The Blog that Noone Reads

Speaking of Leopard, I picked it up at the Apple store just a few minutes after it went up for sale. I’ve been playing with it over the weekend. So far, I’m very happy, though it’s difficult to “play with” an operating system. The real test comes from using it for your every day stuff.

What I can say is that I’m mostly happy with the visual changes. Many people have complained about the new look of the dock, and the folder icons. While I think the new dock is attractive, I find it to be not as usable as the simple one. Luckily, a much more usable, and equally attractive option is only a Google away. As for the folder icons, I like them. The special versions are not quite as easy to pick out since they’re lower contrast than the previous versions, but they’re more unified looking and make thing seem less cluttered.

I’ve actually been using the OS on my main personal machine full time since WWDC, so I’ve seen it go through some changes. In an earlier build, when you clicked on a folder inside of a stack, it showed that folder in the stack view. I liked that better than the retail version which opens the clicked folder in finder view.

Stacks, in general, I have mixed feelings about. I love their functionality, but I don’t like the way they’re displayed on the dock. Since they’re displayed as a stack of their contents, it’s difficult to tell them apart from each other at a glance or quickly differentiate them from minimized windows. Hopefully, Apple will provided a way for them to be displayed as plain ole folders or arbitrary icons in the future.

The last thing I’ve seen mentioned a lot is the removal of the backup via network drive feature that was present in earlier builds. I have some ideas about why this may have been removed, but my hope is that it was just not ready and we’ll see 10.5.1. Based on some apparent differences in the way things are implemented in the retail release, I’m thinking this might not be the case.

Overall, Leopard is a win for everybody. My recommendation for any new major OS release is to wait until after the first patch, which should be no more than a few weeks, but I would recommend upgrading to Leopard to anyone one that happens.

I just finished reading Ars Technica’s review of Leopard. It’s long. Very long. It’s fantastic.

I’ve read several reviews of the OS and most of them contain the same regurgitation of what you can read on Apple’s website. They list the major new features and comment briefly on each. The Ars Technica article goes into deep details about many of the lower level libraries and kernel features. As most people who attended this year’s WWDC will tell you, Leopard is all about what’s going on behind the scenes. There are a lot of compelling features for the average user, but the most exciting stuff is what it’s going to allow from developers in the coming years.

If you want a detailed overview of what’s new in Leopard from the geek perspective, read this article.

I spent some time profiling an application at work today. I’m always surprised at what I find. The parts I expect to be slow often surprise me by how fast they are. Yet, other parts that I hadn’t considered as targets for optimization turn out to be the real dogs. The moral of the story is that the first step of optimizing an app should be profiling. You can often improve performance drastically by just going after the low hanging fruit.

The two major things I look for are methods that just take a damn long time and methods that are called an inexplicably large number of times. A method that completes in an average of, say, 10ms might seem like it’s not worth your efforts. If it’s called 1,000 times, it still owns 10 seconds of your total operation time. If you can get it to operate in 8ms, you save 2 seconds. Or, if you can get it to be called 500 times instead of 1,000, you save 5 seconds.

Just noticed this on Ars Technica. They’re using .ars as their file extension in their urls. I started seeing this custom file extensions a few years ago when developers wanted to mask the server technology they were using by replacing .php or .aspx with something less meaningful.

That’s all well and good, since the resulting content sent to the browser is actually HTML and not PHP. The one detail that’s missing is that the file extension is meant to be meaningful. There are places where that file extension is used as a hint for how to treat the data. For example, if you save that html file to your desktop, you won’t be able to double click to open in your browser because the operating system has no idea what a .ars file is.

The buzzword of the season seems to be “semantic web.” Let’s not just put meaning into our markup. Let’s put meaning everywhere possible. It makes our content more valuable. Why not try .html?