Archive for August, 2009

Who Can it Be Now?

Wednesday, August 26th, 2009

I’ve been enjoying the Snow Leopard betas and am looking forward to Friday’s official release. Our programs are up to date and ready for the new OS X. However, I do have a small gripe. John Gruber over at Daring Fireball seems to think all changes are for the better but I must disagree in the sound department.

As humans we rely heavily on our sight to recognize objects by their shape, size and color. Our other senses come into play when we can’t see the object. I know when someone is calling by the ringing of my telephone. I have a different ring than my neighbor so that I know it’s my phone without having to think about the location of the noise. I even have different ringtones for different callers so I can identify them just by the sound. Since installing Snow Leopard I have been hearing the incoming SMS message tone but when I reach for my iPhone there is no message. Turns out the installer on Snow Leopard makes the same noise as an incoming SMS on the iPhone. Reaching for my iPhone and then noticing I’ve been deceived leaves me a little sad at not getting a message and a little angry at whoever is in charge of OS X system sounds.

Snow, Early in the Year

Tuesday, August 25th, 2009

With the announcement that Snow Leopard’s release date is set for Friday 28th we are releasing version 4.5.2 of the Pedias, fully Snow Leopard compatible. The Pedias needed just minor tweaks to become Snow Leopard ready. All required changes where of a cosmetic nature (for example, reflections drawn incorrectly in the cover flow) but we also took inspiration from Snow Leopard to do a little cleaning under the hood to make our code faster and easier to maintain.

Although the changes to Snow Leopard seem minimal from the outside I would recommend the upgrade. We have been running the beta for quite some time and it’s made our work more enjoyable. It was a great move by Apple to sit down and polish the OS X that we love and cherish; to give it that final shine. As developers we can see a listing of all the bugs we have submitted to Apple over the years and with Snow Leopard the greatest number of them have been marked as fixed. Including the one that made our support work the trickiest: IMAP messages in Mail not being marked as replied to after a draft is saved. On Friday that won’t be a problem any longer.

I’d even venture so far as to say that every Apple application we use has been improved with Snow Leopard. The interface stays the same and our PowerPC friends won’t have to feel left out, but for all Intel Mac owners get ready to have your computers improved substantially. While you wait around for Snow Leopard to be officially released, be sure to get your latest copy of the Pedias, of course with more improvements and fixes than just Snow Leopard support: Bookpedia, CDpedia, DVDpedia and Gamepedia.