Ramblings From Justin Penney

I do not have Leopard (OS X 10.5) yet. I am slightly frustrated that it was not included as it should have been. The Apple Store has been communicative and after the free update site didn't recognize my serial number they asked me to call them so we could work it out. I had only contacted them via email so they could not call me. I was out of town and didn't bother calling yesterday. So far the service has been great. I was shocked to receive email replies in fifteen minutes, especially seeing how busy they were on the 23rd! I think half of the population of KC was in the Apple store ... this included Mayor Funkhouser.

The interface is great! Everything is very responsive and smooth. This is the lowest end Mac that can be bought; I can only imagine how greater macs feel.

Hardware support is a non-issue as it's a known hardware/software pair. Adding my printers was a trivial task. I have a Lexmark Z705 and a Brother MFS-7220. The Brother site had a driver for OS X 10.4 and a note specifying that OS X 10.5 includes the driver. I started to install the driver and received a notification that a newer driver was already on my disk. I cancelled the installation and plugged the printer in. It showed up immediately in the printer utility and worked on the first try.

Lexmark also provided a Mac driver. It was easier to get the Mac driver than it was to get the Windows driver! It took days to get the Windows driver as Lexmark doesn't host that driver directly. Instead there are some questionable download sites that provide them.

I didn't have balloons popping up. There were no dialog boxes asking to download drivers or search around. It did "just work" as Apple likes to tout.

I think it goes without saying that the iPods worked.

There have been some hiccups. SMB performance to my network disk is very poor. I have done some tuning with sysctl which helped but it is still flaky. Using the automount service is not clear. Just having an SMB share mount at all is a pretty obtuse operation. Browsing the OS X forums point in many directions and none of them are very slick. So far my Music folder seems to work all the time. The Pictures folder is spotty. As a work around I may hook the disk up to the Mac via USB and share the directories from there. This is a pretty big hurdle as there are a lot of Windows shares out there. Hopefully 10.5 fixes this.

Installing software is painless. Just copy the program to the Applications folder and it's done.

The trials of Office and iWork are nice. I mostly use Google Docs or Open Office, but I will take a look at iWork soon.

I was finally able to use Handbrake to rip a DVD. On Windows this is an expensive or convoluted process. Handbrake is also open source!

The major hurdle I have at the moment is getting the Darwin Streaming Server to stream to an iPod Touch/iPhone.

# posted by Justin @ 9:59 AM