Mac OS 10.5 First Glance

I spend most of my time in an Ubuntu VM, so I don't use many of the features of my MacBook Pro's host OS.  But I upgraded to 10.5 yesterday for dtrace and checked out a few other features in the process.

Spaces

Spaces works about as well as VirtueDesktops.  It's easier to configure, and it's less crashy, but it doesn't let me give my spaces names, which has been a palpable visual cue in VirtueDesktops that I've landed on the right one.

And although moving to the right of the rightmost space usefully wraps around to the leftmost one, the transition animation shows me moving left (but not across the intermediate spaces), which confuses me every time.

But most significantly, like VirtueDesktops it makes navigating to a window even more complex than it already was, with three somewhat-overlapping keyboard shortcuts: Control-ArrowKeys to change spaces, Command-Tab to change applications (across all spaces), and Command-BackQuote to change windows within an application.

I'm constantly hitting the wrong key.  Maybe I'll get used to it, but I think I'll continue to prefer how I've configured multiple desktops in Ubuntu, where one shortcut (Control-Alt-ArrowKeys) switches between desktops and another (Control-Tab) switches between windows on that desktop.  I wish there was a way to do that on Mac.

Time Machine

Time Machine looks like it could replace the manual backups I currently do with SuperDuper!.  It seems to lack a "back up everything now" button, which I want to press before leaving for a trip, but perhaps its automatic hourly backups are good enough.

Nevertheless, it's unclear when and how it'll back up my 40GB Ubuntu virtual disk file, which is almost always open.  Maybe I could exclude that file from Time Machine backups and then back up the files inside it from within the VM.

Unfortunately, there's no Time Machine (or even SuperDuper!) for Ubuntu, as far as I can tell, just a hundred blog posts describing how various smart folks have used some arcane combination of tar and rsync commands to back up their systems.

Networking

The Network preferences dialog is much better organized, which is nice, since I seem to visit it more often than I'd like.  But perhaps I'll be visiting it less now that Mac OS X no longer turns up its nose at my home network's WPA personal security after every taste of the office network's WPA2 enterprise security.

The WPA2 enterprise username/password dialog also no longer goes away while I'm in the middle of filling it out if I take more than three seconds to do so, a welcome change.

VMWare Fusion

VMWare Fusion has a few minor issues in 10.5.  It no longer resizes my Linux VM's resolution when I plug my laptop into my external monitor, nor does it recenter the desktop when I go from the external monitor back to my laptop's display until I switch from full screen mode to window mode and back.

And using Command-Tab to go to Fusion alternates between open Fusion VMs on two different spaces instead of taking me to the last one I used.  Plus the tools need some munging to properly integrate with X.

But on the whole it still works fine, and I can continue to live in my full-screen Linux VM (from where I'm typing up this blog post now).

Appearance

I like the new darkness, with its multitude of gray tones.  But I bemoan the addition of even more rounded edges, like those at the bottoms of menus.  I prefer sharp edges in both virtual designs and physical ones (like cars and clothing), and its too bad everything has become a blobject since computers made it easy to draw a spline.  Bubble buttons, bubble cars, bleh.

automated JS code rewriting

Taras Glek has been doing awesome work on a framework for automated C++ code rewriting.  I'd love to see something like that for JS code, since there are potential optimizations that are hard to do by hand (like changing the way we memoize nullary methods or removing the names of function expressions assigned to object properties).

Maybe Narcissus could be repurposed to provide round-trip JavaScript parsing, modification, and reserializing?  This'd be a great project for someone who wants to help improve Firefox performance.

Bo Yang's Advanced Microsummary Builder

This summer Bo Yang, a student at NanKai University in Tianjin, China, worked on a microsummary builder extension.  His goal was to make it easy for regular users to create custom live titles for pages while experimenting with some additional features for power users.

He's recently uploaded the extension to addons.mozilla.org, and I've created a screencast showing it in action.  Check out the screencast, then try out the extension (Firefox 3 pre-releases or nightly builds only).

Don't forget to file any bugs you find, and let Bo know (in comments on this blog post or by emailing him directly) what kinds of pages you're summarizing and how the extension works for you.

(For example, I used it to create a live title of timeandate.com's World Clock page showing the approximate time in Bo's time zone so I knew when I could expect to see him online.)