My Keynote Thoughts
Here are my thoughts of the Apple keynote in 5 points…
Leopard: Agreed. Most successful OS X yet. Had to work on a machine with Tiger the other day, and it felt, well, ugly. I definitely like 10.5 way better, even with the remaining flaws (getting impatient for the 10.5.2 update).
iPhone: Good for Apple, but I still don’t want one. I just don’t use my phone/iPod enough to justify what it would cost me. I admit, they are sleek though. Maybe one day.
iTunes/AppleTV: Of absolutely no interest to me. I’m old-school when it comes to renting my movies. I actually like going to the local Blockbuster and browsing the aisles for something to watch. I don’t even do NetFlix or Blockbuster Online.
MacBook Air: Innovative? Yeah, to a degree I guess. Serious work-horse? Not even close. At best, I see the MacBook Air as a toy for those with an extra $1800 (or $3100 for the SSD equipped model. Ouch!) burning a hole in their pocket. To me, it’s just another gadget that only does some of what my MacBook Pro already can. I’ll stick with what I’ve got, thanks.
Time Capsule: This was the highlight to me. For the average user who is in the dark about backing up data, Apple has made that task much easier. Serving as a base station with a “server grade” hard drive (I guess that means it should be less likely to fail), it’s a simple set up. That’s good for a start. I’m still a huge proponent of having a fully cloned (two if possible) backup of the machines you really rely on. Disk drive quality isn’t what it used to be, so that means more of a chance to lose your data than ever. Backup often, and backup early I always say.
As a final note, I’ve already purchased my Worst Keynote Ever shirt from the MacMerc store…
Oh. A final, final note: There were software updates for QuickTime, iTunes, Front Row and iMovie today. Be sure to fire up Software Update to get yours…
Resetting iTunes Authorization
So you just got a new iMac for Christmas, and now you need to know how to reset which machines are authorized to access your purchased iTunes media. Well, you’re in luck, because here’s the support article you’ve been looking for:
Possible Fix for Leopard Mail Freeze
With the move to my new web host, I finally have the luxury of good, fast IMAP email again (thank you!). I had been doing the Gmail thing for the past few months using the very awesome MailPlane, but even as much as the app rocks, it still wasn’t quite what I was looking for in the way of doing mail.
Though I touted GyazMail as the mail app to have a while back, I’ve secretly harbored a desire to use my first love, Mail.app. There’s something about it that I find gets me where I want to be the quickest. But I digress. This post isn’t about which email reader is better…
Instead, this post is intended to help others who may have run into the same problem I had. Every so often when I’d launch Mail 3.1 in Leopard, or just at other times for no reason, the application would become totally unresponsive. Mail would still arrive, but I couldn’t do much more with it than move the main window around on my screen. I was almost as though the application was frozen, but not quite. Obviously it was doing something very resource intensive to become that unresponsive.
After some rooting around, I think I discovered the problem. By setting the “Add invitations to iCal” option in the General preference of Mail to “Never”, all of my freezes have suddenly disappeared. This may or may not help someone else who’s having the same issue. But for me, it did the trick. Your mileage may vary.
[Update] I’ve also noticed that GrowlMail doesn’t seem to be playing nicey-nice with Mail under Leopard. When I logged out or restarted, logged back in, and launched Mail, it would freeze up as GrowlMail thought about displaying a notification for each message, quite slowly.
If you have GrowlMail installed, and are experiencing freezes in Leopard Mail, try turning it off (Mail > Preferences > GrowlMail). Post a comment if that helps (or doesn’t). So far, it seems to solve the problem for me.
Oh, and I got rid of MS Office completely too. That might have some bearing, or it might not. I’m using iWork ‘08 for that kind of stuff now.