Category: Macintosh

Not again…..

Unsurprising news via the BBC: “Security threats to PCs with Microsoft Windows have increased so much that computer users should consider using a Mac, says a leading security firm [Sophos].” I think the appropriate response is a Homer Simpson-like “Doh!”

The latest release of Apple’s OS X, 10.4 (a.k.a. Tiger), includes a dictionary application as standard. Among its claims to fame are that it’s accessible as an application or a Dashboard widget, and that it’s integrated into the parental control system, so little Sandy or Chris can look up crap and find that it means “a losing throw of 2, 3, or 12 in [the game of] craps” and nothing else! Yeah, right. Meanwhile it completely fails my rough-and-ready test for being a usable dictionary: it contains neither quinquereme nor cerulescent. The latter is perhaps understandable (cerulean is certainly more common, and quite adequate), but ignoring the opening of Masefield’s wonderful “Cargoes” is completely inexcusable.

As I blogged over the last few weeks, my upgrade to the latest Mac OS, Tiger, went pretty smoothly. However I had this nagging feeling that things might be even better if I did a clean installation. For one thing, I had been upgrading this machine ever since I got it a couple of years ago, and there were a number of obsolete bits and pieces lying around. I’d also installed many, many version of different applications – all of the flavours of OpenOffice for the Mac, various releases of NetBeans, every dot and dot-dot version of Java, various bits and pieces downloaded with fink – and it was increasingly difficult to figure out which bits I could safely discard. One or two applications hadn’t survived the upgrade to Tiger as well as they should have, and I wanted to give them a fresh start. I’d started to notice a few odd error messages in the console log and when shutting down – messages about xinetd, which had been obsoleted in Tiger. And finally free disk space was down to 8GB out of 60GB, which in today’s calculus is “getting close”. (When I think about how I would have killed for 8GB of disk just a few years ago….)

So I decided to perform a clean installation of Tiger. Overall it went very smoothly, even if some of the steps took a while to complete:

• Make sure I had the license information from all of the licensed apps I use – NetNewsWire, MarsEdit, iWork, iLife, PGP, SuperDuper, etc.

• Turn off networking, purge caches, delete temporary files.

• Clone my hard disk on a partition of my external FireWire disk using SuperDuper; boot from the clone to verify that it’s complete.

• Install Tiger from the DVD, carefully choosing the bits and pieces I want (yes to X11, no to some of the more obscure printer drivers and localizations).

• Plug the FireWire drive back in and use Migration Assistant to move over just the user files and network settings – NOT the applications.

• Still offline, install the various Apple applications.

• Now go online and run Software Update several times to pull down all of the updates for OS X, QuickTime, iTunes, iWork, and so forth. Remember to repair permissions after each update.

• Install the remaining applications.

• Wrestle with the inevitable glitch – in this case, why aren’t the PGP actions appearing on the toolbar for Mail? Discover that I need to shut down Mail and run two commands in a terminal window:
  defaults write com.apple.mail EnableBundles 1
defaults write com.apple.mail BundleCompatibilityVersion 2

• When happy with the result, make a bootable backup copy with SuperDuper.

The bottom line? More free space, the system feels snappier, no ugly console messages on shutdown. The only frustrating thing is that one particular application is still broken….

Joy-joy: “Safari / Dashboard vulnerability in OS X 10.4”

And this Widget Manager preference pane might be useful, too.

[Right now I’m running without any widgets in the Dashboard, and I’ve disabled Spotlight indexing – see man mdutil. The system feels much more stable and predictable – virtually no spinning beachballs….]

Having dug into this a little, I can confirm that when the new Mail.app converted my existing cached IMAP folders to the new format, it left the old messages in place. For example, I have a folder called CoolTech which has 4281 messages totalling 18.1MB. (I got this from the cool new Account Info window in Mail.app.) If I drill down into ~/Library/Mail/IMAPxxx/AAtech/CoolTech.imapmbox I can see two subdirectories: CachedMessages and Messages. Each contains about 4,300 files. (Remember: I’ve been receiving new messages and deleting some since I did the Tiger upgrade.)

So we’ve established that upgrading to Tiger will double your on-disk mailbox usage – at least, if you’re an IMAP user: I don’t know about POP. The question is, how to clean up? How about the Rebuild command? The Help describes it thus:

For IMAP accounts, the table of contents file is moved aside, and locally cached messages are also discarded. All the messages are retrieved again from the server to your hard disk and the table of contents file is rebuilt from the newly downloaded messages and from data in the old table of contents file.

So let’s go ahead and try it…. [long pause with lots of network and disk activity] No, it doesn’t work. Or rather, it works exactly as advertised: all of the message files in the new Messages subdirectory were refreshed, but the old CachedMessages directory was left untouched.

Obviously I know how to walk the tree deleting the old stuff (using find in a Terminal window), but it’s odd that Apple didn’t provide for this.

The new email client in Tiger is… frustrating, but promising.

Thumbs down for the lack of keyboard accelerators, the weird toolbar icons (which totally violate Apple’s own UI guidelines), the pale blue folder panel, and the funky animation when you choose a message from a set of search results.

