RandomMaccess

I didn’t write my annual look at the state of the Mac for the upcoming year this time around mostly because it seemed what was ahead was fairly obvious, with the notable exception of what “one more thing” Steve Jobs might pull out of his hat at some point during the year. I had already (…)

I completely skipped running Tiger on the Macs in my office — mostly over networking issues that never seem to have been resolved. We have two newer machines (both DP G5s) that came with Tiger installed. We found some workarounds for most of the issues, especially those dealing with our company’s proxy server. In a (…)

Professor Moriarty almost did it at Reichenbach Falls, but it took Steve Jobs and his Leopard to finally kill off Sherlock. Apple’s new operating system deletes the abandoned search utility during the installation process. Sherlock was introduced with System 8.5, but has been dying a lingering death for years, as Apple replaced its functionality with (…)

I keep my main home Mac in my family room, so in order to avoid (OK, reduce) computer clutter, I keep my printers in the basement. For us, it makes a lot of sense. We don’t actually print things that often, and besides the room they take up, printers are noisy — especially our black (…)

On the three machines on which I’ve installed Leopard so far, two went off without a hitch: a G5 iMac and a dual G5 PowerMac. The third, a MacBook Pro — ironic perhaps, in that it was the only Intel-based machine I’ve upgraded so far — not so much. For reasons I won’t get into, (…)

Valleywag picked up on on a Silicon Alley post that calculates Daring Fireball’s publisher made almost $6,000 from Amazon affiliate links on the site to Leopard orders. Two things. One: Gruber’s no fanboy; when Apple does something stupid he calls them on it. Two: Good for him. If I could make that much money on (…)

A manager at Best Buy told me the company’s Point of Sale systems (we used to call them cash registers) are being monitored for any sales of Apple’s Leopard operating system in advance of the official 6 p.m. local time release. “We’ll be fined $130,000 for each copy we sell before six,” he told me. (…)

For those who just can’t wait the remaining few hours until Leopard’s release (or are just curious), AppleInsider has posted a gallery of screenshots from Apple’s newest big cat. Seeing them all laid out like this gave me some overall impressions I hadn’t picked up on yet. I dislike the new folder icons way more (…)

While I love the idea of Spotlight, Apple’s system-wide search utility, the reality is that it’s always been too dog-slow to be of much practical use as either a search tool or a program launcher (I’ve turned to the excellent Quicksilver for that). Maybe Apple realizes that, too: in Leopard, they’ve added some features that (…)

Leopard’s Time Machine feature is spurring a lot of discussions on backups, and that’s a good thing. A lot of the discussion, though seems to be centering around backing up your whole machine, and whether or not your Time Machine drive is bootable if your Mac goes down for the count. (It’s not.) I may (…)