More is Less

What doesn't kill you makes you stronger I suppose. And if I have to do another software update I'm going to be the strongest man alive. I recently upgraded to OSX 10.6. I had a single reason for doing so: a bug in apple's openGL implementation meant my favorite program, blender, didn't work. It would crash after just a few minutes of use- every time.

10.6 fixed that error, and I must say Blender's been working excellently for me. I just can't believe it took an entire system software upgrade to fix that one little but.

I'm happy about that, but a little upset that exposé now shows me windows scaled to funny proportions. I liked this better before. A lot of people are complaining about the blue glow, that doesn't bother me in the slightest, but the weird scaling for windows in exposé greatly reduces its usefulness, for me at least. David Trang seems to have summed up most of my thoughts on the matter, so if you want to know what I honestly think of the new exposé size, see his thoughts.

The upgrade did inspire me to go hunting again for a solution to one of the worst things about the new macbooks. Namely, the absence of a numpad on the uio-jkl keys. For a lot of people it didn't matter, but for those of us who used it, that was a major cripple.



And one more thing about my macbook- the power cable is already coming apart. Now you need to understand, before my macbook, I owned a first generation white ibook from the 2001-era. It has a similar power cord, and with similar use, it's in great condition today. The new power cord will likely need to be replaced within a year. I'm a fan of the mag-safe thing, but the quality of the cable itself has been much reduced. Similar things are happening to my iPod cable, but I've got a firewire one from my two-owner iPod mini that's still going strong. What a shame.

I guess I'm on the subject of apple right now, so I'll end with this: my iPhone has gotten less responsive with each software update. It's like they're slowing it down in small steps so they can sell me a new one in a couple years that seems so much faster, but really performs equal to the 2.0 firmware included on my device on day one. I can pull it out of my pocket to add a new contact, and wait up to 40 seconds before I'm able to enter the new number. It's an awkward amount of time when you have someone waiting to give you their phone number. I used to be able to pull the contacts open as they were saying the area code. I guess those days are gone. Who needs speed anyway, more awkward silences I say. What a feature.


And if the above isn't enough. Just try and compare boot times currently to just a few years ago, or install times, or launch times, or anything. The old systems were clocked slower, but UI times sure were better.