Next comes the hardest step: Removing the hard drive from the tray holding it inside the MacBook. You can see Apple’s only poor design decision here as they – once more – chose Torx (T8) screws for that. Meaning that you will be cursing at this step if you don’t have the matching screwdriver. In fact, the screws on my hard drive sled are already quite blank and shiny as I loosened and fixed them a number of times using pliers already (doable but rather annoying). As my brother gave me a nice T8 screwdriver last christmas, I could actually enjoy this step this time around and finished it in a few seconds. Reversing all the steps leaves you with a new hard drive in your MacBook.

The really time consuming part of the hard drive exchange is the software side, though. Copying hundreds of gigabytes of data takes a long time and will use a whole day or night. As I didn’t want to waste even more time by doing a fresh install and going through the lengthy migration progress and the software reinstallation it necessitates, I cloned the old drive to the new one and took it from there. Everything worked fine, just Time Machine insisted on re-adding the complete drive to my backup – which would have exceeded the backup drive’s capacity. Luckily I messed around with Time Machine before and the resulting knowledge along with some googling and adapting techniques for Mac OS X.6 let me fix the issue.

I think it’s fair to say that this is an ‘issue’ rather than a problem as it is caused by Time Machine internally identifying volumes by their unique identifier, rather than by their name which is the right thing to do. It just comes to bite you when you clone a drive. The new volume has a new identifier, hence Time Machine fails to recognise it as the same volume as the one you had before. You can see the volume’s identifier by selecting it in Disk Utility and using the Get Info command:

Terminal lovers can also use the diskutil command to achieve the same, e.g. for the startup volume (or any other volume by using its path instead of /:

ssp% diskutil info / | grep UUID
   Volume UUID:              F9E4B5DA-BACC-3BEB-B4A9-D59041E58A78

Now that we know the identifier of the new startup volume, the next step is to let Time Machine know about it. Time Machine’s usual way of storing technical information is using extended attributes. That is also the case for the identifier which is stored in the com.apple.backupd.SnapshotVolumeUUID extended attribute of each volume’s folder inside the backup’s folder hierarchy. It can be read using the xattr command. I am assuming that your backup volume is mounted at /Volumes/Backup, that the machine you are backing up is called ‘Machine’ and the volume you want to change is named ‘Volume’ in what follows. You need to adapt that to the paths on your machine when using the command there.

ssp% xattr -p -l com.apple.backupd.SnapshotVolumeUUID /Volumes/Backup/Backups.backupdb/Machine/Latest/Volume/
com.apple.backupd.SnapshotVolumeUUID:
00000000  34 30 44 37 43 46 37 32 2D 42 33 39 35 2D 33 46  |40D7CF72-B395-3F|
00000010  43 42 2D 38 34 32 31 2D 35 46 45 42 45 44 43 34  |CB-8421-5FEBEDC4|
00000020  34 39 35 36 00                                   |4956.|
00000025

As Time Machine protects its backup volumes rather well from the user messing with therm and there seems to be no way to turn that off in the graphical interface, the next step is to remove ‘access permissions’ from the backup volume (which in my case is on a disk image as I prefer my backups encrypted). This can be done using the diskutil command with administrator rights:

sudo diskutil disableOwnership /Volumes/Backup

It seems like a good idea to not mess with the volume in any unnecessary way in this situation and just do what we came for: set the extended attribute to the identifier of the new volume.

sudo xattr -w com.apple.backupd.SnapshotVolumeUUID F9E4B5DA-BACC-3BEB-B4A9-D59041E58A78 /Volumes/Backup/Backups.backupdb/Machine/Latest/Volume/

If you observe things closely, you’ll see that the original extended attribute ended in a trailing NULL-character like a C-string does, while the newly set extended attribute does not. This difference doesn’t seem to matter for anything but the display by the xattr command. As it’s a bit tricky to actually get the NULL-character into the extended attribute, I just stuck with the easy way.

Finally ‘lock’ the volume again by re-enabling access permissions:

sudo diskutil enableOwnership /Volumes/Backup

Actually it seems that Time Machine will automatically restore access permissions for you the next time it is running if you forget this step. Still, doing it seems like a good idea.

