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Via The Macalope, Microsoft’s leaked reaction to Mac OS X’s new search capabilities:

Lenn Pryor:

You will have to take Vic’s disk…I am not giving mine up. Tonight I got on corpnet, hooked up Mail.app to my Exchange server and then downloaded all of my mail into the local file store. I did system wide queries against docs, contacts, apps, photos, music, and my Microsoft email on a Mac. It was f*cking amazing. It is like I just got a free pass to Longhorn land today.

Jim Allchin:

Yes. I know. It is hard to take. I don’t believe we will have search this fast.

The funny part for me as I read this is that they’re talking about Mac OS X 10.4 search. Mac OS X 10.4’s search worked, but it was very slow. Yet apparently, even that blew away what they had.

Still, it isn’t all bad for Microsoft: It looks like they at least realized the speed of search was important.

I’ve been using this iMac for a few weeks, and I’ve noticed an odd melty-plastic smell from time to time. I didn’t associate it with the iMac, though; the top of the iMac was hot, but not unbearably so.

After the weekend, though, the smell was more intense. Bruce found a particular spot on the back panel of it that was uncomfortably hot. Time to investigate.

I downloaded Temperature Monitor and found the power supply was at 81° Celsius (about 178° Fahrenheit). That’s far too hot! I found smcFanControl and turned up the fan speeds, and my iMac’s power supply is runs between 55-58° Celsius (131-136° Fahrenheit). That’s much healthier, and the plasticy smell has almost (but not completely) disappeared. The downside is that the iMac is no longer silent, though I’m pretty sure I can turn the fans down slightly over the next few weeks.

I appreciate that Apple was trying to make my workspace more enjoyable by keeping the volume down, but it turns out the smell of burning plastic is more distracting than the fan noise. I can only imagine being without a computer while the power supply and back panel were replaced would have been even more distracting.

So I’m about five days into my free .Mac trial, and I thought I’d write up some thoughts.

I pay about $60 per year for 500 GB of storage and 5 TB of bandwidth from DreamHost. .Mac costs $100 per year. For that much, it should be really, really special. On a strictly numerical level, DreamHost beats .Mac. Now, it’s true that DreamHost’s reputation for reliability has taken a beating the last year or so, but for $6 per month I can accept a few days per month of down time. And it’s nowhere near that bad; it seems to be less than one evening every month or two.

So that leaves a comparison of features. Now, actually there’s very little overlap between the two. .Mac offers a bare minimum of traditional web hosting features, with low bandwidth and storage, and few of the more dynamic features such as SQL and PHP. DreamHost offers huge bandwidth, huge storage, and lots of dynamic features.

As a traditional webhost, DreamHost wins hands down. But .Mac offers a lot that DreamHost doesn’t.

Apple lists the features of .Mac as Web Gallery, Website Hosting, IMAP email, Back to My Mac, Sync, iDisk, Groups, Backup, and 10 GB storage. There’s also easy publishing with the iApps. The webmail interface shames DreamHost’s webmail, but I download all my email anyway. The most useful-looking features are syncing and Back to My Mac.

Back to My Mac doesn’t work at all for me. There’s no errors, no feedback at all — it just isn’t there where it’s supposed to be. I’ve done a bit of research on this, and I expect it’s because my NAT doesn’t support the features Back to My Mac needs. But this is really just a guess, since there’s no feedback at all.

At first glance, syncing seemed to work for me. But then I ran into an odd problem: The sync created duplicates of a bunch of smart mail boxes. No problem, though: Delete them, reset up to .Mac. It’ll propagate to the other computers, right? Well, it turns out that’s a bad assumption. It worked to a point, but then one of the other computers just adds them again. I’d basically need to delete them from both computers simultaneously in order to get rid of them. No problem, I’ll just use Back to My Mac.

Oh, wait. That’s not going to work.

Well, maybe I’ll check out .Mac in another few years. But for now, I can’t imagine spending $100 on it. I want something that takes the gremlins out of a multi-machine existence, rather than adding bigger, more annoying ones. I feel like I started with a mogwai and .Mac fed it after midnight. Maybe if I was a bigger webmail user or wasn’t comfortable setting up things like WordPress it would be more interesting, but I’m not that guy.

Asus is probably going to have some explaining to do to Apple. The conversation might go like this:

Apple: So, you’re manufacturing our products.
Asus: Yeah.
Apple: And now you’ve produced a rip-off of our Mac mini.
Asus: It’s not a rip-off. We’ve got 802.11N.
Apple: It’s also more expensive, bigger, and slower.
Asus: No! Well… yeah. But it also has this really great pen holder!
Apple: Yeah, uh, we noticed that.
Asus: We’re patenting that idea, so don’t even think of stealing it.
Apple: You don’t have to worry about that.
Asus: Pen goes in, pen comes out! So easy!

(Thanks to Daring Fireball for the link.)

In addition to the Time Machine security issue I reported (radar link)¹, Apple has also fixed Time Machine being almost unusable on my Core Solo Mac mini due to poor graphical performance (radar link). Prior to 10.5.2, the star field animation was too taxing for the little guy. With 10.5.2 and the Leopard Graphics Update, it zips along at a perfectly respectable rate while leaving my Mac responsive enough that I can select files without needing something to keep me busy between clicks.

