Plaidophile: Leopard: Laptop Lovin'

February 19, 2008

Leopard: Laptop Lovin' (geekery)

by fluffy at 7:26 PM

So I finally got around to upgrading my laptop to Leopard. It went off pretty much hitch-free (the only problem being that Synergy no longer runs as a daemon for some reason, but all that did was encouraged me to finally set it up as a launchd agent instead), and I found out two long-standing issues with OSX which have finally been fixed:

There is (finally!) per-~~window~~application monitor affinity, so hotplugging my work monitor at the wrong time doesn't scramble my windows so much (yay!)
A remote server going down doesn't completely hork up the Finder until a request successfully times out

Other nice bonuses:

the Screen Sharing VNC client is way faster and slicker than Chicken of the VNC (aside from the lack of fullscreen mode, anyway); it's even capable of streaming video over my network with no problem
Time Machine to a remote drive doesn't completely hork up when the remote drive isn't available (it just silently puts a warning in the Menu Extras item) (now if only you could configure multiple shares, so I could have full backup/recovery both at work and at home)
The font engine seems to do a better job of providing fixed-width font sizes to Aquamacs
10.5.2 finally lets you turn off the godawful translucent menu bar (it's in "Desktop")

So far I haven't run into any problems, though the synergy-as-launch-agent thing does make it more of a pain to change monitor configurations if that becomes necessary (though I doubt it will, since I only use it at work).

Comments

#10466 02/19/2008 10:27 pm

VNC without fullscreen?

Why bother?

#10467

02/19/2008 11:06 pm

Well it's nice for remote control of a single app, and in MacOS you generally don't run your apps maximized (it's one of the fundamental differences between the Mac UI and the Windows one).

Actually one thing that does really bug me about the Leopard VNC client is that there's no way to turn off the "smart" auto-scrolling, which is really annoying and oversensitive.

Oh, but on the plus side, the screen-sharing stuff is integrated into the network autodiscovery stuff, which is in turn part of the sidebar in the Finder. Leopard has made great strides in turning a home or office ecosystem into more of a unified collection of Stuff. Combined with distributed Spotlight, it's getting to the point that you don't even have to think about your systems as being separate computers anymore, and if you have a .Mac account the distributed system doesn't even end at the home firewall (thanks to "Back To My Mac," the first legitimate use of UPnP I've ever seen). Obviously there's still some barriers towards that though. I wonder if the next step will be a home version of XSan to make much more of a storage cloud.