Leopard Review

Posted October 30, 2007 by Chris under

So, I’ve been running Leopard (OS X 10.5) since Friday. There’s a lot of nice stuff, and some not so nice stuff.

First of all, Leopard is gorgeous to look at. The frosted menu bar is very pretty, for one. The new Finder windows are a vast improvement over the old, and CoverFlow is stunning when browsing picture folders. I have a folder of astronomy pictures I’ve collected from APOD, over the years, and running through them in CoverFlow is a thing of beauty.

Astronomy CoverFlow

QuickLook is awesome. With QuickLook, you can press the spacebar when a document is selected in Finder, and a lightweight client will open to show you the document’s contents. Not all file types are supported, but a lot of them are. It really saves time over waiting for the full applications to load, just to see if you have the right file. This has been particularly great for reading RTF/Word documents, because, for most of them, I never even need to load Pages at all.

TimeMachine is quite nice, and really does work. I’ve already gone back to grab stuff I’ve deleted, stuff I’d probably have mourned but lived without in the past (I always did take backups, just not that often).

That all said, Leopard is not quite as polished as Tiger. Applications definitely crash more often (though I haven’t yet had the system lock up or die).

Spaces (which give you multiple virtual screens on a single display) seems more seamless than VirtueDesktops ever did, but isn’t quite as nice as Virtual Desktop Pro was (which I haven’t been able to use since Mac went Intel). In Spaces, subordinate windows often appear on the wrong screen. For instance the text completion popup in Numbers permanently opens on whichever screen it first opened on, even if the current window is not on that screen. Annoying. Another missing feature is the ability to have different backdrops for different virtual screens. With VirtueDesktops, I used these for both at-a-glance identification of the screen I was on, and for setting a particular head-space/mood. Now that’s no longer an option. :-(

The new 3D dock is seriously ugly. There’s just way too much visual noise, and I do find the perspective to be . . . off. Fortunately, the 3D format is only used when the dock is displayed on the bottom, and I generally use it on the left, where it takes on a much cleaner 2D format. And, better news, you can turn off the 3D format altogether. Yay!

What else. Oh, the new, prettier Finder is a memory hog. I’ve seen it chewing up 700MB of RAM after running CoverFlow for a while. Also, there are some redraw glitches with CoverFlow that can be quite annoying. That said, I only ever saw those glitches in large folders (ie. hundreds of photos).

I haven’t yet had much cause to try the new Mail. I’ve wanted to, but GMail is just such a habit, at this point, that I’m not sure I’ll be able to get myself to make the change.

Overall, it is worth the money to upgrade. If you have a Mac, you will want to run Leopard. But, unless you are a geek, you might want to wait until 10.5.1.

Re-examining my faith

Posted October 11, 2007 by Chris under

Earlier this week, I found myself sitting down to write about my beliefs as a Christian. I’d had a rather vivid dream, in which someone said something that didn’t feel right to me, and I woke with the strong urge to write a response to what she’d said. But I didn’t get far before I started to wonder if my counter-argument was, in fact, rather weak.

You see, I’m not what you’d call a bible-thumper. Truth be told, I have a great deal of difficulty believing the Bible is “the divinely inspired Word of God”—a perfectly accurate and unalterable copy of God’s message to us. There were just too many people involved in writing it—people with points of view, agendas, and human natures. The gospels, for instance, that tell us of Jesus’s life, were written no less than 30 years after his death, and only two of the four by people who knew him personally. That’s a lot of passed time, a lot of slow distillation of memory in a lot of heads, and a lot of second- and third-hand information. Most of it wouldn’t be admissible in a court of law, in other words.

As such, my faith is based on what I’ve found “reading between the lines”, sifting out the cultural and narratorial biases, and finding the common threads. In the end, what I believe is simply what “feels” true to me, those parts that fit with my own experiences, and that remain consistent when all brought together. And my spirituality, if you will, has been the constant testing of those beliefs, and their application in my life.

The problem is, as a result, I haven’t actually read the Bible in some time. I mean, I was surrounded by it until I was in my teens. I’ve heard the stories from both the Old and New Testaments more times than I can count. They’ve become part of who I am. As a child, I memorized many bible verses, some of which I can still quote today. But like anyone else, the ones I remember the most are the ones that mean the most to me—the ones that underpin and reinforce my beliefs. Everything else just fades away. As noted in several passages, Jesus gave us first principles—Love God with all your heart, and all your mind, and all your soul; and love your neighbour as yourself—and I just tend to work from there.

But this disconnection from the source text raises a question: what if, after so much time, I’m following only myself?

Of course, the “reductionist Westerner” in me points out that, in fact, that’s what’s everyone’s doing—that, as fault-tolerant, context-sensitive, experiential beings, we are not capable of understanding any given message exactly the same way as anyone else. That, in fact, we change the message as we listen to it, filtering it through our experiences and our personalities, picking out the parts that feel relevant and discarding everything else. That is, in fact, a necessary part of human nature—it’s how we cope with a world that is far too full of information.

But still, if I’m being honest with myself, I have to question even that point of view. What if, contrary to my beliefs, the source text is more signal than noise? What if my direct and personal experience of God has, in fact, been a figment of my imagination, and my beliefs a slowly drifting lie?

So, I’ve decided to go back to the texts. I’m going to read them through, with as open a mind as I can manage, and see what I find now, some fifteen or twenty years later: the gospels, some of the Gnostic texts, and some modern texts, as well. I read Luke from end-to-end earlier this week, and what I found there wasn’t entirely comfortable reading, as far as my relationship with God is concerned. That said, Luke’s text seems internally inconsistent, and portrays a Jesus who is angry and irritated, more often than not. And Luke never met Jesus personally. I don’t know what to make of it, yet, but I’m trying to keep an open mind. I figure I’ll need to read a few more of the gospels before deciding anything.

I’ll write about what I find.

Well, that was short-lived

Posted October 4, 2007 by Chris under

My iPod Touch is going back. I’m not happy.

I suppose I should have read more reviews on the device, but I’d pre-ordered it the day it was announced, because I’d been wanting an iPhone for months. And not for the phone. So it didn’t think to read more on it. I just waited patiently for my new toy to arrive.

When I ordered it, my only disappointment was the lack of a camera, but I figured I could live without it. What I really wanted was a music-enabled PDA—something I could carry my calendar around on, take some notes, read some PDF files, etc. That’s what I thought I was buying.

Unfortunately, Apple has decided that the iPod Touch is to be a very expensive iPod, (the Canadian iPod Touch is $50 more than a US iPhone, and comes with only 16GB of storage, when comparing it to other iPods), and not much else. You can carry your calendar, but it is read-only. You can’t mount the device as a disk to copy files to it, and if you could, the software to read PDF apparently is not on the device (or so the oracle tells me). There is no means to enter a note, unless it is into a web form on a website, which is woefully inadequate for a device that has only WiFi internet.

I switched to Macs two years ago. I love them. They just work. And, more times than not, they exceed my expectations. What the hell happened with the iPod Touch?