From Usable To Unusable In 30 Seconds: OS X Leopard
A few weeks ago I blogged about Leopard, the latest version of Mac OS X. Since then I have used it heavily (it's my primary machine) so I think I'm reasonably well placed for this whinge:
Looking at the dock now I can see I'm running Photoshop, Zend, Parallels (with Windows 2000), Mulberry and Firefox. Not a huge load for a Core 2 Duo 2.33 with 2G RAM you'd have thought, plus the recent 10.5.1 update seemed to make things worse not better (a friend pointed out that this was probably rushed out to fix the Finder bug which lost data). If you're thinking of upgrading, don't - really, don't; at this point it's still Apple's version of Vista.
There are also more options for Leopard bugs here.
I really liked 10.4, it was solid, but I upgraded because I wanted to use Coverflow and Spaces. I've not dare try the latter yet.
Gah.
- I'm really getting sick of the sight of the coloured spinner. This mostly comes when changing to an application that hasn't been used for about 10 minutes, and can last up to 2 minutes before the application is responsive again. Worst culprits are Photoshop and Firefox presumably because of the memory footprint (although other apps trigger it), yet looking now there's 500MB free and Firefox has done it again.
- Return from sleep seems very buggy - sometimes I'll just get a black screen with our friend the coloured spinner in the middle of it, nothing will wake it and the only solution is to power-cycle (which is very very very fucking irritating if you've got a pile of windows open).
- Nicky's having the dreaded keyboard freeze since upgrading, documented here. Very frustrating and making her want to throw the damn thing through the window.
- On keyboards also, my new external keyboard sometimes doesn't detect when I plug it into the USB, I have to plug/unplug a couple of times. I've actually got two of these (the aluminium thing keyboards) and both exhibit the same behaviour on my MacBook and on the Mac Mini at home - both Intel.
- Window focus: this is very odd - sometimes you'll be able to mouse into a window and it's in focus, but you can't actually type into it. The keyboard just won't switch context to that application, solution is to minimise and maximise the window which seems to fix it, but it's hardly ideal especially when you hit cmd-W to close the window and it shuts something else off.
- Finder occasionally won't talk to the keyboard at all - solution is to force-quit and restart.
- Parallels is now very unreliable (running build 5160) - it was reasonably OK on my MacBook until Leopard came along, but it now frequently just sits there spinning and the only solution is - once again - force-quit. There's more about Parallels issues faced by Leopard users here, and I've just noticed that there's details about an open beta of a 'Leopard-compatible' build 5580 here and a download here.
- I've just had the weird mouse-flinging attack where the pointer will zip to a remote extremity of one of the screens, but it only seems to happen while I'm in the Fotopic office - possibly something to do with the light or the flourescents reflecting on the desk? Nicky gets it too, but hasn't mentioned it happening at home so I'm beginning to wonder about environmental influences.
Looking at the dock now I can see I'm running Photoshop, Zend, Parallels (with Windows 2000), Mulberry and Firefox. Not a huge load for a Core 2 Duo 2.33 with 2G RAM you'd have thought, plus the recent 10.5.1 update seemed to make things worse not better (a friend pointed out that this was probably rushed out to fix the Finder bug which lost data). If you're thinking of upgrading, don't - really, don't; at this point it's still Apple's version of Vista.
There are also more options for Leopard bugs here.
I really liked 10.4, it was solid, but I upgraded because I wanted to use Coverflow and Spaces. I've not dare try the latter yet.
Gah.
Lee • 01 December, 2007 • 21:02:27