OS X

Snow Leopard problems with Quicktime and Keynote

6 September 2009 - 2:31pm | Laura Scott

Following up on my previous post, I'm having more problems with Snow Leopard. Here's the story.... I created a slideshow (for DrupalCon Paris 2009) that was to autoplay on a hi-def monitor. Aside from crashing issues I mentioned before, I was able to create the slideshow and export it to an autoplaying Quicktime movie. Only the Mac's own Quicktime 10 would not play it past 4 seconds. So I installed the optional Quicktime 7. It was able to play the video for about 25 seconds or so, and then stop. In both cases, if I set the video to loop, it would loop only the few seconds that it would play. The same file on a Windows machine had no problems. So Quicktime on Snow Leopard has issues, at least with the files that Keynote on Snow Leopard generates. Joys on the bleeding edge.

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Experiencing Snow Leopard in the real world

1 September 2009 - 2:03am | Laura Scott

First, I want to say that I love Snow Leopard. This latest OSX (10.6) is wiki-wiki! All the more so on my SSD MacBook Pro. I log in and within 2-3 seconds I have desktop, ready to go.

But to be honest, it has not been a bug-free experience. Which is why I read with amusement in the Ars "review" (which really isn't a review, more of a background piece) that Snow Leopard was a no-new-features/no-new-bugs release. There are new features, which others have covered more than adequately.

There are also new bugs. Or at least the new OS has shifted enough that apps declared stable and supported on Snow Leopard may be supported but certainly are not stable, in my own experience.

And it's only been since Saturday, so my experience is thin. But in that time I have spent a lot of time in Apple's own Keynote app (iWork '09) and Adobe's InDesign CS4.

They both crash. A lot. To provide context, in both apps I am working with modestly large documents. My Keynotes tend to be graphics heavy. Maybe on the high side of normal usage by people in general. But this is Apple's own product. I have resorted to saving after each change I make, knowing that at any moment, anything I do could make the app go poof! and disappear, without even leaving a note.

I have lower expectations regarding Adobe's InDesign. Since Snow Leopard came out ahead of what most developers expected, maybe Adobe got caught off guard. But when it comes to InDesign, I am doing rich document work, not magazine layout. These should not be pushing InDesign anywhere near its limits.

But InDesign has become my fickle friend, collapsing on me when I do something innocuous like a cut/paste.

In both cases, my gut tells me that this could be related to memory management issues of Snow Leopard itself. I have 8GB of RAM, but copying things from Word to put into InDesign would kill InDesign. When it comes to Keynote, however, whether it's the app or the OS, this is on Apple.

I'm going to keep investigating settings, and if I come up with anything I will post an update from the bleeding edge.

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Mac OS X, Windows Vista and Ubuntu Linux together in Parallels worlds

22 December 2008 - 9:21pm | Laura Scott

So I bought two seats of Parallels a week or so ago. I couldn't resist: It was buy one, get one free. (And still is through December 31st.) Now my desktop Mac at work and my MacBook Pro drive the latest versions of OS X Leopard, Windows Vista and Ubuntu Linux, all from the same desktop, running in ... parallel. Who needs to choose between Mac and PC when there's Parallels?

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NetNewsWire now stops slaying your computer (and it's free, too)

21 January 2008 - 7:44pm | Laura Scott

One of my biggest frustrations with NetNewsWire was that it scaled horribly. When starting the application, it would take several minutes to load -- not to refresh the feeds, but just to load all the feeds. My poor MacBook Pro would whirr away from all the work it took, and if on battery would drain it within 10 minutes.

Simply put, it was the laptop killer. I used it only very sparingly, and only when I needed to cull through a zillion posts for my BlogHer Contributing Editor gig.

But on January 9th, NewsGator Technologies updated the application with a major refactoring. Just check out the change notes:

Fixed a bug that prevented automatic sleep for some people.

W00t!

It’s possible that people who leave NetNewsWire running for hours without interacting with it in some way are having memory use go up and up, since no events are processed and thus autorelease pools are not drained.

See Mike Ash on the subject: http://www.mikeash.com/?page=pyblog/more-fun-with-autoreleas...

I’m following Mike’s advice and posting an NSApplicationDefined event at strategic times, which should drain the pools. We’ll see.

This was a big one for me, bringing my entire computer to a crawl. It was like the 'Book had a virus.

New storage system

A big problem with 3.0 was that each news item was stored as a separate file—and this caused way too much disk access for some people. It was slow. So we took the previous storage system (from NetNewsWire 2.x) and updated it some. News items storage is much, much faster than it was in 3.0.

NetNewsWire now stores the news items for a feed together. One file per feed. This was how NetNewsWire 1 and 2 stored data — so we’re going back.

We’re not going all the way back, though — there have been some changes. It’s not exactly the same.

The first time you run NetNewsWire, it will have to convert old storage to new storage. This may take a few minutes, depending on how much data you have. The next time you run NetNewsWire the startup time should be more normal. (On my machines it’s about a second, but it will be different for different people.)

Oooh!

The changelog is very long indeed. Kudos to NewsGator for truly stepping up! Already I am seeing a huge performance improvement. For one thing, I've written this entire post on battery power, with nearly two hours of time left -- something that was completely impossible before.

And now it's free! (I paid for my license some months ago, but I can't regret paying a company that ends up doing a good deed.)

You can download the now-free NetNewsWire here. This is now truly the #1 RSS reader for OSX, in my book.

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