One More Day

There's two big milestones coming tomorrow, both of which I've been eagerly anticipating - those two things are Mac OS X 10.5 (Leopard) and Scrubs, Season 7.

I like to tell myself that I want Leopard badly, not because of the hype and the 'New Apple product' status, but because it has a whole bunch of features that I'm really looking forward to needing. In fact I'd go as far as to say that the features I'm looking forward to in Leopard fill in the the very few gaps I have found in the functionality of 10.4 (Tiger) which I'm currently running on my MacBook Pro.

Anyway, here's my list:

Screen blanking now a hot corner option

I use the bottom-right corner of the screen to start up the screen saver instantly. The problem is that when I want to sleep, that still leaves 10 minutes of Flurry colours dancing around my room, so it will be awesome to be able to shove my mouse pointer into that corner and have my display(s) got straight to sleep rather than just have the screen saver enabled.

No, turning off the monitor isn't an option, because I usually when I'm using my external monitor I do so with my MBP closed, which means when I turn off my monitor my MBP goes sleep, which defeats the purpose of leaving it on in the first place.

Time Machine

I'm fairly backup conscious; I run rsync backups of my server to remote server, and do the same for my MBP (One of the reasons it needs to be on at night - it runs at 3am), so most of my data is pretty safe.

That said, the idea of having versioned backups so I can go back through history and find a specific revision of a file sounds absolutely brilliant. I know it's been available with Windows XP and up for a while (Volume Shadow Copy), but I don't use Windows and it works slightly differently.

Windows continues to save older versions of files on the same disk which takes up valuable hard drive space, Time Machine on the other hand does it using an external drive and happens automatically when you plug that it.

What would be even nicer for me is if it supported doing its backups to a network drive - I've not heard confirmation of that possibility in either direction so I guess I'll have to wait and see, but if it is possible that means my Time Machine backups would also be included in my off-site Rsync; the best of both worlds!

Asynchronicity

OK, so that's not actually a word, whatever. One of my issues with Tiger (As I explained in sifnt TV episode 6, not yet released at the writing of this article, but should be out soon), is that some time consuming functions happen synchronously which bogs down whichever app (Usually Finder) you happen to initiate said function with until it times out.

This is especially evident with network drives, but a quick example for any Tiger users is to click on the Airport Menu icon - the delay between clicking the icon and the menu popping up is the OS searching for Wireless networks. For a network drive example, mount a network drive using Samba then disconnect yourself from the network....be prepared to wait a long time whilst Finder works out that the drive is no longer available and hang until it times out.

Well, in Leopard it appears that not only are both of those issues fixed, but network drives should now be accessible in any application without having to explicitly go to finder and connect to the drive using Go > Connect to server. At least thats the drift I get from this page (Specifically the AutoFS section).

Other Stuff

• Full UNIX certification
• New tabbed terminal (I know about iTerm, but a few things don't work quite right for me, like Home/End for example)
• Spaces will be rather useful when I'm using my MBP without a second, external, screen.
• Downloads now no longer download to the freaking desktop, they now download to the 'Download Stack' when they can be accessed from the dock.
• Finder is nicely revamped, and it's nice to see they've finally decided to integrate screen sharing. You can now also sync your dock icons and preferences to .Mac which seems handy. So far I've resisted the temptation to pay for .Mac, but this may be a tipping point.
• Front Row is finally upgraded. I love Front Row's simplicity but it's too limited and fairly unstable so a new version is definitely welcomed. I haven't yet used the new Front Row, so no doubt more on that once I've tried it :).
• Photo Booth can now to Video...about time!
• Preview is upgraded including PDF edit abilities (Just page moving I believe) which is nifty.
• Spotlight now does calculations (Much like Google). Awesome, no more using a stupid calculator app/widget.

Ok...that's probably enough on Leopard for now..

As for Scrubs...well it's a brilliant TV show starring one of my heroes, Zach Braff. If you haven't watched Scrubs yet, you should first slap yourself then get right on that. If you have watched it, and love it as much as me...one more day until the next Season starts! w00t!