Mac-Techs.com

I love using my Mac for its great useability, stability, style and terrific technology. However, I find myself in the Finder at times wishing things worked a little differently than they do. Specifically, the Finder, the navigation box, and applications all seem to have a different idea where the action is at.

For example, I’m working in the Finder. I navigate to a nested folder, find a file and double-click it. The correct application launches and the document opens. Now, perhaps I want to open a related document in the same folder or create and save a doc there. You would think the application’s File/Open navigation box would put me in that same folder.

Wrong. More often than not, it puts me soemwhere else in the file hierarchy, like in the Documents folder, or in the last folder it opened from. Multiply this behavior by two or more applications, and the Finder and pretty soon you are using a large proportion of your Mac time traversing folder hierarchies mumbling under your breath and wishing for an upgrade for your abacus.

Okay, so there’s a solution. Default Folder X by St. Clair Software is a terrific piece of software which puts standard navigation boxes to shame. The least of the things it can do is set up default folders for specific applications, show favorite folders in the nav box, let you traverse folder hierarchies right in the nav box using nested menus and do drag and drop of folders into the nav box. Great stuff. Todd sez, check it out.

 Apple’s Snow Leopard is an amazing piece of technology. As such, it’s fairly new and the many refinements and changes to the OS are still being discovered and sometimes tripped over by the user base. In my case, I’ve used Apple products since 1993 or thereabouts when I got my first Mac IIvi. And I’ve followed along, system upgrade after system upgrade.

Being an advanced user, it would follow that system upgrades would be the first thing I would install. As a Mac user, however, one realizes that this isn’t always the best or safest practice.

First comes compatibility issues. New operating systems usually break some tried-and-true software, and Snow Leopard is no different in that respect. Luckily, for me, I am not using any software Snow Leopard is incompatible with.

Having read all the good news about Snow Leopard, the advancements in multi-tasking, updated Quicktime, more stable Finder and so forth. I was ready for the plunge immediately.

One interesting change in OS X 10.6 over earlier versions….the installer does not allow you to do a clean install of the operating system. Archive and reinstall is the only option.

Which brings me to the subject of this author’s travail. After my upgrade, my system seemed to go through a short period of getting acquainted, and all seemed okay for awhile. However, over the past few weeks spinning rainbow wheels of doom and unexplained  hangs in applications led to repeated force shutdowns of my Mac mini.

I was increasingly concerned as my daily Mac usage began to turn into a forced reboot parade resembling the old OS 9 days. Typically, an application, often Firefox, would start the spinning wheel. The Finder would follow shortly thereafter and that was it. Force reboot was the only option as the machine would never shut down or restart on its own.

Finally I realized this was not going to get tweaked into working right. I started to reinstall Snow Leopard and was informed by the installer that my hard drive was not journaled.

Journaling is a way for the OS to keep track of read/writes to the hard drive, so if an operation is interrupted the data in transit can be restored if a corruption issue occurred. In this case, without journaling, my system was taking hits on the hard drive index every time I forced it to reboot.

How did the drive become ‘unjournaled’? Wish I knew. I rebooted, tried installing while starting from the DVD and the installer informed me that the drive was too corrupted to install a system on.

Okay…get out my Disk Warrior CD and reboot from that. This is where it gets really interesting. OS X now has a technique where if the computer is forced to reboot, a disk check sequence is initiated. If it fails, the machine shuts down.

I’ve never heard of this, never seen it on any technical Mac blog or site. So, it seemed to me that my machine was possibly damaged beyond repair.

Reboot, and this time use the EFI volume chooser trick (don’t ask) to boot from the Disk Warrior CD. Repair the drive. Reboot, install Snow Leopard successfully this time. Update to OS 10.6.1. Problem solved, machine is stable.

Moral of the story: don’t wait to reinstall the operating system. You’ll only prolong the agony.

I went to get a new bank account set up and began talking with the accounts person. She related how awful an experience she underwent with an HP laptop. I could relate as I have an HP about the same age. We both found our new Vista laptops to be unbelievably slow.

Slow doesn’t begin to describe the behavior of this lemon. Being a consultant I ultimately got it resolved but being a Mac consultant it took me awhile to get there.

Basically, I ordered the recovery CD from HP as I had already zapped the recovery partition in an attempt to put Linux on the box. I repartitioned the drive into three volumes and restored the Vista install onto one of them, turning off a great deal of HP installation junk as I went along.

