MacNoob

I listen to a ton of Mac podcasts, read many Mac blogs and visit lots of Mac forums in my quest to become a better Mac user.  One of the issues I’ve always had with the Mac, the Menu Bar, is one of the most touchy subjects one can mention when criticizing OS X. Real fanboys look down their noses at those of us who dare question Apple’s wisdom in locking down this most valuable piece of screen real estate.  If you’re one of those zealots, read no further, I’m about to commit blasphemy of the highest order.
First, I get it.  The whole Mac philosophy revolves around a stable, consistent user experience.  To that end, Apple needs to limit the amount of “tweaking” users can do to their systems.  I also understand that for reasons of efficiency, it makes sense to have a single, dynamic menu system that changes to display the menu of the focused application.  OS X’s menu design saves a ton of screen space when you tend to have many applications open simultaneously.  But what about when I don’t need to save space?  What about when I’m using a 30″ second monitor and it feels like a half-mile hike to mouse back to my laptop display to use a menu function I can’t remember the keyboard shortcut for?  Is it too much to ask for me to be able to move the menu bar to a more handy location?  Would it unbalance the space/time continuum were I to resize or auto-hide the thing?

Send your hate-mail to: bikerfunjoe@mac.com

admin Apple Minutia, OS X Apple, fanboy, Leopard, Mac, Menu Bar, OS X

Maybe I’m dense, but I can’t seem to get network shares, wired or wireless to work consistently in Leopard.  When I was using Tiger everything just worked.  I could connect to network-attached storage, shared folders on other PCs (Windows, Mac or Linux) shared printers, everything.  Leopard is a different animal though.  Pardon the pun.  Sometimes, I double-click on a network share in Finder and I’m connected like normal.  Sometimes though, the shared device doesn’t even show up.  Other times, I can connect, use the share but then it inexplicably disappears.  Every now and then I have to use the Go: Connect to server… menu to manually connect to a share.  Every Windows PC on my network seems fat, dumb and happy.  Vista and XP can see and use everything.  My neighbor still runs Tiger on his Macbook, and it works perfectly on his network and mine.  I’m not completely clueless when it comes to networking, I’m a MCSE, but there is obviously something going on behind the scenes in Leopard that I haven’t figured out yet.  Am I alone?  What about all this “Out of the box useability” Apple braggs about?

admin Apple Minutia, Leopard, OS X Leopard, networking, OS X

I hate the “switcher” label. It implies that someone using a Mac for the first time has abandoned all other platforms entirely. I do love my Macbook Pro, but I still have four other Windows machines in my home, two of them running Vista Ultimate, and I really like them also. I think it has become fashionable to dump on Vista. Quite frankly, I’m getting a bit bored by all of it. The “main” PC in the MacNoob household is a Dell Core2 Duo and Vista works just as well on it as OS X does on my Macbook Pro. In fact, there are many aspects of Windows I find superior to OS X. Not to say OS X isn’t a fine platform, it is, its just that Windows has its’ strengths and OS X does too. What are they, you ask? First, Windows is upgradeable. If I want a bigger hard drive, I just install it. If I want a new video card, same story. If I want to add more firewire or eSATA ports, I just slip the new card in and bingo! With these pluses come the minuses. Drivers can sometimes be an issue. This is where I think Vista got its bad rap. The hardware manufacturers were woefully tardy delivering Vista drivers. Subsequently, lots of people wound up with printers that wouldn’t print, video cards that wouldn’t display properly and a host of other gizmos that worked fine with XP but gave Vista headaches. The same people who trash Vista now must have forgotten what a pain XP was when it first released. Now that Vista has been out for a while, PC makers have caught up nicely and things just work right out of the box. My Dell typically runs for weeks without error or need to otherwise restart. The key to the Mac’s stability is the absolute authoritarian nature of Apple. OS X only runs on Apple hardware, period. Most people don’t know or care to know what an infinitely smaller problem set that is for an operating system manufacturer to code for. For all you Mac fanboys out there, flexibility and stability are trade-offs! Given the virtual cornucopia of hardware combinations Vista runs on, its a miracle the OS will boot at all! Apple has done a marvelous job creating a sleek and sexy lineup of machines that run very well. To be an Apple user, however, YOU MUST COMPLY!
I bought my Macbook Pro the day Leopard was released but it came with Tiger pre-installed. I ran Tiger only briefly (about two weeks) until my Leopard disk arrived. Guess what, when I upgraded to Leopard my DAW software and firewire mixer quit working altogether. It took Alesis, the firewire mixer manufacturer, almost three months to get the first beta driver published. Steinbergh, the DAW publisher, didn’t have a working version of Cubase for leopard until late February. I heard a few complaints about OS X in the first months, but they paled in comparison to the outright lynch-mob mentality prevalent in Vista editorials.
My Mac is a ton of fun to work with. It does what it does very well. Core animation and core audio are, in my opinion, better technologies than their Win32 counterparts. So, when I need to create and/or edit audio or video my Mac is my choice. For most other tasks I default to my Windows machines. It may be because I haven’t figured out how to do some of those tasks on my Mac yet. Time will tell.

admin Apple Minutia, OS X Apple, Leopard, Vista, Windows

Well, it’s conclusive, the problem with my network attached storage issue is a problem with Leopard.  Linksys (i.e. Cisco) has done what I consider their due diligence.  They were able to fully reproduce my problem in their lab when using a Leopard machine, but when they used Tiger, everything worked fine.  The engineer I spoke with said they have been working on the problem since I reported it and couldn’t fix it.  What was really intriguing is the level of effort they put into the issue.  This Cisco engineer told me they had poured over the source code for the WRT600N firmware and found it to be 100% compliant with Apple’s Leopard API.  Even if they wanted to fix the problem, they wouldn’t know where to start.  I’ve been in their shoes before.  When coding to someone’s API you have to go on faith that the API does what it says.  If it doesn’t, you can’t fix a problem even if you know where it is.  Kudos to Cisco for giving it their best shot.  Even though my problem still exists, I will buy Linksys (Cisco) products in the future simply because of this experience.  I have never been involved with a support incident that garnered so much attention from the provider.  As for Apple?…Give me a hand. I called Apple’s tech support, and they weren’t much help but did agree to document my problem. I figure the more folks complain about this, the more likely it is to be addressed. Give Apple support a call at 1-800-APL-CARE (1-800-275-2273) if you’ve experienced network problems with Leopard.

Thanks,

MacNoob

More to come.

admin Apple Minutia, OS X Leopard, Linksys, Mac, network, OS X