Leopard notes
I upgraded my MacBook to Leopard on Sunday morning. Lots of tiny things are better; some serious issues with Safari 3.0.4 and the Flash Player; overall stability is… well… read on.
I had to delete my Parallels VM in order to free up enough disk space for Leopard, and now I have to figure out how to clean up enough cruft to make room for the VM to come back. Good thing I have another machine to do development on.
Love all the little details. 3D dock: nice. Translucent menu bar: nice. Better AirPort menu: nice. I’m fine with saying goodbye to brushed metal — I for one welcome our new gray-gradient overlords. Seems like there are many tiny little bug fixes that make life nicer, like the fact that the Dock finally seems to deal correctly with Java applications like Eclipse.
Haven’t had a chance yet to try Time Machine, which is the Leopard feature that more than anything else made it worth it to me to spend the money. Haven’t tried Spaces yet.
Everything feels faster on my 2.0 GHz C2D MacBook with 100 GB 7200 rpm disk and 3 GB RAM, but I’d really like to know why. Better memory utilization? Faster disk access? I’m not complaining, mind you.
Flex Builder 3 beta 2 will pretty consistently crash the second or third time I use Cmd-Shift-R to open a file. Usually it crashes after picking the file, but once it crashed while I was typing the file name. I’m pretty sure this doesn’t happen under 10.4, but don’t quote me.
NetNewsWire 3.0 was crashing a lot yesterday. It was pretty stable under Tiger, so I think this is new.
Safari 3.0.4 seems pretty well behaved overall, but there are some problems when running Buzzword. Problem 1 is that our JavaScript for pushing focus away from Flash wasn’t working reliably. I fixed that using the same retry technique that I had to come up with to resolve this exact same problem under Firefox in Ubuntu. Problem 2 is that FileReference.upload() seems to be completely broken, which means that Buzzword can’t upload images. Emmy Huang says the fix is coming in Moviestar; hope that’s soon.
Buzzword seems to be fine in Firefox under Leopard except for the image upload problem.
There appears to be no way to get the shipping version of Safari 3.0.4 for Tiger. If we had that, it would give us more flexibility in testing fixes to 3.0.4-related bugs. On the other hand, maybe we should count our blessings that it’s not available, because it keeps the testing matrix smaller!
Upgrading to a new version of the OS is a really interesting transition. As a developer, I’m in awe of how much work it must have been to get to the point where 99% of everything just works the same as before or better. As a user, I feel like the 1% of stuff that’s broken or crashing is pretty bad, and gives the OS that not-quite-ready-for-prime-time feel. Ah well, if I had wanted maximum stability and a more seamless transition, I would have just waited a few months. But then again, that wasn’t an option, given the need to test Buzzword right away.
Technorati Tags: Flash, Flex 3, Leopard, OS X 10.5
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I have the same problems with Flex 3 beta 2, as you describe. I can’t drag components from the components menu to my design view. If I add a photo to the image component in design view, it wil “crash” . Everywhere I click then, will open the “Open File” windows, and I have to restart Flex. (Only force quit work then).
Sounds like there are some general complaints about Java under Leopard. I guess that’s what comes with naming a shipping date – I’m guessing we’ll be seeing some frequent updates between now and December
I’ve had no luck with Safari in general. I was really excited about trying it when I started using a Mac for development at work. However, it often fails to load pages. Just pauses and does nothing.
I tried upgrading from Safari 2 to Safari 3 beta in hopes that my issues would be resolved. (They were not, furthermore, I then began to have serious issues with MSN Messenger and other apps – so I reverted.) So far, Safari has been a big time disappointment. I would expect to at least be able to consistently browse Apple’s own website.
So Firefox is my default browser for both Mac & Windows.
UGHHH I am having the issue with fileReference,upload() as well. I hope this fix is coming quick because I’ve got clients on macs sending in bug reports as fast as the internet can handle them. Man, I swear Apple is getting closer to MS with every successive release (and that’s not a good thing).
‘I swear Apple is getting closer to MS with every successive release (and that’s not a good thing)’
Apple have never really concerened themselves with backwards compatability unlike MS. Apple seem to take the view that the upgrade is worth it and that software needs to catch up. Looks at OS9 to OSX. There was a ong period of time where if you wanted to use particular software you would have to boot up OS9.
In retrospect you could say thet are getting closer to MS, as majority of software still works after the Leopard upgrade.
Yes! cmd-shift-R has been ruining my life since upgrading to Leopard!
It’s crashing under (vanilla) Eclipse and Zend Neon – like you say, it’s after the second or third time using it. Quite odd, but infinitely frustrating. Searching manually for files? What is this? 1999? Pfah!
My Leopard upgrade has been pretty similar. I must say coming from Linux, spaces is pretty refreshing. Though due to the pattern of having virtual work spaces in my head I keep looking for an app / window list for some reason. I am extremely disappointed that Apple left Java6 out of Leopard, hopefully it’ll be added soon via an update.
All,
This morning we updated the MAC version of the Flash Player 9 Update beta on http://labs.adobe.com/technologies/flashplayer9/, specifically to address this issue.
All Leopard users should update to 9.0.98.0.
Hi,
Regarding cmd-shift-r… Truly a bummer. But I’ve installed this instead:
http://muermann.org/gotofile/
Does the same thing and doesn’t seem to cause any problems…
The major problem I am having with Leopard is that Acrobat Connect crashes every few minutes. It is seriously getting in the way or how we do business, and I haven’t heard anything on the issue. Do you know of any patches or upgrades that would help?
thanks!