Yesterday I took the plunge and flattened my MacBook Pro (Core 2 Duo, 2.33GHz, 2G RAM) to reinstall Leopard. This was not an upgrade, this was a completely fresh install. It all went pretty OK really – nothing to write home about and certainly no disasters.

I can now quite happily report that out of all the applications installed the following seem to work without a hitch: Zend, Firefox, Adium, Azureus, Vienna, MS Word 2004, MS Excel 2004, Logic Express 7.2, MySQL 5.1, Mulberry Mail, Nokia iSync profile (for our new E65s).

The two apps which have little niggly problems that I’ve found are:

• VLC (media player), which occasionally has problems resizing the aperture and hiding the transport bar as a result.
• Parallels 3, which seems to ‘forget’ the bridging interface if you shut off the wireless interface.

I should note if you are a LAMP developer that the system comes preinstalled with php5.2 – I haven’t had to grab anything from Macports yet.

The annoyances of the transparent menu bar don’t really show in the backdrop I have, and the menu bar has been fixed with the hack I posted earlier this week. Additionally macosxhints.com had a nice hint on removing the stripes from Finder’s list mode, which were getting on my nerves.

Oh, while we’re on the subject of transparency, most of the presets in Terminal.app have a semi-transparent background. This can be changed in the ‘background color’ config section, the opacity option is hidden away in there. Took me 20 minutes to find that one.

Altogether so far an almost seamless upgrade. Tomorrow I try it in anger, and curse the missing wireless profiles I forgot to copy over 😛

Matt arrived at our house on Friday evening with a copy of the latest incarnation of Mac OS X ‘Leopard’ for me. Since the MacBook Pro is my principal machine, I thought I’d install it on the Mac Mini (which after all doesn’t get used by me much, more by the kids when they want to play on the CBeebies website). Anyway, I’ve taken the plunge on the Mini and upgraded the operating system.

First impressions…

• I like Spaces, the virtual desktop thingy. I used to use this sort of thing under Gnome and it’s really good to have it back – being able to have a workspace for worky stuff and a workspace for non-work so I can ignore it when I’m really busy is a very very good thing indeed.
• The menu bar transparency pisses me off. Matt noticed this first, but it’s got more irritating as time’s gone on – if you have a blue backdrop for instance the transparency in the menu bar makes the bar go light blue. The busier the backdrop, the less readable the menu bar is; it would be good if the transparency could be switched off altogether (someone suggested putting a 60px-or-whatever-it-is white extension to the top of your backdrop to ‘fix’ the transparency to 0%). Matt also noticed the rounded corners are gone on the menu bar!
• The reflection on the dock is a bit distracting too – I liked the old dock!
• Actually, a bit more control over the graphical elements of the UI in general would be nice.
• The new Finder is quite nifty, but it reminds me a lot of iTunes.
• The file drawers thing on the dock is very very useful. I’d quite like to be able to squish the font down though so I can fit more documents in the curve.

I’ll probably take out next weekend to flatten the MacBook and install Leopard on there, once I’ve listed all the applications I’ll need to install. I’ve not zilched the machine since I got it, and in the first couple of months I installed all sorts of crap so I good broom is required to get rid of my learning curve 😛

Update: Barely 10 minutes after I’d written this blog entry, there was an Apple Update for ‘login and keychain access’. I wonder if it’s got anything to do with this…

Update #2: macosxhints.com has a nifty way of getting rid of the 3d dock at the bottom.

OK, it seems I was a little hasty in my Apple keyboard whinging. I’ve cut my fingernails and it seems fine now. The posture change has helped a bit too.

Sadly, the function key melarky is still annoying. You can’t have everything, eh?

On my way home from my current contract in Sheffield I stopped off at Meadowhell to pick up a spare keyboard from the Apple Store. I’d heard about the new aluminium keyboards being quite thin, and since I tend to carry a full keyboard around with me when I’m contracting this seemed like a good acquisition.

I’ve been using it for about half an hour now to get used to it, and a number of things annoy me – not least the ergonomics. The problem lies in the profile – it’s almost flat to the table, and consequently use of a wrist rest is prohibitive. It also means you have to hold your hands almost vertically over the keyboard itself which (after low use) has given me a bit of an achy wrist; the keys don’t seem to travel enough, sometimes leaving me hitting them probably a bit too hard. Maybe I’ll get used to that.

Second thing that’s naffed me off – merging the volume keys and the function keys. I realist that F16..F19 are probably very important, but it would have been really nice if Apple had kept the volume keys over that way rather than the function key / utility key merging. I have my MacBook Pro configured so that the utility keys are at the foreground, with FN key combinations being required for use of F1..F12 but prefer it the other way round on the keyboard itself. I can’t do that in MacOS, I can either have it all one way or all the other.

It will go in my bag and be used at contracts, but I doubt I’d want to use one of these ‘in anger’ at a workstation. I think I may acquire a couple of the older white Apple keyboards just as spares for when I get a new desktop (which will happen one day or the other when I’m back with a solid office base to work from).

For many years I was a Eudora fan, using it to organise my email from upwards of 20 POP3 boxes. When I moved to IMAP I ended up using Mulberry, and it followed me onto the MacBook. I still have problems with the way Mulberry does some things (such as not rendering HTML mail, inline attachments, or being able to set ‘priority’ on outgoing emails) so it was with interest that I heard the first version of Penelope (aka Eudora 8) had been released, and I installed it eagerly.

Firstly, they’re very eager to state that it’s a complete rewrite, or to be more accurate it’s a hack of Thunderbird. However, I think I’d expected more than this – it did have a nice Eudora-y installer and a lovely set of icons, but other than that it was… well, Thunderbird. It’s also interesting to note that most of the bug reports on the Penelope tracker appear to be to do with keystrokes not doing the right things.

One final note: if you’re going to try this, back up your Thunderbird config first. Penelope very helpfully trampled all over my Thunderbird settings and left my NNTP reader in an almost unusable state.

2/10 – could try harder.