And that is it. Backups from the cloned new hard drive in my MacBook seamlessly continued the previous series of backups just like I wanted it to. The only difference is in the extended attributes (both their value and, for technical reasons, their format) – before and after:

ssp% xattr -p -l com.apple.backupd.SnapshotVolumeUUID /Volumes/Backup/Backups.backupdb/Machine/2010-07-14-094357/Volume/ /Volumes/Backup/Backups.backupdb/Machine/2010-07-14-104415/Volume/
/Volumes/Backup/Backups.backupdb/Machine/2010-07-14-094357/Volume/: com.apple.backupd.SnapshotVolumeUUID:
00000000  34 30 44 37 43 46 37 32 2D 42 33 39 35 2D 33 46  |40D7CF72-B395-3F|
00000010  43 42 2D 38 34 32 31 2D 35 46 45 42 45 44 43 34  |CB-8421-5FEBEDC4|
00000020  34 39 35 36 00                                   |4956.|
00000025
/Volumes/Backup/Backups.backupdb/Machine/2010-07-14-104415/Volume/: com.apple.backupd.SnapshotVolumeUUID: F9E4B5DA-BACC-3BEB-B4A9-D59041E58A78

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What’s particularly sad about this shortcoming of the software is that all the infrastructure required to make it work already exists in Mac OS X and Time Machine. There’s just no button to easily access it.

The details about how to set this up changed a little bit between Mac OS X.5 and X.6 and as Time Machine recently pleased itself by deciding that one of my backup disk images is broken with no explanation offered, nor an option to fix it again:

I eventually gave in and decided to start my backup anew – thereby sacrificing all the history Time Machine had built up over the past months.

I record the steps required for later reference, so I don’t have to google for them again in the future.

1. Connect to a writable Apple File Sharing (AFP) volume.
2. Go to Time Machine Preferences and set up Time Machine to back up to that volume.
3. Start the backup. This will create a disk image called ‘Kalle.sparsebundle’, where ‘Kalle’ is the name of your Mac, on the remote drive which is set up correctly to serve as a Time Machine disk image.
4. Cancel the backup once the disk image has been created.
5. Copy the .sparsebundle disk image to the top level of your backup drive.
6. Convert the disk image to an encrypted disk image using the command hdiutil convert -format UDSB -o Backup.sparsebundle -encryption AES-256 Kalle.sparsebundle/ in the folder of the image. Again, ‘Kalle’ is the name of the original file, usually the name of your Mac. This will ask you for the password you want to use to secure the encrypted disk image and creates a new, encrypted, image called Backup.sparsebundle.
7. Both the original and the new disk images are bundles. Use the Show Package Contents command in the Finder on both of them to see their contents.
8. The original bundle contains a file called ‘com.apple.TimeMachine.MachineID.plist’. Move that file into the new ‘Backup.sparsebundle’.
9. Double click the new ‘Backup.sparsebundle’ disk image to mount it.
10. Enter the password needed to read the encrypted disk image check the checkbox for storing that password in the Keychain.
11. The disk image’s drive is now available in the Finder. Observe the free space it has. If the network volume the image was created on is small, the free space may be much less than you need. [You will probably want a size that’s around twice the data you want to back up or all of your backup disk.] In case you determine the available space to be too little, eject the disk image and use the command hdiutil resize -size 1t Backup.sparsebundle/ in the Terminal to increase the disk image’s maximum capacity. Here, 1t means that I want the image to be able to grow to 1TB in size, you need to adjust that number to suit your needs. The converted disk image will be called ‘Backup.sparsebundle’. You could choose any other name here. You can also delete the original disk image ‘Kalle.sparsebundle’ once everything is set up and working.
12. Open the Keychain Access application.
13. The newest key in your Login keychain will most likely be the one used for the encrypted backup image with the name ‘Backup.sparseimage’ in our case. Select that key and move it to the System keychain, so the operating system itself will be able to use the disk image without you having to enter your password every time. You will need to enter an administrator password when doing that.
14. In the Time Machine preference pane, select your backup drive as your backup volume.
15. Start a backup.

If all has gone well, Time Machine will now be able to locate the disk image – thanks to the file you moved into it –, mount it – using the password you put into the System keychain – and start doing its back up duty.

If something went wrong on the way, Time Machine will either create its own ‘Backups.backupdb’ folder on the backup drive if it cannot find the disk image or it will fail to do anything if it cannot find the key required to read the encrypted image.

