Simeon Says

I was one of those crazy folks who went and stood in line on Friday night in order to get my family pack of OS X 10.5 (Leopard) licenses. We had a really good group of people at my local store, and they had starbucks on hand to keep line-goers happy.

I completed the backup procedures and prepared to wipe the drive and lay on the new OS. So the thing that was most impressive for me was how quickly this installation went. Typically I start by loading the OS disks and then we begin the arduous task of installing all the other stuff that makes me productive. But the trick with leopard was it already had most of the stuff I needed. On my list of installs for Tiger was a virutal desktop manager and a better terminal application. Well in leopard both these items are addressed, Terminal got an impressive over-haul and Spaces works like a dream.

Then comes the stuff that makes me functional as a developer with tiger this included upgrading apache, subversion, re-installing ruby and then gems and packages. But again with Leopard this is a no brainer, because everything is very current. All I had to do was add mysql and textmate and I was working on projects from last week at work.

So with all this added in to leopard what did I have to install? Well Mysql was one of my first downloads. Then TextMate, Transmit, CocoaMysql, HTTPScoop, Spanning Sync Ical/Google calendar sync and menumeters. Which means that including my OS install and my software reinstalls I had less than an hour of downtime. And I think that rocks.

Now that I have had a couple days to use Leopard I have to say what I am most impressed with. I knew I was gonna love spaces so that one is not my best feature. Whats odd is my favorite thing is not something I knew I wanted fixed. This is gonna sound silly but I am amazed at how much faster spotlight is. I mean its ridiculous. I have been using QuickSilver as an application launcher ( I know it does more, but I dont do more with it) but you will notice that was not on my list of reinstalled software. I am so overjoyed with the speed at which spotlight searches and brings up results. And in truth I am impressed by the speed of the OS all together. I never felt like my computer was slow, but I feel like it is faster today than it was on friday.

The only downside is that after my re-install ColdFusion is not running quite right. But that is not really leopards fault. Leopard is a fully 64bit OS and CF doesnt run in that mode. Its supported on 64bit platforms with 32 bit jvm’s. But to be fair, CF runs just fine. The problem I have is that CF doesnt include a mod_jrun connector for apache 2.2 that is 64bit. So while CF is fine, I have to wait for an updater to be able to do development. With so many folks using macs these days I half expected them to have an updater for this TODAY. But I suppose they have better things to do like count the stacks of cash they made on CF 8 and planning for making more stacks of cash with CF 9. But I am not bitter [Mark Drew](http://www.markdrew.co.uk/blog/index.cfm/2007/10/27/Running-ColdFusion-8-on-Leopard) has had success getting his install up and running. So it appears there is hope out there for others.

At any rate I totally recommend the upgrade. I am really enjoying this latest batch of OS X goodness.

I am working on actually posting to my blog occasionally so this is just a quick tidbit that I wanted to share. When I am helping students in the Flex class debug code there is one error that stands out above the rest. And that is switching your () for {} elements.

The easiest solution? More rigor! Nah, just switch your font so its easier to see the difference. Verdana does a great job of separating the appearance of the () and {} characters.

OK, thats it. Thats what “Simeon Says” today.