NGG

Recently a company named Bjango decided to take their free iStat Menus application for the mac to a pay model. That’s fine, its a great app and I used it daily. I was considering upgrading from my free version. They announced this by popping up an upgrade window that had 3 buttons on it, Skip this version, remind me later, and upgrade now. I have this running on several macs, so it popped up on all of them. No problem, its only $10, I’ll probably do it to support them, so I hit the remind me later button. Popped back up the next day, I hit it again, remind me later. This went on for several days, by now I think I will remember to do it, so I hit the skip this version button and I will revisit it when I am ready to. Next day, it popped up again. Hmm, I hit skip again. A little later that same day, it popped up again. I thought it was just my laptop so I hit skip on my desktop. A little while later it popped up again. Well, now I’m a little bit miffed. You had me due to the benefits of the application, so I would have upgraded. Now you are spamming me on my screen using the free version that didn’t use to do this, and you put a button on the screen to make me think I can stop it.  Lost a customer.

There is no way I will use this product anymore, and I hope others will join me.  I found another app that does many of the same tasks, and I am really liking it so far.  And the best part is its still free, its called atMonitor.  Check it out, it has a mode that puts graphs on your desktop and/or in your menu bar.  So long iStat Menus, its been real….

OK, so right now I have to say my favorite new un-published feature in leopard is the smarter renaming feature for files.  If you click on a file to rename it, it highlights the filename minus the extension.  So if I go to rename a jpeg for example, I click on it, hit return.  The name is now highlighted, but not the extension.  So if I want to name screwup.jpg to screwup1.jpg, all I have to do his hit the right arrow key on the keyboard and it moves the cursor to just after the p.  It’s the little details like this that make me smile.

NOTE: if you are a little snitch user, you will need to upgrade to the new 2.0 beta, and it is well worth it aside from being the only way it will work in leopard.  I really like the new features. I also love the process sampler that is in the activity monitor now.  Very handy.

I really love the changes to the Terminal.app, I spend most of my time in this application and the improvements are perfect.  You can even make a direct ssh, sftp, ftp, rlogin connection in a new terminal.  And again, the tabbed terminal is something that should have been there a long time ago.  Now if we could just get window groups that would remember which connections they have it would be a done deal.

Screen sharing built right into the finder is a great feature too, no longer need to open up remote desktop.  It seems to me that all of the things that make sense are coming to fruition more and more with this release.  With the cover-flow view of your documents, you no longer need to open an application if you are just quickly browsing your filesystem for a particular document.  I have found myself getting things done faster with these features. I thought I wouldn’t be that impressed with the downloads folder, but is been awesome as well.  Apple obviously has some serious user experience folks.  As I said in the title, its the little things, the small details that make the mac great.

Well, I got my copy of Leopard this morning, and began the process of upgrading my systems.  I pre-ordered so it arrived before lunch, which was good because it took most of the day.  I met with a Rep from Apple this afternoon too, which was interesting as he was very surprised to see me with my copy already since it wasn’t supposed to be out until 6 tonight but I guess he hadn’t heard of pre-ordering.

So my new iMac upgrade went fine, and my wifes macbook upgrade went fine, but then I got to my macbook pro and it all went down hill.  I started it up and when it got to the select a destination screen I noticed my hard drive was not present.  This is usually of no great concern, could just be a bit of FS issues so I ran the Disk Utility repair on it and it found some problems and repaired them.  So far so good, so I tried again, still no drive present.  Weird.  In Leopards Disk Utility app I noticed that the partition was missing in the list, only the device showed.  I rebooted using my diskwarrior CD and ran its repair on the drive, said the drive was fine and didn’t need any repair.  I decided my only course of action would be to back up all of my data on an external drive an do a clean install.  This of course took hours, but when it was done I booted up the Leopard DVD and tried again.  This time…. still no drive.  In Disk Utilities I selected to erase the drive, and it reported back to me that the drive was busy and could not be erased.  Highly peculiar.  I quit Disk Utility again and was about to start it up again when suddenly my drive appeared.  So I continued with the upgrade instead, and it worked without a hitch.  Don’t know exactly what went on there, but I think the drive didn’t get started up correctly, and the process of trying to erase it got the driver going!??  I don’t know, but I do know that I love this new OS.

There are too many new features that I love, and I know many others out there are already writing about them.  I really like the tabbed terminal upgrade.   All in all I am very pleased with this update.  Thanks for a great new product Apple!