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Contents

• Finder
• iChat
• Time Machine
• Activity Monitor
• (Dock) Exposé
• Location Services
• XCode
• Further Notes

Finder

Ever since Mac OS X arrived old-time Mac users bemoaned the decease of the proper Mac Finder (in case I’m not bitchy enough about it go and google your own Siracusa quotes on the issue). Yes, the Finder has been improved in every update, yet substantially it has always remained a royal piece of shit. It may have become faster, prettier and everything but as long as it keeps regularly misplacing my windows and icons it is far from helpful and seems like a tool designed to turn people into command line users.

With the whole 64bit thing Apple apparently felt obliged to turn the Finder into a 64bit application as well. As Apple also decided to not make Carbon’s GUI parts 64bit savvy, they thus forced themselves to turn the Finder into a Cocoa application as well. As a consequence I assume that some poor programmers were locked in a basement somewhere in Cupertino to dig through that code and turn the Finder into a Cocoa application, painstakingly preserving whatever fragile balance the application had before and hopefully preserving sufficiently many of the tiny details included to make the GUI tolerable. (Hint: They didn’t. The X.6 Finder seems even keener to place my icons at random positions than its X.5 predecessor. Particularly when crashing / needing to be killed it quite enjoys displacing all my carefully aligned desktop icons on a stupid grid. Using Undo never restores the correct icon position and doing so on Desktop icons while Exposé is active tends to place icons beneath the menu bar. Ahem.)

In short, people probably put a lot of effort into creating a Finder that sucks just as much as the old one but which can tag itself with the labels ‘64bit’ and ‘Cocoa’. That’s not surprising, but it’s still a shame that this opportunity to finally bring the OS X Finder to the same level as its Classic counterpart was missed. It’s even more of a shame that no exploration of new file management user interfaces was started.

To be ‘fair and balanced’ let me mention a few actual improvements that made it into the Finder: In the View menu you can now adjust the sort order in column view. As an addict of sort-by-date-modified, I am tempted to find this useful, although first attempts to actually use it suggest it is too unpredictable, particularly with respect to which windows and columns will be affected by this setting. You also have great control of the sort options in Spotlight results windows now, letting you do a sort-by-date-modified there as well. Sort-by-size is still missing, though.

Also, the advancing of the progress bar in the copy dialogue looks smoother now [but they didn’t make an effort to unify the countless progress indicators the Finder and System can display which would have been a good improvement as well].

And let me keep the best improvement for the end, so we can party like we were using System 7 from HFS drive: The Finder now supports a ‘Put Back’ command for items in the Trash again, meaning that you can easily return items that were accidentally trashed where they belong. That’s great, they just missed adding the same feature for the Desktop while doing it. The magic here lies in the Trash’s .DS_Store file, by the way.

A rather amusing change in the Finder can be observed when resizing the sidebar in its windows. Note that when doing so the toolbar buttons for the view style now move to be aligned with the end of the sidebar at all times. Interesting question how that is coded, considering that the toolbar looks like a usual one with flexible spaces. What’s less amusing is that you can now completely hide the sidebar (using a command in the View menu, but not by dragging it) to have a sidebar-less window with a toolbar. I guess in X.7 we can then hope for a toolbar-less window with a sidebar…

iChat

iChat started out as the little application that could, with a bit of an AOL stink to it. But over time it became quite capable adding features like Jabber chat, audio and video conferencing and screen sharing - a definite improvement to all parent-support situations. However, the dirty little secret of iChat remains that it is not a master of any of its trades. None of its features works really well, the user interface options for the features seem to have been tacked on by summer interns year after year and over time they even mutilated good features like Bluetooth support which previously worked. All in all iChat could have done with a lot of user interface consolidation as well technology improvements. But it didn’t receive a single one or perhaps just a few on the connection side (as these are long-term experiences, it’s hard to judge them at the beginning, my impression right now is that things may be a little better but are far from working well).

