RejectReality

This weekend was pretty sweet. My other half organised lunch with friends at the local botanical gardens, just for something different.

Although I’m not really much of a plant guy by nature (believe me when I say I kill more plants than I save - I can still hear the screams), it was a great excuse to get the camera out and see what was around.

The botanical gardens have gone through a serious upgrade since we were last there many years ago; a new glasshouse built for lilly pads,water feature, sculpture and new restaurants.

We also came across plenty of the native wildlife; these ducks were everywhere and were absolutely fearless. This one, in particular, was more than happy to sit there and pose while I had a lens around a foot or two away from his noggin for a good few minutes.

More photos from the outing are here. Warning - large quantity of duck lies beyond that link.

Tonight was the night my Mac Mini and MacBook Pro met up with the new cat on the block.

Ladies and gentlemen, the Leopard has landed.

For the install (and to make my life easier if it went/goes up in flames), I turned my iPod into a bootable copy of the install DVD using Disk Utility. Both Macs were booted off of the iPod and Leopard was installed over USB.

Both boxes received the Archive and Install treatment which was decidedly uneventful; it Just Worked(tm). Each took around 1/2 an hour to complete using this method.

First impressions:

• Yeah, it’s pretty.
• Screen Sharing works great.
• Spaces work well. Give or take some strange focus issues, it seems to be less quirky than the last release of Virtue Desktop that I was using. At least Spaces hasn’t lost windows.
• I don’t know what all the fuss is about with the translucent menu bar - it looks fine to me, although that’s likely due to my background image.
• Stacks. Meh.
• Reflective Dock. Again, meh.
• Quick Look is a neat idea. Dunno how much I’ll use it.
• Tabbed Terminal is great - especially considering how many of the things I usually have flying around
• iPhoto still works with no apparent weirdness. I’m still glad I made (multiple) backups of my 40 gig library.

Quikry stuff:

• Spotlight decided it was time to do a full re-index on my MacBook, but not on my Mac Mini. A near-hour of thrashing later and it was happy again, although I’ve got no idea why it was necessary. Even more amusingly, it only on one box and not the other - they were both fully indexed and happy before the upgrade.
• Mail found and re-added two (really) old email accounts that I deleted months back.

  Good thing: it left my other three alone.

  Bad thing: it decided to suck down all my mail again for my primary account. 1.5 gig of mail coming from the other side of the world via IMAP when my home DSL connection has been shaped to modem speed ain’t fun to watch.

• MarsEdit’s post preview seems to refresh the page in it’s entirety *really* frequently, including sucking down header images from my remote server, rather than use a cached copy.

  I suspect WebKit’s changed it’s behaviour for the Leopard release; shame it’s new behaviour is crappier than before. I can say that it certainly didn’t have this behaviour under Tiger with the Safari 3 beta installed (v3.0.3), or at least, it wasn’t anywhere near so visible.

  Unfortunately, preview’s off until that is sorted.

• X11 is supposedly fundamentally broken. I’m not even going to bother trying this until the it receives a patch.

New stuff to play with:

• Time Machine’s going to get set up on the weekend when the parts for my new drive array rock up. Yay for completely automated backups (although I’ll still keep up with my Unison ones)
• Since I’ll have a couple of spindles spare, I’m going to break out the ZFS beta and see if I can work out how to kill it. For my workload, ZFS is going to rock — as long as it doesn’t hose my data in the process. Again, yay for automated backups

Overall, it’s not a bad release. Eye candy is always good, but I’ll take a solid platform over that any day. Once the (numerous) initial wrinkles are ironed out, it should be well worth the upgrade.

Apparently, Apple’s already preparing and testing 10.5.1 to address these issues. At least that’ll be a couple of week gap between release and the first “service pack”
I’ll post again when I find more broken stuff.

I was posed with an interesting problem today; to come up with a way to quickly add and display outstanding iCal to-do items.

An hour later, a little AppleScript was born that grabs all your outstanding to-do items and displays them, separated by which calendar they exist in and displays the due date, if entered. Even better, they disappear from the notification list when you mark an item as completed in iCal.

It requires Growl, a general purpose notification utility, to be installed to display the to-do items. It also works best when invoked by using a global hotkey to execute the script on demand. I use Quicksilver, an application launcher, for the latter part; I’m sure there are alternatives that will function just as well.

Aside from having Growl installed and running, you don’t need any special configuration to use it with this script.

Details for how to set up a Quicksilver keyboard trigger to invoke this script can be found in the Quicksilver documentation.

Pick up a copy of the ready-to-run script here:
growl-todo-items.scpt.

Feel free to open it in Script Editor to have a look (and most likely a giggle if you’re a serious Mac developer ) at the script.

When you run the script, here’s what it looks like:

Pretty neat, eh?

If you use it, like it, hate it, have problems with it have mangled it into something else cool, make sure you drop a comment below or send me an email to let me know!

PS - If you install Quicksilver with the iCal plugin to run this script, you can also use it to quickly add todo’s into iCal too!