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May 2, 2005 04:07 PM

In the Jungle

Like most of the Mac-nerd universe, I spent this weekend installing Tiger on my Powerbook and G5 desktop, and logging the various joys and gripes I'm experiencing. The joys are manifold, and Apple is doing a good enough job of publicising them - you don't need to hear from me that Spotlight is amazing, Dashboard is gorgeous and Automator is, well, automatic. The Daring Fireball feed of less obvious changes also covers good ground - and I won't be repeating any of it. One thing that is worth repeating though is yes, the new Mail icons suck. But there's a solution, so enough of that.

A couple of gripes:

• Where's my Stuff?
  On both of my Tiger installations, I've noticed that while the computer is performing intensive tasks (like building a Spotlight index, or performing a Software Update), the contents of my user folder disappears. Tiger doesn't hang, or give me the spinning beachball when I try to access my stuff - it just tells me that the folder contains '0 items'. The first time it happened, my heart skipped about eight beats. It turns out that the items are still accessible via Spotlight, or if you happen to have an alias of the folders or items in question, but sheeesh. EDIT: You can see this in action in a slightly different context. If you add a new copy of an application to your Applications folder, your Apps folder will appear empty for as long as the 'Do you want to replace the item' message is on the screen. It's annoying, and I'm guessing it's something to do with Spotlight indexing. But I may be way off the mark there.
• Download Broken
  I've never, ever had problems with downloaded items not unzipping correctly, or with disc images not mounting - until today. I've been doing a lot of downloading - mostly of updates to programs that need Tiger fixes - and I've had errors galore. Part of the frustration can be attributed to Apple's decision not to include Stuffit Expander as part of the default installation, but that doesn't account for the disc image errors I've been seeing left, right and centre.
• Font Book
  For various reasons - mainly that I'm trying to eliminate pirated software from my life - I haven't installed Suitcase (for font management) yet. Instead, I'm attempting to use the native Apple Font Book, which is now up to version 2. The interface - which, for me, is 90% of everything - is nice. I like the ease with which one can group fonts, I like the simplified duplicate manager, and I like that the largest window in the app is dedicated to the thing we want to look at most, namely THE FONT ITSELF (are you listening, Suitcase?). But I find it very annoying that Font Book finds some reason to shit its dacks after three minutes of casual use. I'm getting a bit over the ole spinning beachball / Force Quit menu, let me tell you.
• Hello? Mail?
  Mail is slower than it used to be, and that's annoying, since I'm only ever going to have MORE mail. But Smart Folders will get that time back, so it's no big deal. And I can't get .Mac mailbox / Smart Folders syncing happening. But I'm probably just being a moron. EDIT: This just required me to delete everything on .Mac and start again. It's working now, but I'm disappointed that it only syncs Smart Folders (not regular folders), since most of my rules direct my email into regular folders, which makes most of my neatly sync'ed rules useless.
• Airport
  Airport is being sucky since I installed Tiger - I have two Airport Express base stations in my house (on the same network), and now, when I move my Powerbook between them, I often get connection failures. On the bright side, I get to use the new Connection Wizard or whatever it's called, which appears as a link from Safari if you go offline for some reason. It's really neat.
• Unstylish
  About one in twenty pages loads in Safari without its stylesheet. Drives me inSANE. Usually a refresh fixes it, but sometimes it doesn't. And I'm not sure WHAT to think about the image loading animation. Cool, or nasty?

Just as I thought, I'll be adding to this page over the next week or so.