To be less mystic, let me list a few obvious improvements that I have been waiting for for years:

• A single contact list without needing to resort to third party tools like Chax.
• Not disconnecting from AIM and Jabber all the time. And if a disconnect happens, discreetly reconnecting instead of bouncing the Dock icon until I manually reconnect.
• Support for more messaging services, or a plug-in interface so other people can provide that support.
• Reliably establishing audio and video connections.
• Gracefully handling low-bandwidth situations (Skype will give you a crappy image, iChat will give you a Connection Error - which one does your mum prefer?)
• Bluetooth support that works like in Mac OS X.3 (particularly a simple button for switching between wired and Bluetooth audio)
• A single interface for text, voice, video, screen sharing communication with the ability to freely up- and downgrade the connection type.

I am happy to admit that these are not particularly creative features, just the bugs that need fixing. Once those are sorted out, people may start thinking about ‘innovation’. A rather obvious one would be to file Chat protocols along with e-mail conversations in Mail because they often tie into one another (and because Mail has become a junkyard of non-conversational things already, so it might be refreshing to add something that fits in).

At least Apple fixed one problem they introduced in X.5: When running in German, iChat no longer places the log files of chats in folders named DD-MM-YYYY which was among the stupidest things one can possibly do. One still has to write one’s own script to rename the existing folders (because - obviously - Automator remains unable to serve as a tool for simple tasks like this).

Time Machine

Time Machine is great to have as a part of Mac OS, particularly since most of the really bad performance and crashing issues we saw shortly after the release have been resolved. Unfortunately Apple seem to have left it at that. Allegedly Time Machine’s performance has been improved for Mac OS X.6 (do you notice this in a significant way?), but none of the many details that could have used improvement saw any.

Two main issues that remain unsolved have to do with setting up your backups. As soon as I had a spare hard drive, I figured it would be a good idea to just leave that at the office for some ‘off-site backup’ magic. As many people have keys to unlock doors in our building, I wanted my office backup to be encrypted. Time Machine makes that unnecessarily difficult, I wrote up the steps for creating an encrypted backup in Mac OS X.6. Options for creating encrypted backups and for converting an existing backup into an encrypted one are missing from the graphical interface (and I had to battle the finer points of the command line utilities for disk images to achieve the desired effect - something made less fun by the fact that always it takes a whole night’s wait if you want to convert a 200GB backup).

While Time Machine does not officially support backing up into existing disk images, it does run those backups once you have all the components aligned just right. Time Machine’s recovery interface, however, always fails to locate my disk image backups unless I manually point it to them (by mounting the disk image and option clicking the Time Machine menu to select the backup volume to use - a useful command that may be a bit too well-hidden)

The other shortcoming that remains is related to the same setup. As I have two backup sets, I want Time Machine to use both. Unfortunately the software does not do that automatically, but only acknowledges the existence of a single backup set at a time. Meaning that a whole round trip to System Preferences along with many clicks is required every time I want to switch to the other backup volume. This, of course, should be handled automatically out of the box as the whole effort of Time Machine focuses on making backups a complete no-brainer that isn’t susceptible to human failure like forgetting to press some buttons. I have since created TMSwitch, a small (and rough) tool to do the switching automatically as well as turn Time Machine off at night.

Activity Monitor

If you want to know something about your Mac’s state and aren’t too keen on the command line, Activity Monitor is an invaluable tool. It makes it easy to monitor the processes running on the system, to learn details about the resources they consume and to sample or kill them if needed. One thing I always like about Activity Monitor is the care that went into the application’s design: For example the column titles changed the text shown in them into a shorter version once the column became too narrow to contain the full title. For example ‘Real Memory’ turned into ‘RSIZE’. A very elegant way of handling things, I think:

It looks like someone ‘redesigned’ the application for Mac OS X.6 and ripped all that goodness out. The smart name replacement is gone, so you end up with non-information and ellipses all over the place, columns have wider (and seemingly random) minimum widths now which makes it hard to set up an efficient display, the amount of space wasted at the left hand side of the process name column was increased by even more pixels. That is, the formerly good experience was broken.

In fact things are worse outside the main table as well: Look at the numbers at the bottom: Instead of being right or decimal-separator aligned they are now left aligned and hard to read. Keen observers will also note that Apple finally removed the display ‘Nice’ CPU time which had been dysfunctional since X.5 anyway. That said, the system can still do a bit of nicing, as a run of the (tcsh) command) yes > /dev/null &; yes > /dev/null &; nice +20 yes > /dev/null & shows, but just as in X.5 it essentially sucks. The CPU cycles may be distributed according to some rules, but a highly niced process (e.g. a video encode in Handbrake which was completely unnoticeable in X.4) can still ruin the responsiveness of the whole system. I’ve even seen it affect video playback.

