Mac OS X 10.6 Snow Leopard: First Impressions

Yes, I admit it. I am one of those geeks who pre-ordered Apple's newest operating system, Mac OS X 10.6 Snow Leopard, on the first day possible and eagerly awaited its arrival. I installed it as soon as it arrived, on Monday, August 31, which took about 55 minutes and freed up about 10 or 12 GB of hard disk space. It's taken me awhile to get around to finishing this post, but these are my rambly first impressions.

Initially, I thought it was quite a bit faster overall. Startup and shutdown were and still are a bit faster. At first, Safari felt zippier, and Dashboard widgets were a bit faster to initialize on the first use after a restart. But lately I am getting spinning beach balls quite often. I know the new iTunes 9 makes use of Safari, and perhaps that's what has caused the more recent slow down. But the main speed increase I noticed was and still is with Time Machine.

Time Machine is definitely much faster. I've been using it since I got my MacBook in November of 2007. It was reasonably fast originally when I was connecting via USB to my external hard drive. But eventually I got it working wirelessly using the AirPort Disk feature on our AirPort Extreme router. While it has been convenient not to have to plug in a cable every time I want to perform a backup, it can be excruciatingly slow at times and very inconsistent. So far in Snow Leopard it has been consistently quick, and it has been improved to give more feedback as to what it's actually doing while it's grinding away. Previously, in the Time Machine preferences pane, an indeterminate progress bar was displayed at the beginning of the backup reading "Preparing..." Sometimes it would stay in this state for over an hour before finally starting to send data to the backup disk! Now during that time it instead displays "Calculating changes..." under an actual progress bar which seems to be pretty accurate. So far, "calculating changes" has been much faster than "preparing," usually completing within a few seconds. Another nice touch - the name of the AirPort Extreme router (or presumably Time Capsule if you have one) is displayed below the disk name. I'm pretty sure it wasn't there in Leopard.

Another thing I like is that the date can now be displayed along with the day of the week and time in the menu bar:


Granted, my menu bar is already over-crowed with stuff, so I quickly turned this back off when I remembered that the iCal icon shows the current date in the dock. More recently I realized that I usually know what day of the week it is anyway, so I'm now displaying just the date and time.

One thing I didn't like in Leopard was the Energy Saver. It offered 3 predefined profiles for various power settings - Better Performance, Better Battery Life, and Normal. There was also the Custom profile where you could set up your own preferences - but just one set. You couldn't define your own profiles like Movie or Presentation; you just had to remember how you had tuned your Custom profile. In Snow Leopard it is even worse. The predefined profiles are gone. You can adjust the settings, and you can restore the defaults, and that is it.

As a user of everything Google, I appreciate that Address Book now syncs with Google Contacts, and Mail and iCal now have automatic setup for Google accounts.

A small improvement that I appreciate is the option to assign Spaces to hot corner in Expose preferences. I always intended to make better use of spaces, but without a dedicated key for it, I never got into the habit of it. The problem of course, is that I already had all 4 hot corners assigned to other functions and ingrained in me. Now I have replaced Dashboard with Spaces, since Dashboard does have a dedicated key.

The new stacks design is much improved with the ability to scroll grid view and navigate into folders. Unfortunately, some of the beautiful animations that once accompanied stacks have been scaled back somewhat, and I'm not exactly sure why. Fan view is unchanged, but the animation for grid view has been simplified. In 10.5 Leopard, each icon in the grid would follow its own trajectory into position as the background expanded behind it. This can be seen by holding the Shift key when opening a stack in grid view. I found this video on YouTube that shows it (play from the 35 s mark). The video is pretty crappy, but will allow you to imagine how neat the animation looked in 10.5.

In 10.6 Snow Leopard, the grid just expands as a single unit. Here's a video I made using the new screen recording feature in QuickTime X (it's a little wonky at the beginning on YouTube, but the slow-mo part is clear):

How did I upload this to YouTube? You might think I used the built-in export to YouTube feature in QuickTime X, but actually it failed to work for me! That's rather disappointing. It said that YouTube returned invalid data. Maybe something has changed on the YouTube side that broke this feature. Or maybe it never worked. Who knows?

As far as my existing applications, the only things that didn't work were Dropbox and Squeeze Center - but both of them already had beta builds available with Snow Leopard support, so I just installed those without a hitch.

Finally, I will leave you with a small creation that you might find useful. On Windows XP machines, I have always installed the Windows XP Power Toys. Some of them can be quite useful. One of these is the "Open Command Window Here" Explorer plug-in. It adds a context menu item in Explorer that will give you a command prompt with the working directory already changed to that of the selected folder.

I had looked into creating a Finder plug-in like this for 10.5 Leopard, and it was on my list of things to do but seemed like it could prove quite difficult. In Snow Leopard, the whole Services architecture has been redesigned. For example, the services menu is now context sensitive, and services can appear directly in context menus. Also, Automator now allows you to create workflows that can be used as services. I have created an "Open Terminal Here" service that acts on Finder files and folders. If I have one folder selected, selecting "Open Terminal Here" in the context menu will open a Terminal window and cd to its directory. If I have a file or multiple items selected, the Terminal window will open in the directory containing those items. You can see the AppleScript in the following screen shot. Although it reads like English, it took me awhile to work out exactly how to do it.

I have included the workflow below. You can install it by dropping it in your ~/Library/Services folder, or you can open it with Automator to see how it works or customize it to your liking. Enjoy!

