11 June 2002

Yesterday's meeting didn't happen until after ten, when I went looking for my manager. It turned out that he'd gotten stuck in a conference call that he expected to run until noon. But he instructed me to talk to CK about the project he wanted me to do, as CK had all the specs, anyway.

I talked to CK, only to discover that the project they needed me to do was exactly the same as the previous project - just for a different database. All I was going to have to do was copy the files and rename them, and make a few relatively minor changes.

Just as I was renaming the files, my Fed Ex packages arrived.

I was almost literally quivering with excitement, but I decided to be good and do my work first. It took longer than it should have, due to an undocumented feature that made my connection break because I had a dash in one of my field names.

So I finished the project that my manager thought would take me through Wednesday at least in about an hour.

The rest of the day was pretty much devoted to my shiny new OS and iPod. I'm very excited!

Before you accuse me of devolving entirely into a bad case of Mac-luv, I'll say the transition to OS X isn't going as smoothly as I had hoped.

The first thing that made me upset was that the desktop is less customizeable than it had been in OS 9. In OS 9 I could set the desktop color, and put a picture on it (either centered on the desktop, stretched to fill it, or tiled - my choice). I could set both highlighting colors to anything I wanted. I could set the system font.

With OS X, I can put a picture on the desktop, but I get no choices about how it's displayed - if it's small enough, OS X tiles it; otherwise it stretches it until it's big enough to fill the screen. (And if the image isn't desktop-proportional, that means it gets stretched to be too big to actually fit on the desktop.) I can only set one highlighting color. And I can't change the font. I'm most irritable about the picture thing.

(Jeremy pointed me at a utility that should fix the problem, but it doesn't work for me - I suspect I need to download the latest upgrade first. Besides, that's not the point. They shouldn't have removed that functionality from the user in the first place.)

Then, iTunes 2 searched the hard drive for all my MP3s and imported them, which was cool... But it lost all my playlists, so I'm having to rebuild them. Not entirely from scratch, but I can't run iTunes 1 from OS X at all to look at what they were - I had to boot to OS 9 (thank goodness that option exists) and export my playlists to files (thank goodness that option exists) and then reboot to OS X and open the files so I can see what songs were on what playlists.

And I discovered in the midst of copying over one playlist that an entire album of MP3s had gone missing. I didn't delete it. And I had it on Sunday, because I was listening to it while I was making cookies. I searched the entire hard drive - nada. It hadn't gotten moved; it had just disappeared.

And despite many jokes about how it was a display of OS X's good taste - it was my Britney Spears album that went missing - it really shouldn't have. And it's not like it deleted all my Britney songs; I have a few other random ones that weren't from the album. At least the album that went missing is one I actually own, so I could just re-rip it. But I have to confess, I'm wondering if anything else is missing, that I just haven't noticed yet.

(Yes. I own a Britney Spears album. It's one of those guilty pleasures, that I like bubblegum pop once in a while. Shut up.)

On the other hand, for all I know, I might have accidently deleted it myself while I was cleaning up and getting ready for the install. Or Matt might have decided, after listening to it while I was making cookies, to sneak in and delete it. (Nah... Probably not.)

Some other assorted gripes, which probably have more to do with the fact that I'm still getting used to the system than any real complaint...

The icons on the desktop keep moving around on me, despite the fact that I told them not to.

Occasionally, when an application needs to pop up a file-choice box, it takes it much longer than I think it should.

If I have a lot of "Classic" apps running, then OS X gets very choppy. (Though that should go away on its own as I find OS X replacements for my Classic apps.)

I'm still pretty dubious about the dock and the amount of real estate it takes up, but that will get solved as I play with it and get used to it.

And lastly - a couple of things are flat-out broken. Quicken, for example, starts up okay, but barfs and quits as soon as I try to actually open a register.

But - after all that bitching - I actually like it pretty well. Or at least, I think I'll like it a lot once I've gotten used to the change. (This is why I always drag my feet on getting updates and new versions of things. I hate the adjustment period.) But really, most of my gripes are relatively minor, and will go away when I update my software and get used to the new system.

And there are things I like... It's very pretty. (Shiny!) The memory management is wonderful. If I put it to sleep, it wakes up almost instantly (less than 5 seconds) after I open it back up again. There are a lot of little details that I like, like the battery display that works while I'm running on AC power. And the screen savers are pretty cool.

And my iPod? I got nothin' but luv for that sweet little machine!

--Liz