Great Insight for the Impatient (Me!)

I am by nature fairly impatient. I am not prone to sitting around or waiting for things to happen. I like to move quickly and I sometimes forget that there are good reasons that the entire world does not move at the speed that I would like it to move at.

A great example of this is the blog of Dave Nanian, the maker of SuperDuper my very favorite Mac backup program. SuperDuper is still not Leopard compatible.

Now I have been using Leopard for a couple of months and was starting to become impatient with how long it was taking for SuperDuper to be updated. I love SuperDuper and was really growing tired of waiting for it to get bumped up to being Leopard compatible . I mean it is just a backup app, how long could it really take? (Forgive me for thinking this!!)

Well if you take a look at Dave's blog of his and his team's progress, it is taking a while... and for good reason. Really, read his blog, it helped me take a big super-sized dose of patience.

Sometimes I forget that behind the smooth interface and reliable performance of my favorite apps, there are people hard at work trying to make them better. And after reading Dave's progress with SuperDuper and Leopard, it details all the work they have done in fixing some major hiccups due to the new OS, apparently many of which were Time Machine based.

I appreciate companies like ShirtPocket Software (Dave and the other creators of SuperDuper) who take the time to make everything work right together... Time Machine and SuperDuper so that when I install it and use it, it will work great and not mess up the other software on my Mac...

Even when it doesn't happen on MY schedule.

Take your time Dave, I can wait.

10.5 and the little bugs

So overall I am still really liking Leopard (since have it installed on all my machines, I guess it is too late to not like it) but there are still a few things that continue to bug me.

The first and most annoying is that my HP 7310 All-In-One printer will no longer do double-sided-printing. It appears this has been a known issue since Leopard's release and HP has worked with Apple and on the Leopard install disk are print only drivers for the majority of their printers... that's right print only drivers... so a lot of the other functionality of the all-in-ones has disappeared. No more scanning or faxing from the computer and no more double sided printing.

And I can't begin to tell you how much fun it is to have to feed each page of my published image copyright continuation forms by hand into the printer after filling them out in Acrobat so that they will print on both sides correctly...

There are numerous discussions about this on most of the Mac forums.
Hopefully we will see a fix from HP soon.

The other thing that has come up recently (I've only experienced it in the last two weeks) is a bug where in using Photoshop CS3, when you try to enter a size in the crop tool, nothing ends up being entered into the boxes where you put the size and resolution of the image. Most of the time, quitting out of Photoshop and opening it back up again does the trick... but still... what a pain.

This also happens using the feather tool and a number of other tools, but most frequently for me with the crop tool. What is odd is that I am having this happen on my MacPro and my MacBook Pro but not on my MacBook. It could be because I do the least Photoshop work on the MacBook.

There has also been some debate over whether this is an Apple bug or an Adobe bug. Hopefully come MacWorld it will be fixed since there has been word that 10.5.2, which is rumored to be scheduled for release at MacWorld, will fix the problem.

A short term workaround for the problem: If you hover your mouse over the text Width, Height, and Resolution text in the menu next to the boxes where you enter the size, and then hold down the mouse button you can use it like a slider (go right or left) to increase the value to what you want in the box. If you also hold down the shift key, it will go by increments of 10 (pixels, inches, etc.), if you hold down the option key, it will move by increments of 0.1 (pixels, inches, etc.)

The other way you can make a crop if the bar isn't behaving is to do a crop with no data in the sizing windows and then use the "Image Size" tool under the "Image" menu bar item in CS3.

The other Leopard oddity I have experienced on all three of my Macs is the occasional really long startup or shut down for no apparent reason. If there were updates that were installed or running maintenance scripts or something beforehand, I wouldn't worry... but it is odd that this happens every so often. Repairing permissions doesn't seem to make a difference and there are no rogue startup applications that could be causing the problem... hopefully this will be put to bed by 10.5.2 as well.

If I had to do it all over again, I would still be running Leopard right now. It is fast and very stable... with the exception of the problems listed above... none of which are important enough to avoid making the jump... but hopefully they are viewed as important by the companies that hold the keys to fixing the problems.

Installing Leopard... a tale of two installs

One really important thing I forgot to mention about Leopard: DO A CLEAN INSTALL.

But before you do anything... do a complete bootable backup of your hard drive. Please! I beg you! Doing OS upgrades on a computer is the way to guarantee something will go horribly wrong if you aren't backed up. So go to your local computer store, Apple Store, or your favorite online retailer (my favorite for Mac stuff is Other World Computing) and buy yourself an external drive to back everything up first. You will be glad you did.

The first machine I installed it on, my MacBook, didn't take to it too well when I did the install as an update. In fact, my poor little MacBook didn't do well at all. It got slow, buggy, things crashed, it had problems booting, problems shutting down and was not much fun to use. You would be in the middle of doing something and all of a sudden the fans would come on and the Activity Monitor would show all of these strange (meaning not the normal processor intensive things going on behind the scenes) processes running at nearly 100% of the laptop's capacity.

So after a couple of hours of trying to track down what caused all these issues (although deep down I knew it was because I tried running the update) I then heeded the advice of Apple and did a clean install... and it worked great.

At times, I don't learn lessons easily, however. So my next Leopard target was the Mac Mini in our family room that is used by my wife for surfing, my son for playing Lego Star Wars and Wingnuts and my inlaws for watching Korean soap operas while they are hanging out with the twins. So what did I do, why I tried running the upgrade again on the Mini.

How did it work?

