:05 pm • Permalink •
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I've seen the 'ripple' effect when adding new widgets to the screen as a demo at the Apple Store, and it's mentioned above. However, I haven't managed to replicate the effect on my machine. When I click on a widget to add it I get an effect similar to the genie effect when maximising windows. Is there a widget setting somewhere?
by Alastair @ 05/05/2005 9:05 am • Permalink •
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I've seen the 'ripple' effect when adding new widgets to the screen as a demo at the Apple Store, and it's mentioned above. However, I haven't managed to replicate the effect on my machine. When I click on a widget to add it I get an effect similar to the genie effect when maximising windows. Is there a widget setting somewhere?
by Alastair @ 05/05/2005 9:06 am • Permalink •
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Matthew: That's a bit weird. I've had the weather widget running continuously for a few days, and it's only pulling about 12MB of real memory. I don't know how to get FTSE on the stocks widget (heh, no stocks for me!), but I'm sure that there will be loads of localised widgets available before long. That's the beauty of them.
Alastair: I think that the ripple effect depends on Core Graphics, and that's only available on machines with the right video cards. If you've got a Mac mini or an older Mac, you might not have the right video card to see it. My guess is that the genie effect gets substituted if that's the case.
by bsag @ 05/05/2005 6:05 pm • Permalink •
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I spent my first wedding anniversary, 24 October 2003, waiting in line at the SoHo Apple Store in New York to pick up Panther, with my wife naturally. The line was enormous, and some passers-by asked the couple in front of us, who actually had a small baby with them, what they were waiting for. The guy said, with a broad smile, "A new operating system!" He then turned around to us and said, "It does sound bad, doesn't it?"
by teekay @ 07/05/2005 7:06 am • Permalink •
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No ripple for me either :( Although there is a UK Yellow Pages widget!
by richie @ 08/05/2005 4:06 pm • Permalink •
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Alastair and richie: bsag is right. The ripple effect requires a graphics card that supports Core Image. You can check whether your card supports it or not by clicking the Apple menu (icon in the top left of the screen on the menu bar) > About This Mac > More Info... Then expand Hardware and check the Graphics/Displays screen.
Alternatively, you can just drag a new Widget into your Dashboard and see if it ripples
Details of cards that can support Core Image can be found on [url="http://www.apple.com/macosx/features/coreimage/" rel="nofollow"] - see the right hand sidebar "Hardware Support".
Simon[/url]
by Simon @ 10/05/2005 7:06 am • Permalink •
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My Mac doesn't support Core Image, apparently. But nevertheless, I can still have hours of fun with the Core Image Fun House (install Developer tools, natch). And there's a very enticing looking program called Quartz Composer which runs like a drain but looks very cool.
How can I get work done with stuff like this?
by pete @ 10/05/2005 3:06 pm • Permalink •
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Hi, your Spelling problem reminds me of a tiff I had when I had an incompatible version of cocoAspell installed.Though this was long before Tiger came along, the symptoms you descibe are totally similar, so I'd check with them for updates. Cheers,
Jules
by Jules @ 20/06/2005 8:07 am • Permalink •
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