Tuesday, May 4, 2010

Guinea Pigs Are My Friends

In my world, photography and the computer are inextricably linked. So, I don’t feel that it’s particularly off-topic to speak of my marathon upgrade weekend, and recovery from it.





I never upgrade to a new OS when it first comes out. I give it a while for the software Guinea pigs to test it first. This gives the developers a while to work out the bugs, and third party developers a chance to make their applications compatible with the new version.





My thanks go out to those Guinea Pigs for all their hard work with the latest version of the Mac OS.





I skipped the upgrade to Leopard, Mac OS 10.5x, having interpreted the disaster it must have been by its comparison with Windows Vista. I must say that I do like Snow Leopard, Mac OS 10.6x, having gotten over the anger of the disabling of many of the features that I had come to use and enjoy. Features like the “Install and Keep Package” option in Software Update, or the more powerful features of “Spotlight”, the Mac OS search engine. No longer can you drag an item onto the Favorites folder in your finder toolbar, and have an alias created for you automatically; you must hold down the Command and Option keys to force that option. Even little features like the ability to drag a file onto the column header in a Finder window to move it to the parent folder have been needlessly disabled.





I do like the way folders are displayed from the dock with the “Stacks” feature. “Spaces” I could take or leave, although I know the first time I have a need for them, they’ll be appreciated. “Cover Flow” view is just plain silly for viewing files that do not have a visual component, but I suppose to have made it context-relavent would have been too complicated for the OS. It’s great for photos and music though.





“Quick Look” and the ability to scale the preview in the finder window are features that I appreciate the most as a photographer. While there are many third-party apps that help you to view and sort your library, it’s nice to have these feature built directly into the OS user interface. Nice going, Apple!






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