Lots of Good Stuff

posted on january 20, 2004, tag: software

Plenty of Apple-related stuff has been happening lately. I've been meaning to write several little entries about various things, but time has been against me lately what with xPad, work and Zelda needing constant attention. Here's a collection of short bits for your consumption.

iLife '04

iLife arrived on Friday (pre-ordered it), and it's fantastic. GarageBand is exactly what I wanted a few months ago, and I'm thrilled with the application. This is going to spark a huge movement of regular people making music that actually sounds good. It's so easy to use. If you can click a mouse you can make music with GB in minutes. If you can actually play an instrument as well, the possibilities are endless. Very cool.

iPhoto 4 (what happened to 3?) is much faster on my G5 and is now a usable application. After moving all 600 pictures I've had floating around my harddrive into iPhoto I did some initial sorting and was pleased with how quick the app responds now. The only thing keeping me from using it before was speed. The addition of smart albums and ratings is great too. Strangely, I think this upgrade might actually cause me to take more pictures.

iMovie 4 has a lot of the things I wished version 3 had, which makes it even more solid. For consumers or "regular people," iMovie 4 offers just about everything you could want in a low-level digital video editor. Especially now that you can record directly from your iSight and modify clips in the timeline.

iTunes + iPod = Spinning Beach Ball

If you've got an iPod and you've recently upgraded to iTunes 4.2 (via the web prior to the release of iLife '04, or via iLife itself), you might be experiencing a problem where you cannot move music to your iPod without getting an I/O beachball and eventual iTunes hang and death. If you're anything like me, this pisses you off because not being able to move newly purchased iTMS music to your iPod renders said purchases nearly useless since we don't listen to music in our office nearly as much as we do away from home. Even if you're not like me, this is frustrating.

There have been several suggested fixes, all with mixed results. Works for one person, not another, etcetera. I can tell you that for me, unplugging my iSight fixes the problem. This apparently doesn't work for everyone (and, frankly, it's strange that it works at all), and obviously won't help you if you've suffering from the problem and don't have an iSight. I would suggest checking in on this discussions thread from time to time for updates. Apparently Apple knows about the problem, but it's surprising something like this could go on for so long without a fix when the iPod/iTunes is at the forefront of Apple's marketing campaign right now.

Speed-Up OS X 10.3.2 Start-Up

Many users (me included) have complained that the 10.3.2 update to OS X caused start-up times to increase noticeably. On my Dual 2GHz G5, my start-up time (measured with a stopwatch manually from the moment I hear the chime until the login window finished loading) with build 10.3.1 was 38 seconds. After updating to 10.3.2, the time changed to 1:05, which is nearly twice as long and quite noticeable. Luckily, this delay is caused by OS X looking for a directory in the wrong location during start-up, which hangs the process and adds unnecessary time. You can fix this by copying the directory from its actual location to the location in which OS X looks or, better yet, create a link to the proper location. Open Terminal and type the following (no line-breaks):

sudo ln -s /System/Library/Extensions/BootCache.kext/Contents/Resources/BootCacheControl /usr/sbin/BootCacheControl

Enter your password and restart twice. You should see a noticeable speed increase in start-up time. My G5 now starts up in 40 seconds (only two seconds shy of the speed of 10.3.1). It should be noted that my start-up time would be faster if I didn't have Unsanity haxies, MySQL and Apache installed. [Originally read about this fix on Mac OS X Hints, further information (including using link rather than copying directory) from this Apple Discussion.]

OmniWeb 5 Preview
If OmniWeb 5 is anywhere near as cool as I think it's going to be, it might be the first web browser I will ever pay for in my life. There are some really fantastic features and ideas there, and I can't wait to try it out. Since it's based on WebCore now, it's like using Safari but with additional features which might just be worth paying for.

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