Abrupt Logout in Leopard 10.5.2
Okay this so totally sucks that I have to let the world know about it!
While in the middle of my work, Leopard 10.5.2 just logged me out on its own without any kind of warning. It didn’t let me save any open documents or anything — it just logged me out, and so totally hosed a FileMaker 6 file I was working on in the process that it can’t be recovered or anything. Thank god I have a back up — but DAMNIT Apple, you just cost me two hours worth of painfully tedious work on that file with this little inconvenience. I’m pissed in a very big way right now. Thank you so much.
First it was the external monitor debacle that bit me, now this! Has anyone else had this happen to them? How did you deal with it? Is there something I don’t know about going on here?
[update] It would seem the WindowServer crashing was the culprit according to my crash logs. It could be that there’s a tremendous memory leak in FileMaker 6 (a PPC application which has to run in Rosetta) windowing code. Unfortunately, I don’t have much choice here as the day job is unwilling to upgrade — other than developing FM6 solutions in Windows, which I may have to do now. At any rate, I’ve calmed down somewhat, but I’m still quite annoyed that I lost the 2 hours of work.
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.
Third-Party Devs Request Patience
As Leopard Day nears, third-party devs request patience
You may have already started getting ready for Leopard this week, but third-party developers can’t ensure their apps will work with Apple’s new cat until they get in line with the rest of us.
(via Infinite Loop)
It would appear I’m not the only small-time one man indie developer who’s got to deal with the major OS update…