Incredibly enough, HP’s own recovery CD was buggy and it took me several attempts to get the installation finished. Vista was still glacial, so I ended up installing Ubuntu Linux into one of the other volumes and happily used the machine for some months.

Finally, I thought there must be a solution to this madness, did some googling on ‘vista speedup’, and turned off a number of system services that finally gave me a somewhat lifelike Vista laptop. It only took two service pack installations for the HP webcam to start working.

The account rep’s experience was a little more direct. She simply stopped using the machine and got an iPhone. It serves all her needs including web browsing. She figured that since she didn’t buy a separate Internet connection for $50/month, the iPhone was affordable for her.

What I found interesting was how the iPhone for many is becoming their laptop of choice. Why carry one around when all you want to do is check your email, listen to music and perhaps surf a few pages. Doesn’t hurt to be able to watch a video or add a cool game or other application too.

I guess iPhones rock. Somehow I’m not there yet, though I’d like to have one for a week just to check it thoroughly.

Moving from an older machine to a new one is a scenario that probably fills many Mac users hearts with dread. Not that it’s that difficult to do, just that when you consider all the stuff you accumulate on your Mac, the processes, the applications, the tweaks and the adjustments, it doesn’t seem possible that you could fairly seamless and easily move all that to a new machine and get it up and running in a short amount of time.

Migration Assistant makes it just that easy. Of course, it helps to have a knowledgeable person around so the you get over the humps easily, but all-in-all, it’s one of the things that makes OS X so great.

I assisted a client recently move from a dual-core tower G4 to a almost new video production machine moving into a new role, a Mac Pro with two 3.0GHz quad-core Intel Xeon processors. A screamingly fast system by any account.

The older mac had an e-SATA card in a PCI slot used to drive a SATA drive, which was also the boot drive. Also installed was a high-end PCI audio card.

The Migration Assistant lives in the Utilities folder in Applications. It’s basic operation is to access a mounted volume, copy the information off it and into the new machine’s operating system. Sounds easy, right? The first step in this is to get the older machine’s boot volume mounted on the desktop of the new machine so Migration Assistant could access it.

Macintosh systems have this neat trick called ‘target mode.’ Hold down the ‘T’ key, reboot, and a Firewire icon begins dancing around on the monitor. Target mode puts the computer into a mode that is basically like a big external firewire drive. Plug the target mode machine’s firewire port into another Mac and its drives pop up on the desktop. Voila!

Here we entered our first bump in the journey. The older tower G4′s boot drive was running on an e-SATA card. Target mode didn’t recognize the e-SATA card’s volume, so that scenario hit the rocky reefs of reality in short order.

Lo, there was a workaround. The client had a recent backup, a full duplicate of the boot drive, that we could plug into the new machine’s firewire port. Volume on desktop, and back to Migration Assistant.

Without giving away a lot of the process, let’s just say it’s fairly user friendly. You select the volume to transfer from and you are presented with the users on the volume. You select the one you want to transfer and all the applications, and user login data (everything in the home directory) is moved to the new machine.

Once completed, you have a user login on the new machine identical to the user login on the old machine with all the data and settings transferred. It’s fairly a miracle of modern technology yet is really only possible on Apple’s platform since they control both the OS and the hardware.

There were still some tweaks remaining to get fixed. The audio card was PCI. The new machine’s PCI Express slots are totally incompatible. The firewire scanner was unhappy with the Epson software, so Image Capture was called into action, a great program that most people don’t know exists on their Macs for working with scanners or digital cameras.

Tweak, adjust, get back to work. Total time: 3 hours for the copy, 2 hours getting things fixed, back in business.

It’s typically the case that new operating systems from any vendor are something to approach tentatively with some research on bugs and incompatibilities with existing services and/or software.

In my experience so far, Snow Leopard has been one of the most painless upgrades I have done for my own Mac system. Stability of the operating system has improved and I haven’t found one incompatibility yet aside from Second Life, which seems to not to want to launch.

Initially, I experienced some l-o-o-o-o-o-ng rainbow wheel sessions. Thankfully, actually getting a rainbow wheel has lessened, but when it does pop up it can basically go on for quite awhile.

Overall, I’d say thumbs up.