Thumbs up for “Smart Folders”, and the way they interact with the rules-based filing and filtering. A smart folder is like the smart playlists in iTunes: the contents of the folder are defined by an arbitrarily complex predicate.

I’ve defined two smart folders: ALL-UNREAD, and UNREAD-4-ME. (I’d like to colour-code them, but no….) The ALL-UNREAD folder contains all unread messages. UNREAD-4-ME contains those unread messages in which "Any recipient" contains "geoff". (I wanted to define it based on the "To:" header only, but no….)

For example: when a new message arrives from my boss, Samir, addressed to me, my rules cause it to be filed in the folder "Active/G2". The unread count for that folder is displayed in the folder panel. In addition, the message satisfies the criteria for both of my smart folders, so it will show up in both of them. Of course, as soon as I read the message it will disappear from those smart folders. On the other hand, the unending stream of messages on the "mac-users" and "solx86-interest" aliases will be filed away and will only show up in the ALL-UNREAD folder.

The bottom line is that this lets me see at a glance how many new messages are addressed to me, and how many I’m getting by virtue of list membership. If I’m in a hurry, I can simply scan the UNREAD-4-ME folder, and I can do this using just the space bar and delete key.

I’m not going to comment on all of the new features, nor the changes to the GUI. These have been copiously documented all over the place. I particularly recommend John Siracusa’s extraordinarily detailed writeup in Ars Technica. No, in this piece I’m just going to list the problems I’ve encountered with Tiger, in the hope that it may help a few others.

• I’ve already mentioned the first-time conversion issue for Mail.app. Most of you won’t have as much email as I do, but if you’re low on disk space, watch out. The new format takes a lot more space; my ~/Library/Mail now takes 1.7GB.

• Before you run Mail (preferably before you upgrade), remove ALL of your Mail.app add-ins. I caught most of them, but I forgot the PGP bundle. This caused Mail to crash hard the first time I touched a PGP-encoded message. Delete everything in /Library/Mail/Bundles (and also ~/Library/Mail/Bundles). Until we get a fixed version, you can decrypt a message by selecting the whole body and then choosing Mail→Services→PGP→Decrypt-Verify. If the PGP app isn’t running, you may have to try twice. UPDATE PGP has posted a final candidate for PGP Desktop 9.0 which is supposed to be Tiger-compatible. I’ll try it shortly. (Since they have my email address from when I bought the product, couldn’t they have notified me?) UPDATE: PGP Desktop 9.0 works just fine. The only problems were: (1) It wouldn’t accept my PGP 8.0 license key – will this be a paid update? (2) By default, it tries to secure email connections and squawked about my IMAP/SSL connection to Sun. It shut up when I told it to ignore it.

• Bluetooth seems to work OK; I was able to send some photos from my Treo to the PowerBook. However I use Missing Sync to synchronize my Treo over Bluetooth, and this didn’t work: Missing Sync crashed with EXC_BAD_ACCESS half-way through a sync, and the Missing Sync Crash Reporter (which I didn’t know existed) also crashed, with a BREAKPOINT (so perhaps that was deliberate). UPDATE Mark/Space has a page on Tiger issues; I’ll try their suggestions a little later – maybe install the beta 4.0.5.

• I’ve had several other crashes, including an EXC_BAD_ACCESS in the X11 window manager, /usr/X11R6/bin/quartz-wm and another in iPhoto. Neither of these was obviously repeatable. UPDATE: I’ve also managed to cause the Dashboard to reset a couple of times; while manipulating a widget, the dashboard disappears, and if I hit F12 I see all of the widgets restarting. Weird.

That’s it for now. More as I find ’em.

P.S. A couple of interesting things. First, I seem to be getting much better WiFi signal strength – 90% in a location where I used to get 40%. Safari RSS is very polite: it knows about NetNewsWire and lets it handle RSS feeds. And the latest X11 beta of OpenOffice 2.0 (the “Francophone version”) seems to run just fine.

Some pics from my Treo [hence poor quality] of the crowd at the Apple store in Chestnut Hill (just west of Boston). I got there around 5:35, and got in line (first two pics). There were a couple of reporters and photographers buzzing around, asking people who had laptops to fetch them out and “do something”. The guy in front of me had a Compaq tablet PC that he was trying not to draw attention to…. The doors opened on cue at 6:00. Everybody got a “Scratch and win” card: mine was worth a one-song iTunes download. After hanging out and chatting for a while, I left at 6:20, and the line was longer than ever (third pic).

Just installed Tiger on my PowerBook. Naturally the first app that I run is Mail, right? After all, it’s where I spent a significant amount of my life time. But before I can experience the new Mail UI, it tells me that it wants to convert my existing mail folders to the new format (one message per file, for ease of Spotlight indexing). Since I cache my entire IMAP hierarchy locally, together with archives, this means converting 53,322 messages; Mail estimates that it’ll take just over an hour. So I think I’ll let it get on with the job.

(Perhaps I’ll drive over to the nearby Apple store for the launch party… see if I can score a T-shirt or something.)