First Day of Leopard

Ougachaka ougachaka ouga ouga ougachaka.
 - Björn Skifs

Get It Try It

Ever sat behind the wheel of a real quality car? When you get in you can smell the quality. You can feel it. When you turn the engine over you hear something you can't put your finger on but you know it's there. And when you hear the engine revving up you feel something akin to 'recognition' - you know you're 'in tune' with the vehicle.

That's what happens with Leopard. Forget all the fanboys with their features - it's not about features and you know it never was - this is for people who have a better sensitivity - people who appreciate quality 'in the seams'.

And someone sits next to you in this dream car and says 'oh look they have cigarette lighter'. You don't care about a cigarette lighter! And they point and say 'oh look a GPS system'. And you don't care about that either. You care about the quality - how it all holds together.

And you're in your own world. You literally don't hear what your friends are going on about. What do they know anyway? If they can just leave you alone and leave you to sit in your dream car and enjoy that feeling of oneness with something made so well.

Welcome to Leopard.

After 31 days. It actually arrived yesterday. It was ordered 31 days ago. But to get it to us where we are under the shadow of Otemanu took a month. But it finally arrived.

I hadn't slept well in two days. Sydney was off early to the post office in the next village and had it back by 10:20. I set about installing right away.

Hutch told us - or so we thought - we could partition and keep our data and run Tiger and Leo parallel. No such doing. So I opted for 'archive and install' and then went out for coffee with Sydney and Geena in the garden. And when we got back the install was already complete and starting to reboot.

Because we preserved all settings we didn't see much difference. And in fact the login screen is identical. But there are subtle signs right from the get-go.

We have a list of over fifty (50) bugs we filed with Apple in the past half year; it's going to be interesting to see how many of them are dealt with. It seems that most of them have in fact been dealt with.

[That was a fatal assumption - it was a fatal mistake. Ed.]

Mail functions well but I have reason to come back to that monster program in a bit. Everything functions more or less well with the exception of Xcode which likes to crash on the most innocuous things. The most dependable programs are our own. We shouldn't be surprised but at least we're delighted.

Xcode update: we stop him creating this crazy ~/.Xcode which he never uses and if that doesn't work - he crashes?

After less than 24 hours we say: 'this system works'. It's complex and some parts are going to be better than others but it can be taken as a whole - which in itself can be something significant - and when taken as a whole it 'feels' trustworthy.

But for us to 'love' this system we have to be able to 'control' it. And there is too much going on at the present - new wires, new schemes, new things deliberately not made obvious.

And right about the time we figure it all out and relax again they'll come out with the new version.