So, yes Melinda and I bought a Leopard family license on a whim for our 3 macs, and yes had we got to wait in line 2.5 hours for a couple of t-shirts and a DVD in a fancy looking case, but for us it was all worth the effort and money.

Upgrading

When we got home I decided to be the first to do an upgrade, obviously first backing up my trusty Tiger install to an external drive. Two hours later I still didn’t have a running system as my upgrade had caused me an unresponsive (and unfortunately blue) startup screen, which didn’t have an error code but was quite similar to the Windows blue screen of death.

EDIT: This problem is now known to be related to a haxie container framework called Application Enhancer. If you did install ‘APE’, you should do a clean install.

I gave up soon after this and decided to just do a fresh install which went both faster and worked immediately. After me, Melinda tried an upgrade and hers ironically went without any bumps at all, so I guess my problem will only affect a small percentage of switchers. The official Apple support site already has a thread with 270 responses and maybe a few solutions.

In short: make sure you have a backup before you go into the process of upgrading as you might need to reset your tiger install or do a fresh install and transport the data.

3rd Party Applications

Once we both had Leopard running we started playing with its features and we were bot impressed by the speed. Leopard is fast, VERY FAST. Only a very few applications didn’t work properly though, mostly browser hacks like Saft and Inquisitor that use the now no longer supported InputManagers concept. We did find a little tool called PlugSuit that re-enables InputManager support and has let us use Inquisitor again (Saft didn’t work but SafariStand did most of what we wanted from Saft).

All and all I am happy with Leopard as it is a decent upgrade that, has a few very interesting features for everyone and probably doesn’t give you all the trouble an upgrade to Vista would give you.

A few unboxing photos

A week ago I noticed zapreader.com, a site that makes it relatively easy to teach yourself speedreading. At least 1000 people also bookmarked it and from personal experience I can say: It really works quite well. In a nutshell, it takes a bunch of text and splits it into words. It then displays each word (or a block of two, which works a bit better in my opinion) in a huge font in the middle of your screen, for a fraction of a second, before moving on to the next word.

However, the ZAP reader itself has some annoyances so I decided to fix them.

Thus, I present: the (mac only!) desktop app version of zap reader. Download here: http://files.fourstarters.com/ZAPMac/ZAPMac.dmg.

It works very simply: select text in any application, then hit CMD+SHIFT+V and ZAPMac automatically starts and zapreads the selected text for you. Once the text is done, it quits automatically. Use Z and X to rewind/fast forward 16 words at a time, and use A and Q to speed up or slow down. space starts and stops, and there are preferences to change a number of things, though the defaults worked the best for me. It intentionally goes fullscreen - to make sure there is no distraction for your eyes.

Apparently it works so well because of two things:

• It saves you from having to ‘track’ - you no longer expend effort to keep your eyes in the right place. Your eyes no longer need to move at all, just keep staring at the same place.
• It makes use of ‘brain replay’. Ever said ‘What did you say?” to someone, only to realize that you DID hear them after all? Your brain has a limited ‘pipeline’ of sorts, but you usually incorrectly think you misheard or misread forcing you to take action. When reading, this means you often reread sentences that you don’t need to reread. With ZAP Reader you force yourself into going forward.

This is my first foray into Mac Os X Cocoa development, incidentally. I spent maybe 12 hours on getting this thing together, including learning a new programming language from scratch (well, enough to write this, anyhow), and including learning how to distribute it, set it up with a nice preference pane that stores its settings in the right places, and all that jazz. Basically cocoa development is really nice and very simple, which may explain why Mac software looks so good.

If you’re interesting in the source, here you go: http://files.fourstarters.com/ZAPMac/ZAPMacSource.zip.

A couple of months ago I did a small review of what I thought would be the really interesting features of Apple Mac OS X Leopard. Not only were all my predictions about the user interface and the growing up of certain features true (yes, drop the balloons!), but Apple also introduced some new features including a new dock and menu and stacks. Obviously I wanted to test this (nearly) feature-full product so I managed to get my hands on the WWDC2007 build and gave it a try.

After an afternoon of playing with Leopard, I was amazed about how well this beta release works. Here and there I encountered some bugs (especially in Photo Booth which has a bunch of new effects that just crash the app) but overall everything was simply quick. Might I say it was maybe even quicker than my Tiger install? Especially the Spotlight search has really been improved to offer more of a feel that Quicksilver does at the moment for Tiger. Furthermore the new look, with harder contrasts between active and inactive windows, is just so much cleaner and with the help of Quick Look and Cover Flow the finder has just become so much more useful.

Finally I was really amazed about how they improved some of my personal Mac Whines. First of all they changed the little network menu item. It now auto-refreshes and shows the difference between open and closed networks. Another network related improvement is the automatic discovery of shares on the network, allowing you to browse open shares much like you would do on Windows. In other words: no need to explicitly mount folders, and no crashing finder when you switch network with a folder mounted.

All an all I think Leopard is worth the money as it offers a lot of improvements over Tiger. I didn’t even mention Time Machine, Spaces and all the other new features, but I think it is those small things that make you a happy Mac user.