The screenshot above also highlights a further design error Apple introduced in this release: They increased the right padding used in NSTableViews’ header cells. Look, for example at the PID column, it is right aligned and there is a strange space at the right hand side of its title which makes things look broken as the title doesn’t line up with the text in the column any more. The extra space is ‘needed’ for displaying the sort direction indicator, with the change being that Apple now leave that space even when the sort direction indicator is not displayed (even when the list cannot be re-sorted, in fact). Not only does that look bad, it also affects all Cocoa applications, meaning that any application with tightly spaced columns may now have ellipses appearing in its column headers because of this change on Apple’s side. Thanks a lot.

(Dock) Exposé

Apple also decided to tweak Exposé, my favourite feature of Mac OS X.3, which I still use countless times every day. And unfortunately these tweaks get a big thumbs down. Exposé excelled in moving windows out of the way, and displaying miniatures of all windows. By arranging the windows in a free style and in sizes proportional to their actual one, this gave you a convenient grasp of which window is which one despite the lack of a strict order.

In Mac OS X.6 Apple completely reversed that design decision and instead opted for preserving order of the small windows between invocations of Exposé and arranging them in a neat (almost-) grid. The order seems random but you can actually have them sorted by name or by application using Command-1 and -2 (sort-by-application isn’t really alphabetical, though). The grid implies that all windows of each screen are scaled down to the same size, meaning that each of them will be scaled by a different factor and your collapsed Stickies window will occupy as much space as the editor you are doing work in. Ridiculous, if you ask me.

Furthermore per-application Exposé now highlights the Dock icon of the application it’s currently showing and it can now be invoked for applications without open windows which is less-than-useful, particularly when tabbing through applications. This over-enthusiastic usage highlights the graphical activity (dimming the screen, hiding other windows) caused by Exposé. That’s more irritating than it is useful to me. The only nice addition here is that per-application Exposé also displays the application’s minimised windows - which can now optionally be stashed invisibly in the application’s icon in the Dock rather than close to the Trash can (personally I hardly ever minimise windows, it just feels too slow compared with leaving everything open).

But I’m not done with being irritated yet. There’s still the new feature, Dock Exposé, to cover, which probably is the reason for futzing with Exposé to begin with. Dock Exposé somehow marries Exposé to the Dock. The trusted mouse gesture of clicking and holding an application’s icon in the Dock to see its Dock menu has been killed and replaced by Dock Exposé, which dims the whole screen and invokes per-application Exposé for the application you clicked. I don’t welcome this change as I have years of muscle memory telling me that clicking and holding the mouse on a Dock icon will open its Dock menu and let me quit it, hide it or issue some simple commands. Luckily the Dock has a hidden preference show-expose-menus to turn this off.

What’s even more ridiculous is the inconsistency of the menus that appear for application icons in the Dock. When invoking Dock Exposé, this menu appears:

The menu is white-on-black in a small font. It contains the items Quit, Hide and Options in that order, with the latter revealing a submenu for the rarely used Keep in Dock and Launch when Logging In options as well as the frequently used Quit command wedged between them. The application’s Dock menu items are missing from this menu, as are the application’s windows which you already see in Exposé.

If, however, you do a contextual menu click on the same application you get a menu as well. It shares the fashionable white-on-black menu style [Is it just my MacBook’s shitty screen or does anti-aliasing and sub-pixel rendering generally look so bad for white-on-black type?] but otherwise keeps the traditional layout of Dock menus with the application’s additional menu items and open windows being added, the Quit command located at the very bottom and the Hide command above it.

Whoever ‘designed’ this begs to be punished.

People have found a way to ‘hack’ around some of the Exposé shortcomings which can be found here. As doing this involves manipulating your System’s Dock application, I suggest you only follow these steps if you’re confident that you know what you’re doing and keep in mind those hacks in case things break with the next system update.

Location Services

The Core Location framework made it from the iPhone to the Mac as well. It’s a fascinating technology that tries to determine your location by using the GSM cell, you GPS coordinates and the IDs of local WLAN access points. The latter are mapped by Skyhook Wireless and that idea is brilliant. On the iPhone (or iPod touch) it’s a very cool feature and it just seems like magic when the device just knows where you are to scroll the map to the correct location or determine your closest bus stop and the next connections from there.