Horribly! I had everyone mad at me because it actually seemed (to me) to work pretty well after it had finished. Now I don't use the Mini much, unless it requires some sort of fix, so I guess I didn't spend that much time checking everything out, but I probably should have. Safari started crashing, Nick (my Lego Star Wars loving son) was unhappy because the games wouldn't load and my inlaws couldn't get any of the online videos to play. Lets just say my family was not seeing the value of upgrading to Leopard.

So again, I got the various install disks out and did a clean install and it worked great. No problems whatsoever.

Now I have to confess, in the past, I have gotten away with doing upgrades (I did 10.3 to 10.4 upgrade on my 15" Powerbook in a hotel room in Ohio somewhere after a shoot) and then came home and did the same for all my other Macs and it worked fine... that time. But Leopard seems to introduce enough new stuff that upgrading can cause more problems than just spending an hour or two and starting fresh.

The other good reason to do clean installs is because it gives you a chance to do some spring cleaning on your computer. You actually look at how much junk you have installed on your computer vs. what you actually use all the time.

Some people that are too scared to wipe their hard drive (or maybe they just like living dangerously and are opposed to backing up ) like the archive and install choice. That is where it moves everything on your computer into a folder called "Old System" or something like that and installs the new system in a new system folder. The reason I don't like this is because it leaves all your applications alone and there are a number of apps that put stuff in other places (that is now called "Old System" ) and so the temptation is to start using the stuff in the old system instead of reinstalling your apps, too. Take this as a fact... if you try to use your apps from the previous install, you will spend more time trying to figure out why they aren't working right than if you had just installed them cleanly in the new system.

After doing the clean install, this is when you can go to your backup of the drive to import thing like your email, preferences and other odds and ends that you are going to need on the new system after you installed all your apps.

Another thing that I would suggest before doing the upgrade is make sure you have all of your downloaded installers, installers on CD's or DVD's and most importantly, serial numbers for everything before you do the reinstall. I actually print out a copy of what is in my applications folder so that when I do the reinstall I don't forget anything important. I actually create a folder with the latest drivers and installers when I did my upgrades on all the machines so I could just work down the list in the folder installing one after another which saves time of having to hunt for disks and downloads later on.

I would also suggest doing a Google search to make sure that all your critical applications and hardware (printers, scanners, etc.) are working with Leopard. In Google just search for the name of the hardware and "leopard" or "10.5" or search for it both ways. You can also include words like "issue, "problem", or "conflict" to see if anything comes up.

If it turns out that your printer or some other hardware is not Leopard compatible, look at the bright side... you really do deserve some new peripherals, don't you???

I am liking Leopard

I am now running Leopard on all three of my work Macs. Currently, that would be a Mac Pro 2.66 quadcore, a 17" MacBook Pro Core 2 Duo 2.33, and a black MacBook Core 2 Duo 2ghz. It has been quite stable and I am not experiencing any real serious issues with it.

My main pet peeves are that I can't get my HP Officejet 7310 duplexing printer to duplex any more and that I have a few little odd files in the trash that won't go away on the Mac Pro (but this problem hasn't shown up on either laptop.)

I understand that there is actually a fix for the files in the trash thing that has something to do with the windows partition... maybe (I am running Boot Camp, but I haven't taken the time to research it since the only thing that happens is that it shows that the trash is perpetually not empty. The things like holding down "Option" while emptying the trash or using SuperGetInfo to make the files go away hasn't worked. If you do a get info on them, try to rename them, or try to drag them to the desktop, they just disappear... and then magically re-appear in the trash again. (I'm writing an awful lot about a problem I haven't really tried to fix, huh?)

Another thing that I am really, really, missing is the ability to use Shirt Pocket Sofware's SuperDuper to back up my laptops. It has been my nearly perfect tool for backing up the MacBook and MacBook Pro to external portable firewire drives so that I have a bootable backup ready to go if something goes amiss in the field while on a shoot. The thing I love about SuperDuper is that it is simple and after you do the initial backup, you have the option to do smart backups so that it is only updating what has changed since the last time you backed up... it doesn't copy everything all over again. It will also make the copy bootable so that you can plug it in and boot from the external drive if necessary (it does need to be a firewire drive for this feature.) They are furiously working on a Leopard (10.5) compatible version and neither I nor my Macs can wait!

What I am liking about Leopard is that it is fast, has some cool new tweaks, and is no less reliable than Tiger (10.4).

What I'm really digging right now is Time Machine. Under Tiger, I used Apple's Backup program (which is free if you have a .Mac account - another good idea... but we'll get to that another time.) for daily archival backups to an external drive and then would do a full bootable backup of the system using SuperDuper every few weeks.

On my desktop system, I care more about my data (address books, photos, invoicing, receipts, passwords) being backed up than keeping the machine instantly re-bootable if there is a hard drive or software issue. After all, if I am sitting in the office, I have both laptops and all the install CD's to re-install everything anyways. So I can always pull the backup off the external and run things off a laptop if I need to. But Backup was always slow and I would set it to run at 2:30am so that it wouldn't choke whatever else I was doing... plus there were occasionally issues with programs like Mail if you were using them when Backup started running where the backup could fail when you went to recover it.

I have found that Time Machine is fast and seems to use disk space very efficiently (in the time I have been using it.) I have recovered files from it and found that it recovered thing much more quickly than Backup ever did. Part of this could also be attributed to the fact that I don't have weeks and weeks of backups stacked on the drive yet. I would imagine that the performance could decline some over time as there are more backups it will have to sort through to pull out the right data. From my experiments, it doesn't seem to matter to Time Machine. It seems to make good backups of things even while you are using them, or at least must have the sense to avoid backing up the things that could cause problems down the road.

More about Leopard later...