Dan Makovec’s blog

Impressions of Leopard

Just installed Leopard on my iMac last night, and to be honest it’s a bit meh so far.  There have been some small improvements, but surely nothing that required a dot upgrade?

I bought it for Time Machine, which I’m sure will pay for itself after a while - lazy as I am at doing backups and maintaining scripts to tar and untar archive files.

I notice some minor improvements with Mail.app - for my purposes, iCal’s Todos showing up in Mail is nice, since I hardly ever look at iCal.  One neat feature (to me anyway) they’ve done in Mail is a change to the way multiple messages are selected.  If you click on a message and drag up or down, you select the other surrounding messages.  If you drag left or right, it realises you want to move the messages and groups them together to drag.

The old Tiger Mail grouped them no matter which way you dragged, so you had to shift-drag to select multiples.  The “Move to XXX Again” context menu is also nice.  I have an enormous IMAP folder hierarchy and it’s a bitch to drag lots of messages between various folders, so after doing it the first time, the above menu item gives you a nice shortcut.  New keyboard shortcuts (apple-1 to apple-8) let you jump through folders easily.

The most controversial “feature” is the new desktop translucent menu-bar.  Depending on the picture you have on in the background, this can make viewing and using the menu extremely difficult.  This is a rare slip up for Apple, who normally pride themselves on good UI usability.  I never got the whole transparent thing, but if it’s there then there should at least be an option to turn it off.  I know I’m not alone in suggesting this.  If they wanted to conserve desktop space, they could have made it an auto-hide menu (a la the Amiga c. 1985).  As far as I can tell though, this new transparent menubar is just wank for wank’s sake, and actually reduces productivity by making the damn thing harder to read.
Oh yeah, they’ve also finally done away with the rounded corners at the top of the screen.  I kind of miss them, but they really were a relic of the old CRT macs. and looked a little dated.  I’m not really a fan of the new folder icons either (they’re pretty chunky), but I’m sure I’ll get used to them.

Finder has had a serious makeover and now works the way I thought it always should have (when it doesn’t lock up).  Coverflow view is kinda cute but a bit gimmicky.  Accessing network machines is now far more logical than before though so quite an improvement.  Smart folders (a la Tiger’s Mail.app and iTunes) are also a welcome, if overdue, addition.

So, would I upgrade all my computers to Leopard?  Probably not.  But this upgrade’s cheaper than Tiger was (especially with work paying for it), and the built in backup makes it a good idea for a work machine if you don’t already have a decent backup system in place.

Employment contracts

For our move to Brisbane in April, B had to take a bit of a punt.  Take on a reasonably well paid 6 month contract with big bank “X”, with the possibility that it wouldn’t be extended beyond November.  Actually, he’d originally been offered it as a permanent job, but when the paperwork came out, it had been changed to the aforementioned 6 monther because of a “staff hiring freeze” while the company was undergoing restructure.

Now its the end of October, and his contract officially runs out next Friday.  Bank X need him to stay on and carry out the work, but can’t guarantee his employment beyond another 4 weeks.

Fortunately for B, he had foreseen this problem in September, after repeatedly asking his managers for an indication as to the likelihood of a contract extension.  Upon getting no firm answers, he did what any sane person would do, faced with uncertain employment over the Summer: he started job hunting.  At first it was by scouring through Seek, then by contacting agents.

Now, upon asking around the office at Bank X, he discovers that staff morale is low. The hiring freeze in place for most of the year has meant that most staff in his department are on contracts, and most of those contracts are running out within the next few weeks.  The staff are nervous, and many of them have now also started looking for work.  Some of them are even off to job interviews with other companies today.  Management is not happy, because they feel that they’re being deserted en masse, and are now up for significant work disruptions, re-hiring and training costs.

There’s a blindingly obvious moral to this story: if you want to keep your staff, give them some certainty of their employment.

Everybody knows that the arse drops out of the job market mid November and doesn’t pick up until late February.  If you’ve got employee contracts coming to an end over the Summer, decide by the beginning of October whether to extend them into the next year or not.  Then tell the staff to give them a sense of certainty.

Nobody wants to be out of work for 3 months - particularly those with families and/or mortgages.  Hence, if your staff don’t know your intentions by October, they’re going to start jumping ship in droves.  You’ll be left to pick up the pieces over the lead up to Christmas (at which time, the smart permies will already have booked their leave).
So what about B?  Well, as of last week, he’d been offered a permanent role, on higher salary, with Bank X’s arch-rival, Bank Y.  He’s arranged to start 2 weeks after he leaves Bank X, the departure date conveniently coinciding with our moving into our newly bought house.

Sorry Google, not good enough

Google’s Desktop search for OS X is pretty neat - it lets you search documents by content rather than just by filename (a limitation of Tiger’s Spotlight).  It’s also pretty sexy how it remembers web page content from firefox.

All that aside - it just crashed my 6 week old iMac.  Not happy.  I was doing my work as normal (Mail, Emacs, Firefox), and the computer started slowing down.  I immediately suspected GDS - since it was the only program I’d installed on the computer in 2 weeks.  Eventually, the screen stopped responding altogether, so I hopped on the laptop and ssh’d in to run top.  I saw 1.8G of my 2G of RAM was in use - 1.2GB of it was being used by GDS alone.  Straight over to John Gruber’s blog, where I read up on all the files that were installed by GDS, and removed them by hand, then killed the processes.  Unfortunately it was too late for the GUI, which by now was so twisted up in swap that it just couldn’t recover, so I had to hard reboot.

This was only the second time I’d ever hard rebooted this machine, the first time being yesterday, 2 days after I’d first installed GDS.  Not hard to guess who the trouble maker was on the system.

So thanks but no thanks Google.  I’ll stick to Quicksilver + Spotlight for now.

Mind Meister

Is it just me, or is Mind Meister one of the best web 2.0 apps ever?

This is the first such app I’m not just considering paying for, but am actually paying for.  I’ve always found mind mapping tools (e.g. Freemind) useful - but this one takes the whole tool concept one step further with its real-time team collaboration features.  It allows us, a work-at-home, geographically dispersed startup, to collaborate on ideas and actually get them documented in a logical and centralised fashion in a way that wikis just don’t allow. Plus it’s so easy to use that the learning curve is pretty much non-existent.

Keep up the great work, guys!

Joosting along

Just downloaded Joost (www.joost.com) and decided to give it a spin.

My prediction is that this will do for TV what Skype did for the telephone. Considering it’s been public for under a week, what they’ve done is simply phenomenal, both with respect to technology and content.

Definitely give this a go if you have broadband…