I guess the same technology is a bit less amazing on a computer as you don’t need to know your location as frequently. Indeed, the only place where Apple uses Location Services right now is in the time zone preferences which (clumsily I must add, as surely one can map people at that level of granularity by their IP address alone) try to determine your location to set the correct time zone. Personally I don’t travel enough between time zones to consider this a significant improvement, but it may be convenient.

As it remains unclear just how much information the computer sends (over what seems to be a https connection to Apple) and what happens to it. There’s no direct statement about what happens in the time zone preferences or the help either, so I do wonder how desirable location services will really be. I can see that companies may love you running them, but will there be services that improve significantly if you don’t need to enter a post code but have it transferred automatically?

XCode

I won’t discuss the developer tools in detail as they are a huge subject on their own and people who use them more frequently than I do are more qualified to comment. Hence this point comes at the very end, not because it’s the worst change in X.6, but because I’ll leave it at a rather superficial look. Yet, my first impression (after taking a detour to Preferences → Fonts & Colors to restore non-antialiased Monaco 10 to be used in the editor) is quite promising and suggests that the small bump in version number for XCode from 3.1 to 3.2 is deceiving.

The application feels less sluggish. The Help has been completely revamped. Because it would very hard to be worse than XCode’s old Help that has to be an improvement (although to me it still seems like a waste of space, an enemy of efficient keyboard navigation and having the Back/Forward buttons in terribly bad location). The Research Assistant has been renamed Quick Help and seems to be much better than the previous version, particularly performance-wise, which means that one may get away with using the help less. Time will tell.

In addition to that a new set of compilers, including GCC 4.2 and the LLVM version have been included. The static analyser is there as well and it even comes with very neat integration right into the XCode editor. Frankly, I always thought that the static analyser’s web front was rather good (seeing that it’s a development tool and those seem to be obliged to have horrific interfaces), but integrating it right into the editor is obviously much better:

Interface Builder’s inspector still seems to be the same (i.e. bad), Quartz Composer has been revamped to look more sexy and Instruments seems even more powerful, though I’m fairly sure I can’t even appreciate it’s power. One really bad thing these applications have in common is the ‘Library’ palette which seems to be some new UI chique in Cupertino these days but which I usually find very clumsy to use: big space wasters with poor navigation, not exactly what I’ve been looking for; but that bad trend already started in X.5, so it’s hard to blame X.6.

Further Notes

Of course the previous points are far from comprehensive. They’re just the things that I actually run into. Other points may be:

