Leopard Features

My initial impression upon looking at Apple’s 300+ features page was “Good Lord!” The second was “A lot of these are pretty minor.” Remembering that Apple has built its success on making the little stuff work so well it completely changes how you do things, I dug deeper, and came away impressed. When I get around to reviewing it the review will end up being a long one.

Many of the features are actually minor ones, small usability enhancements such as doing a Google maps search by clicking the address in the address book, or the ability to add a new contact to your address book by clicking on an address in the mail body even if they didn’t send you a vcard. Each of these is minor. Each of these nevertheless saves you time by minimizing the jumping around needed to do each task. That way you get back to your work quicker.

In other cases, it’s the combination of features that’s the big deal. Sure, 10.4 had parental controls in place and workable whitelisting that made similar controls built into Windows look anemic and weak. Apple didn’t rest on its laurels, and made improvements. I’m not impressed by “dynamic” filters, but they are now available for filtering web pages if you want. What really blows my mind is that on top of whitelisting allowed websites, email contacts, chat contacts, etc. you can also now control when certain users are even allowed to be on the computer at all. You can also do this from a remote computer across the house so you can centrally manage your parental policies.

For parents geeky enough to be using these features in the first place: whoah.

The biggest deal to me is that Apple, in conjunction with their iWork update, has taken one more step towardsa replacement for Exchange/Outlook/Office that many workplaces rely on. The iCal server integration features offer what 90% of Exchange users use shared calendars for. Now if we could get shared address books (a real one that can be easily updated like Exchange, that LDAP schema doesn’t count) and a Access-like database program integrated with iWork…

The long and the short of it is that it looks like a number of the small features may be small, but they can change how you work in ways that going back will feel like being crippled. Other features work together to be a really big deal. To tell the difference, as well as which features really are just fluff, will take time. To explain how this could  affect you or improve your computer usage will likely use a lot of space.

Don’t expect a full review from me anytime soon.

Software Not to Ship With a Product or “How using a Western Digital Mybook Stopped me From Burning CD’s.”

I recently saw a customer comment for an audio/USB adapter that stated “I’d have given this a perfect rating if they hadn’t included the crappy software.” Apparently, while the adapter did an absolutely bang-up job, the software that came with it to record audio was buggy, crash-prone, and difficult to use.

The good news is that for me, and for a lot of people buying that adapter, the included software was entirely secondary. But what happens when software that needs to be installed for using a product has issues?

Enter the Western Digital Mybook drive a client of mine bought. This drive looks sharp, and comes with Firewire ports and plenty of storage, so they bought one to use for backups. In the 1 Terabyte size it needs to be configured using their RAID utility before a Mac will properly recognize and use it. The RAID is internal to the drive casing, so that’s not an issue either. I’ve got to say that overall it seems to be a nice machine.

What is an issue is that a background service is installed – apparently to allow you to launch their crappy backup utility. By crappy I mean slow even on a brand-new Mac with lots of memory, flaky, and too simplified to make me comfortable using it.

Even that isn’t the showstopper.

The other day, only a few after installing two of the drives, a client of mine inserted a blank CD-R and the disk would not read. We literally spent hours trying to trace down the problem. It turns out that one of the services installed with the Mybook software can and often enough does prevent the system from properly reading blank CD media. Deleting the file starting the service will stop the problem. I got the fix from the following thread at the Apple support forums, and can say for a fact it worked for my client as well.

You’ll find the answer 13 posts down:

http://discussions.apple.com/thread.jspa?messageID=4343400