My Not Particularly Secret Mac OS X 10.2 Diary

(Style shamelessly appropriated from Zarf’s My Very Secret MacOSX Diary)

The dates are complete lies.

– Day 1 –

“Jag-wire” arrived today. Still have that goofy pronunciation stuck in my head. Freaky Steve.

Before running the installer, backup the drive. I have 50,000+ files on my drive? Dig around. It turns out Mail.app stores every single message as a seperate file. Stupid Steve. Delete IMAP cache. Now only have 10k files on my desktop. Backup takes 20 minutes.

Run the installer. Go to dinner. Might as well have gone to lunch in Cuba for how long it took. Stupid Steve. Install the rest, move on. Night now, time to go to sleep.

– Day 2 –

Run a bunch of apps. They JUST WORK. Go Steve!

Attempt to read mail. Have two IMAP accounts and one POP account. Mail now all jumbled together into the same folders, so you have to dig around here for the inbox and there for the folder “foo” for this account or that. Completely inscrutable. Stupid Steve. Help system describes this as “improved”. Stupid Steve. No way to turn this off and go back to keeping accounts seperate. Stupid, stupid Steve. Would put more “stupids” there, but would break form.

– Day 3 –

TinkerTool no longer allows me to turn off font smoothing for Cocoa beyond what the OS allows. However, font smoothing has been dramatically improved. Change it to the default setting for a laptop, it’s quite readable. Go Steve!

Attempt to use Help app to divine the secrets of getting back the non-sucky multiple-IMAP account interface. New Help system is fast, makes sense, and no longer takes 10 minutes to load. Go Steve! Help system, however, provides no help on turning off stupid interface. Stupid Steve. Note diminishing marginal returns on bitterness. Considering switching mail clients.

– Day 4 –

Give up on Mail.app. Rip out work account and put it in MS Entourage (has its own breakage, but not nearly as much when running under 10.2. Go Steve!). Can’t get POP account forwarded to personal account (stupid large faceless corporate ISP), just reading personal IMAP account in Mail.app. Using only 1 IMAP account with Mail.app is very well organized. Go Steve! Too bad about the rest.

More tinkering with Mail.app. Junk mail filter is fairly smart. Turn off, since it slows things down and I’m already using Spam Assassin on the server. Font smoothing no longer makes fixed size typefaces unreadable. Global full text search of messages works, and works quickly. New synchronization feature is happy. App as a whole is a bit slower, though.

– Day 5 –

Look through more preference panels, tinker with Finder views. Font size can be shrunk down to human scale. Finder windows much more usable. Go Steve!

– Day 6 –

Launch Classic for the heck of it. Note that I haven’t needed Classic in months. Go Steve! Yep, it’s Classic. Close it.

– Day 7 –

iBook is no faster than it was under OS 10.1.x. Get fewer SBOD’s, though. Spining Ball Of Death. Avoid. Marginal improvement. Worth it, but not worth the hype.

– Day 8 –

Notice that LiteSwitch X doesn’t work. System hacks seem to lose much more than apps. Disable most of them anyway.

Notice little cruft due to new system install. Decide I should probably wipe system and reinstall. Pat self on back for setting up directory layout so as to make this easier. Go Fink!

– Day 9 –

Play with built in apps. File finding has now been put back where it belonged: in the finder. Plus it’s actually reasonably fast again. Go Steve! Sherlock no longer tries to extend the file finding metaphor to a bunch of silly things I don’t care about. Instead it puts a decent interface on random web stuff. Hmm. Neat.

Address Book is neat but who cares? It can actually pronounce my name or something.

– Day 10 –

PPTP VPN, PPTP VPN, PPTP VPN, PPTP VPN, PPTP VPN. Go Steve!

MS Entourage is happier under 10.2 than it was under previous releases, Mozilla is much happier. As in, it’s usable. Go Steve!