• Exchange support: Zero benefit for me, but apparently the corporates cheer about it. It scares me. I don’t want corporate users in my world. They made quality software like Windows and Office big and seem to be keen on putting all their power and money to get crappy pseudo-solutions.
• Screen Locking 1: Quite annoyingly, Energy Saver now seems to lock the screen when it turns off the power. Before, only the Screen Saver did that, giving the two reasonable states of sitting at desk without using the machine and not needing a password to continue using it and not sitting at desk with the screen locked. I’m annoyed by that.
• Screen Locking 2: A nice new detail about the screen locking is that you can now set a 5 second delay before it actually locks. This makes accidentally hitting the hot corner I have set up for screen locking less painful.
• Keyboard Switcher: Switching keyboard layouts now comes with improved feedback. A quick keyboard layout switch using the keyboard equivalent for it will work as before and toggle between the current keyboard layout and the one you used previously. But if you keep holding the modifier key of that keyboard equivalent a bit longer, a big transparent overlay will appear and let you pick the keyboard layout you want from a list. That’s great as it doesn’t force you to focus on a tiny bit of screen way up in the menu bar and it means when switching past many keyboard layouts you don’t have to know the exact number of switches to make (and possibly press keys one time too many) but you can look along the list. The feature would proabably be even more useful if it recognised which screen you are currently typing on and made the list appear on that screen.
• Image Capture: I rarely use it, but the application seems to have been reworked, making camera management and sharing simpler. That should be nice.
• Scanner Sharing: Can now be set up in Sharing Preferences. Without a scanner I don’t have much use for it, but strangely it doesn’t seem to be the same as the Camera Sharing in Image Capture which conceptually feels just the same to me.
• Printers 1: We only have HP PostScript printers at the office so everything is dandy just as it would have been in 1993. Mac OS X.6 even ships with a PPD for our new LaserJet P4015 (previously I had to download it from HP’s atrocious and slow website) which has a cool booklet printing feature that’s unfortunately not available to all printers.
• Printers 2: The OS doesn’t seem to install as many printer drivers by default. Which seems like a bad idea. Sure, those drivers do require a load of space (to a large extent because printer manufacturers are idiots, one suspects), but I’d rather waste some space on my drive than being in the middle of nowhere without internet access and having my computer tell me it needs to download some driver. Be prepared!
• Printing 3: The Printer Proxy applications which display the print queues now have a nice new feature to display a preview of a print job. That comes handy when you have a bunch of jobs without good names in the queue and want to delete one of them. Said preview comes with fancy (overly animated) page flipping, is aware of double sided printing and, it seems, invariably assumes that books are read left to right (or front to back as we say in the West). Previews do not reflect the booklet feature mentioned above, though, and you still can’t drag a PDF from the print queue to your desktop.
• Compression: Looking at the X.6 startup volume from a X.5 drive shows you many files of size zero which you cannot open. It seems like Apple are trying some compression trick there which superficially looked like they’re stuffing compressed file contents into some extended attribute. Perhaps that explains the smaller size Apple claim for the installation?
• Utilities: The Applications folder looks cleaner now. Things like Exposé, Spaces and the AppleScript Editor have been moved there.
• AppleScript Editor: It now contains the preferences from AppleScript utility. The lower pane of its document windows has been reworked as well to be more confusing than it was before.
• Sudden Termination: The name doesn’t explain the feature too well, but the idea is great: Applications can now tell the system that they have nothing they need to store or clean up when they quit. When that is the case the system will simply kill the application when it is quit. If you remain logged into the machine for a long time without restarting and don’t quit applications (as I do), you will know that logging out can take ages in those situations. It happens because applications have been swapped out over time and the system needs to slowly swap them in again just so they can be quit. Sudden Termination lets applications play nice and give the system the chance to quit them without all that fuss. Even document based applications can easily support the feature as NSDocument will automatically take care that the application isn’t terminated in this way as long as there are unsaved changes. Neat.
• Metric Megabytes: Someone at Apple decided that the user interface needs to display ‘metric’ (i.e. base 10 rather than base 2) Megabytes now. I guess one will get used to this over time, but it’s very irritating. I’m used to DVDs containing 4,3GB of data (not 4,7). I’m used to my swapfiles having sizes that are powers of two (not 535,9MB). I’m astonished by the inefficiency of my MacBook writing its 4GB of memory to a 4,29GB sleepimage file. I’m confused that a 4096 Byte file is 4KB while a 40200 Byte file is 41KB. Does that make any sense? Does anybody apart from lawyers benefit?
• Airport Menu: The Airport menu now displays the signal strength for each network it can see. That’s nice, even though I’m not really convinced it will be particularly useful for anything but finding an open network (those don’t seem to exist in Germany anymore). What’s a bit strange is that I always have weak networks appearing in and disappearing from the Airport menu, so actually following the signal strength isn’t really possible.
• Spotlight: Its GUI seems to be as sluggish as it was before. But after all these years they managed to follow the basic programming guideline to respect a user’s number formats for the built-in calculator.