Subsidies to Political Parties are about Fairness

I often find myself reading the comments on news articles on CBC.ca. And I often find myself enraged. Surprisingly, I have yet to create an account and start posting my own comments. That might just suck up way too much of my time.

In response to the Harper goverenment's plan to cancel the $30-million in subsidies that federal political parties receive, I have seen so many people saying things like "put your wallet where your mouth is" or "I don't want my tax dollars supporting some leftist commie party."

Are these people for real? Do they really believe that the rich have a greater right to have their voice heard than the poor? Also, the funding to the parties is based on how many votes they receive, so your tax dollars are only going to the party you voted for. Sure, you might argue that you pay more taxes than most of the poor people who vote for these "leftist commie" parties... but that's the whole point of taxes. They're not your tax dollars. If they were, we'd just let you keep them in the first place. Revenue collected by the government is owned by everyone, to be used for the greater good of all Canadians equally.

I'm not sure what's going to happen now, but I hope that the public see this for what it is - a blatant attack on democracy. I think the Conservatives will be forced to reconsider, given that the talks of a Liberal-NDP coalition are starting to sound pretty serious. Unless they can spin this as the other parties being greedy. But I'm hoping Canadians are intelligent enough to understand that that is not the case. There are many other things of far less consequence that could be cut to reduce spending by a mere $30-million.

Liberal Ridings Lost by the Green Vote

There were at least 20 ridings in the 40th General Canadian Federal Election where the Liberals would have won with the help of some or all Green supporters in that riding. Most of these were won by the Conservatives, with a handful going to the Bloc and NDP (including Trinity--Spadina!).

Egmont
West Nova
Saint John
Ahuntsic
Brome--Missisquoi
Brossard--La Prairie
Haute-Gaspésie--La Mitis--Matane--Matapédia
Jeanne-Le Ber
Kitchener Centre
Kitchener--Waterloo
London West
Mississauga--Erindale
Oak Ridges--Markham
Ottawa--Orléans
Sudbury
Trinity--Spadina
North Vancouver
Saanich--Gulf Islands
Vancouver Kingsway
Nunavut

List of Harper Faux-Pas

Commenter Salem5 on CBC.ca writes:

Is it ethical, moral or right to:
- bribe a dying a man, then lie about it and drag his family through mud and back;
- To fire a Liberal appointed Nuclear watch-dog for doing her job when the Conservative appointed head of Atomic Energy of Canada is at fault;
- to lose Canadians millions over a broken promise on income trusts;
- To claw back on resource royalties from have-not provinces through a broken promise on the Atlantic Accord;
- To fix elections then call one, siting parliament as disfunctional despite passing every bit of legislation you want;
- To brand your opponent as not a leader, without any knowledge in support, only days after his appointment;
- To welcome a floor-crosser to your party, having just spent Liberal money to get elected, and make him a minister;
- To take the electorate for granted by not realing a plan until days before the election;
- To run disgusting and defamatory ads;
- To use scare tactics to discredit your opponents platforms despite the fact that they are signficantly supported by the scientific and economic communities;
- To commit election fraud;
- To squander a surplus, running a budget that will trun a deficit, then suggesting your opponents will run a deficit;
- To suggest the economy is fine, that we aren't headed for a recession, while simultaneously saying that we are in uncertain times;
- To bride families with tax cuts and $100 child allowance when clearly that won't buy you shorter waits times for health care or a child care spot;
- To lie to Canadians, suggesting your opponents are raising taxes when;
- To suggest the environment is fine when scientists say otherwise and the Alberta Oil Sands environmental devastation is visible from space;
-To publicly humiliate someone with a hearing impairment;
- To stand behind your ministers, when they leave classified information behind, call your opponents dogs in the House, make jokes about Listeriosis...;

Ladies and gentlemen, I could go on but my character limite is looming. The Harpers have accomplished the above and more in only two and three-quarter years in power. To my neighbour who still sites the Sponsorship Scandal as a reason to vote Harper, if you add the costs associated with all Steve's gaffs, scandals and controversies, the Sponsorship Scandal is literally just pennies in a pot. Does that justify a Liberal vote? Not really. But Dion has conducted himself with dignity and respect, two words Harper is unfamiliar with.

Cap and Trade

For all you NDP supporters out there, I have a question. Have you stopped to consider how a cap and trade system would actually be implemented? Thousands of auditors would be needed to assess the carbon footprints of every company, and enforcement would be needed to ensure that polluters are operating within their cap or purchasing sufficient credits from greener companies. The cost of implementing such a program could be enormous. A carbon tax is much simpler to implement; we can start now while figure out the logistics of a cap and trade system with real limits on green house gas emissions. Saying you support cap and trade is not a plan. The Liberal platform, and specifically the Green Shift component, is specific and lists the amount of tax one would pay on each type of fuel - typically pennies per unit. There will be no additional tax on gasoline, as it is already taxed the equivalent of $42 a tonne. In the 4th year, home heating oil would have a tax of 11.3 cents per litre (the price has increased by 57.5 cents, or 71.5%, in the last 2 years due to market forces alone). For a typical home, this amounts to under $250 a year in the 4th year in taxes, which is way more than offset by income tax cuts.

How much would cap and trade cost consumers? No one knows. With a carbon tax, consumers and business know what to expect. The Liberal plan also phases in the taxes over 4 years so adjustments can be made gradually. With cap and trade, a market is created for carbon credits. If companies are having difficulty cutting their emissions, carbon credits will be scarce, making them expensive. These costs will be passed on to the consumer.