Unfortunately, Apple has not fixed the problem where the Leopard’s new (and totally awesome) menu search can point to the wrong problem (radar link). Still, at least the arrow is close enough. I love this feature.

Two out of three is pretty good, especially considering the one left unfixed is relatively minor.

The bugs that were flagged as duplicate also seem to be fixed. Sadly, my biggest Finder pet peeve (radar link) is still present (click the image to see it demonstrated in a QuickTime movie):

I’m pretty sure this one predates Leopard.

I’m one of those who thought that 10.5, even with its bugs, was a better OS choice than 10.4. However, with 10.5.2 I can finally recommend 10.5 without even a hint of reservation.

1. You won’t be able to follow this link; it’s in case anyone from Apple stumbles across this post and wants to look up these bugs. See rdar:// urls over at the red shed if you’re interested in this. [↩]

Apple claims to have fixed the issue where applications could run automatically out of a Time Machine backup. Look for CVE-2008-0038 in Apple’s About the security content of Mac OS X 10.5.2 and Security Update 2008-001 .

Thanks to Apple for mentioning me. I certainly would have reported the bug regardless, but it’s a nice bonus.

The only thing I wish had happened differently was an earlier acknowledgement from Apple that they realized what I was describing and agreed it was a security problem. I didn’t find out Apple considered it a problem until January 22nd, when they asked how I’d like to be credited for discovery. Most of that time I wondered if I should file more details in an attempt to convince them it really was a problem.

Note: I’m saying “claims” only because I haven’t installed the update and verified the fix yet. I have no reason to disbelieve Apple.

I’m seeing over and over in blogs and “news sites” how Apple’s new Xserve is the most powerful Xserve ever.

Consider:

• Hardware usually gets faster or cheaper. Sometimes both.
• The Xserve price hasn’t dropped like a stone.
• It’s been 4-5 months since the last Xserve was last updated.

Put it another way: Unless it was radically cheaper wouldn’t Apple have just left the old one on the market if the new one wasn’t faster?

I have my problems with MacWorld¹, and I think they’ve fallen some from their glory days, but incidents like this just show how far they’d need to fall to catch up with everyone else. In this case, MacWorld at least used one of Apple’s claims to quantify the increase in their headline, and even attributed it to Apple (Apple: New Xserve twice as fast as predecessor). Not so with hundreds of other news sites.

1. Chief among them their horrible new software, which in addition to being ugly ate my login to the point that I can’t create a new one. [↩]

AppleInsider is reporting that Apple is ignoring two Mac data loss issues. One is an old bug (that really should be fixed). The other is an apparent abundance of failing hard drives:

Meanwhile, U.K.-based data-recovery firm Retrodata is warning Apple customers that they risk potential data loss due to a design flaw on certain 2.5-inch Seagate SATA drives, commonly found in notebooks such as the MacBook or MacBook Pro.

“The read/write heads are detaching from the arm and plowing deep gouges into the magnetic platter,” says Retrodata Managing Director Duncan Clarke. “The damage is mostly on the inner tracks, but some scratches are on the outer track — Track 0 — and once that happens, the drive is normally beyond repair.”

The problem is reportedly prevalent with Seagate 2.5-inch SATA drives that are manufactured in China and loaded with firmware Version 7.01. Model numbers affected include ST96812AS and ST98823AS.

Um, yeah. My first generation Intel Mac mini has a ST96812AS with firmware 7.01. I’d be a lot more worried if I wasn’t using Leopard and Time Machine.

Here’s a fairly extensive comparison of Acorn, DrawIt and Pixelmator.

But the reason I’m posting is an odd thought occurred to me.

I wonder if Steve Jobs called Adobe and said:

See? This is what happens when you wait years to come to Mac OS X, break with every update, and then drag your feet at going universal. We create a whole @#$%ing Photoshop construction kit right in our OS. How do you like that, huh?

We could go even further. We could say this wasn’t a phone call, but a face-to-face meeting at Apple. And we could go even further, and say that while the meeting was going on Steve arranged for the Adobe rep’s car to be towed, and for him to be tarred and feathered as he left the building.

But, no, probably not. The Photoshop construction kit in Mac OS X Tiger is probably the sweetest revenge.

(With maybe just a hint of car towing.)

I used the default packages and install options because I haven’t seen my Office 2004 disc around in a while. The install was slow (I let it check the DVD), but required no intervention.

I thought Leopard’s menu bar was supposed to be ugly! I guess they’ve toned it down, because this looks pretty good to me. I’m not sold on the dock, but that’s okay: I know it can be turned off.

Actually, if I had to describe it in three words, I’d say “System 7 modernized.” That’s a good thing. I thought Mac OS 8 was quite a step backwards, and Mac OS X has taken small but repeated steps back to the classic Mac look. Tiger is clean, with light backgrounds to its windows and a smooth gradient effect. Sheets are gorgeous.

My biggest complaint is that the window gradient is a little severe, especially on windows without toolbars. The dark end of the gradient is a little too dark.

Other random thoughts:

• Spotlight is reindexing. I’m not surprised.
• System Preferences and Safari are really responsive. More so with Spotlight indexing in the background than they were in Tiger.
• Quick Look is awesome. It would be nice if applications could launch this fast.
• QuickVerse doesn’t work, but I’m pretty sure this isn’t a last minute Leopard change.

I’ll post more thoughts after I have some time to really explore this.