Archive for May 1, 2005

Sunday, May 1, 2005

Random Tiger Notes

Launch Services lost all my custom application bindings when I installed Tiger.
What kind of OS update would it be without Retrospect breaking? They promise a free update soon, with a later one to provide support for Tiger’s new filesystem features.
Apple Help is unreliable. Sometimes, it just doesn’t open, even for Apple’s own applications. Or, sometimes it opens the main help page instead of a specific sub-page. This has happened with my applications, and with Mail.
I like Dictionary. But not its panel.
My Command-Control-D keyboard shortcut for comparing the two top documents in BBEdit stopped working. The solution was to tell Dictionary not to use this shortcut in the Keyboard preferences pane.
Preview’s PDF viewing has more features, but seems slower.
The default screen capture format is now PNG instead of PDF.
After waking from sleep and entering my password, I get sometimes get another password dialog asking for my AirPort password. Or, sometimes, it forgets which network it was connected to and I have to re-select it.
TextEdit (and Cocoa in general) has much better import and export facilities. You can access a lot of them using textutil.
The Cocoa text system now supports lists and tables.
Classic seems to be faster, and it uses less processor time when it’s idle.

Sometimes my printer queue gets stopped for no reason.
Apple seems to want to sell me printer supplies, but the results come up empty for all of my printers.

Each time Mail is updated, it leaves old files behind. A couple versions ago, it left SKindex files around after switching to content_index files. With Tiger, it leaves the content_index and mbox files while duplicating the message data into the Messages folder and putting the index information in Spotlight.
Clicking the mailbox pane in Mail doesn’t give it keyboard focus; you can only do that by tabbing into it. In fact, if it’s already focussed, clicking a second mailbox in it will make it lose focus. Still an improvement, though, since the drawer couldn’t get focus at all in Panther.
Page Up, Page Down, Home, and End don’t work in the message list.
When doing a search, the preview pane is hidden; it’s shown again when you click on a search result in the list. I guess this makes sense, but I find it a bit disorienting.
Everything from downloading messages to searching is much slower. Smart mailboxes don’t always update their unread counts until I click on them.
Sometimes Mail gets stuck and won’t display the contents of any mailboxes. Quitting and re-launching it gets it working again.
I don’t see a way to easily go from a selected message in a smart mailbox to seeing that message in its thread in its original mailbox.
Mail no longer has its own Script menu. Apple has effectively removed the ability to assign keyboard shortcuts to Mail scripts, since the system Script menu doesn’t support them.

I tried to use Shark after installing the developer tools (with the CHUD option) and kept getting this error:

CHUDProf.kext not loaded. There may be a problem with your CHUD installation. [CHUDDataSource]

Then I manually installed CHUD.pkg, and now Shark works.
I kind of expected that Subversion would be bundled with the developer tools. Oh well.
A Mac-savvy rsync was, for me, one of the most anticipated features of Tiger. Unfortunately, it’s been unreliable so far. Nearly every time I use it to sync a large folder using the -E flag, it either crashes or stops with an internal error.
The Mac-savvy tar, cp, and scp rock. So does BOMArchiveHelper.
There are new database and plist scripting additions.

Safari is faster.
Safari is much smarter about how it puts Google queries onto the find pasteboard.
It’s great that Safari now displays errors as Web pages rather than sheets.
Sometimes it doesn’t load the stylesheet.
Safari Web Archives are great, although I prefer iCab’s Zip-based format.
It’s no longer possible to see the transfer rate in Safari’s Downloads window unless you make the window really wide.
Is there any way to tell Safari not to view PDFs inline? I prefer using Preview. There doesn’t even seem to be a way to save the currently viewed PDF to disk. The only way I could save my credit card bill to disk was to use OmniWeb.
The new Safari often loads stale pages. I have to keep resetting its cache and re-launching it to get it to notice that a page has changed.

Bottom-line, it’s still much faster to search the Web than my Mac.
I hate the Spotlight search results window.
The first time I tried to use Spotlight, after letting it index overnight, it froze SystemUIServer for 12 minutes.
Spotlight seems to be inconsistent about finding files that aren’t in my home folder. It finds some files in /Developer tree, but the whole ADC Reference Library seems to be excluded.
AppleWorks files are indexed; Safari Web Archives are not
After the initial indexing, there’s no visual indication of the indexing process. After downloading or importing messages, or copying over lots of files, it’s not clear whether I’d get more search results if I waited an hour and searched again.
Even though I’ve declared most of my home folder off-limits to Spotlight, it still seems to be indexing everything. Its CPU use goes crazy for hours if I re-render a Web site or do a large Subversion checkout, slowing down my whole Mac, which is partly why I wanted to exclude it from those folders. The other reason is that I was hoping to improve its search speed (which is about 15 seconds now) by having it index a smaller number of files. But it seems that it indexes and searches everything, and then winnows the results.
Why does iCal create 3500 .icalevent files each time I start it up, even though I’ve told Spotlight not to search events?

Get Info once again opens separate windows for each selected item.
Dragging from the Finder to Path Finder copies instead of moving, but you can hold down Command to make it move.
I’m really disappointed in the Finder’s new Find feature. Searching by name is still slow (with several seconds of the spinning pizza), and some matching files that are in plain view simply don’t show up in the search results.
Much better at updating views when files have changed or new files have been added.

The items in the Trash’s contextual menu moved around, and I haven’t adjusted yet.
It used to be that if you held down Command-Option, you could drop a Dock icon onto another Dock icon (e.g. dropping an application onto Script Debugger to view its dictionary). Now, this works if you first bring the receiving application to the front.