I upgraded my iMac to 10.5 this weekend, since it arrived after Apple pulled the Boot Camp beta from their web page and one of the main reasons I bought an iMac instead of a Mac Mini was so that I could use MS Flight Simulator running in Windows. My initial thoughts on the newest release are a mixed bag.

The good:

• Spotlight seems to scale much better. I initially loved Spotlight on 10.4, but once it indexed my entire mail archives, it got too slow to be useable. The new spotlight appears to have indexed all my mail and is still snappy quick. I had let it archive my inbox and played around prior to upgraded, just to make sure that it wasn’t just the jump from the Power Book to the iMac.
• Spaces works almost as expected. It’s very nice, but will jump to dialog boxes that pop up, which is a bit annoying.
• Carbon emacs, Quicken, Log Ten Pro (my pilot logbook software), and X-Plane all seem to work out of the box.
• System Preferences sanity — no more secondary, semi-duplicate applications for printing or vpn/wireless. Everything is ordered in a much more sane way.
• X11 integration. DISPLAY is now automagically set and when X11 is needed (such as you starting an xterm), X11 automagically starts. This even works when you start an xterm/emacs on a remote machine using ssh tunnels.

The bad:

• Translucent menus. The menubar isn’t too bad, but the menus themselves are hard to read if you have too many windows open and things are busy on the screen.
• The 3-D dock. It’s ugly. Thankfully, it can be turned off: defaults write com.apple.dock no-glass -boolean YES killall Dock
• X11. They don’t document that you shouldn’t start X11.app at login like you used to do in Tiger. They also don’t document that /Applications/Utilities/X11.app is essentially just an xterm starter and not the “real” X11.app that launchd starts when needed. X11 doesn’t play well with spaces. I also like having the X11 icon next to the Finder icon in my dock (dunno why, but it’s always there on my machines). I couldn’t figure out how to make that happen, but finally did — Add /usr/X11/X11.app to your Dock. Don’t have it started at login. It’ll all work out. There’s some other oddities with X11 — it appears that the upgrade from XFree to X.org codebase was not as smooth as it could have been, but sounds like Apple’s working on it.
• Bloody linker. The Open MPI configure script causes the linker to bus error during the assembly tests if -g is used as a CFLAG. Stupid linkers.
• iCal/iSync. I can’t seem to get iSync to sync my calendars between a machine running tiger and a machine running leopard. iSync seemed to have synced everything else quite well.

Discovered this the other day, and it’s just so cool (and yet so useless). In OS X land, one can make a .app directory structure to create an application bundle and the actual executable doesn’t have to be a Cocoa / Carbon application. It can actually be a shell script, or a C program, or Perl, or whatever. Double click goodness and everything. And most importantly to me, it can be added to the per-user login items, without popping up a terminal window (which is what happens if you just add a script with a .command extension). So I have a little shell script application bundle that runs at login on the desktops in the lab to make sure that there’s all the scratch directories I want on our scratch disks (so that things like Safari’s cache are on local, fast disk instead of global, slow NFS). Woo Apple — every now and then, they do get something right. Credit must go to MacEnterprise.org for the hint.

With Panther, the volume keys on a Sun Microsystems Type 6 USB keyboard do the “right thing”. Now if only stop-a dumped you out to OF :). Anyone know how to get the cut/copy/paste keys to work? That would truly kick ass…

Found a fun little plugin for iChat today to auto-respond when status is set to away: iCAR. Seems to work, which is kind of cool…

Ok, so I’ve started using Mail.app because it somewhat sanely deals fairly well with the multiple mail servers I have these days (ISI, .Mac, and OSL). One feature I’ve been longing for is the ability to have multiple From addresses for a single mail server. Since brbarret@{osl.iu.edu, cs.indiana.edu, lam-mpi.org, indiana.edu} all end up in my OSL account, it made sense that I set things up this way. So, while trolling through the Mail.app help trying to figure out how to make a mail list I found out that you can do this already!

All you have to do is put a comma separated list of from addresses in the “address” field for an account, and you are good to go. Amazing. Why didn’t I read the help months ago. This was always my major complaint with Jaguar’s Mail.app.

Ok, so my computer just crashed. Or something like that. I was talking to Laura and all of the sudden this window popped up informing me that i had to reboot my computer (by force – using the power button). The only other crash I’ve ever seen under OS X is when I ripped the root filesystem out from under my tower then made the kernel access the disk. Bad things happened 🙂