• Stacks: Stacks gained more options. I can’t be enthusiastic about this as I find stacks mostly too slow, clumsy and unusable. Not using the stack and simply opening the Finder window unfortunately is not among the new options they added. It still takes a Command-click to do that.
• Weather Widget: Mu-hahahaha, of course it’s still not localised [patch with German localisation], but it does default to degrees Celsius now on my system. Just like the iPhone version, it’s powered by Yahoo rather than Accuweather now and it can handle Göttingen when you enter it as a place name. [Reminder: in Mac OS X.4 you had to enter Goettingen for it to work, in X.5 you needed to enter Gottingen, and only now Göttingen does the trick and is promptly changed to ‘Gotinga’ for some reason, like it is at flickr.] I also still wonder why the Weather Widget (and the Weather iPhone application) don’t use Core Location. It would seem natural there.
• Installer: In a way the Mac OS X.6 installer is fantastic. It certainly has the smallest number of clicks between starting the computer from the installation volume and having the freshly installed operating system in place. I’m not really sure that I’m happy with the loss of control (and the difficulty of finding the command to erase the volume), but from a simplicity point-of-view this will be hard to beat.
• Rosetta: The PowerPC emulator Rosetta is not installed by default and Software Update will download it as needed (which seems pretty much like a huge and unnecessary opportunity for FAIL). It doesn’t need much space, so I’m wondering which ideological or monetary motivation made Apple do this, the customer’s benefit certainly isn’t it.
• PowerPC: No more support for PowerPCs. With all the beefy G5s around this strikes me as a bold move. Luckily people aren’t missing out on much as most changes to have to do with future-proofing and PowerPCs certainly aren’t part of the future as things look now.
• AppleTalk: The writing was on the wall since Apple killed AppleTalk support for file sharing in Mac OS X.4 and AppleTalk, the most user-friendly network technology ever, has now vanished from Printer Setup as well. It’s a shame because none of the newer networking technologies do as good a job at keeping a live list of services, and on the printing protocol level none seem to provide as rich an interaction with the printer. AppleTalk was ahead of its time and died before the time managed to catch up.
• Remote: Apparently Apple don’t support this feature officially, but instead of fixing that attitude problem of theirs, they seem to have changed the software handling the remote control in a way that non-Apple applications like VLC can still receive the remote’s signals but the signal will still be passed on to Apple’s applications. A bit user-hostile if you ask me. Let’s hope the non-Apple developers manage to work around this.
• Gamma: Apple (finally) changed the gamma value of their display calibration. There goes the classic Mac look… well it’s not quite as (a) my MacBook’s screen is a crappy dithering hell anyway so I am in no position to notice anything and, more significant in a global sense, (b) the magic of colour management means that you shouldn’t see the difference caused by the gamma change on colour managed images. What remains are the UI elements and Apple seems to have done a reasonable job of making things look all right. Just some of my old icons seem to look a bit different now. In the long run I imagine this change may be beneficial for people who publish images on the web without knowing what they do.
• Monospaced: Mac OS X.6 comes with a new monospaced font called Menlo. Apparently it’s meant to become the OS’ new default monospaced font. It’s probably not bad, but non-anti-aliased Monaco 10pt isn’t bad either. I think I’ll need still higher resolution screens before I can switch my monospaced font size beyond 10pt and live with the anti-aliased versions. What I saw so far of Menlo looked by far too dark to me and I found it hard to skim through code and actually find the things I was looking for.
• Creator Codes are unfortunately ignored by Mac OS X.6. Quite a stupid strategy to destroy this time-proven bit of Mac user friendliness which attaches information to a file indicating which application should be used to open it. Such information can still be set for each file individually and manually from the Finder, but that’s a far cry from the smooth automatic handling of yesterday. Now, just as in the arcane world of MS-DOS, the file type (most commonly indicated by end of the file’s name) determines the application which a double click will open.
• PICT format: When running in 64bit mode Preview refuses to display images in the classic Macintosh PICT format. Sure it’s a legacy file format, but why force people to go through their files to update them when the relevant code is still part of the system?

All right, that’s it - The things I managed to notice so so far that felt worth mentioning. I had to put the bar pretty low for that as many of them are mere details. In fact, my guess is that despite this long discussion many people would find it hard to tell the difference between X.5 and X.6 when using it unless they look at the numbers the System tells them.

If you liked this and could do with even more details and words, be sure to read John Siracusa’s X.6 review at ars technica as well.

Still think Mac OS X.6 is worth having? Why not make me filthy rich and buy a copy through one of my links below?

[Buy at amazon .com, .uk, .de]

A sweet nothing

Apple’s motto for Mac OS X.6 was that it will not contain big new features but will revamp some of plumbing to make the operating system more future-proof. At the same time it is said to refine existing features to make them better. In other words: This may be the least exciting software update you have ever seen. The improved infrastructure will most likely be invisible and only pay off in the coming years, while the refinements will be small details that are difficult to spot but may shave a tenth of a second off your interaction with the machine here and there.

And yet, this update could be considered daring precisely because it is so unexciting. After all, the computer world as we know it is totally focused on its patented OMG! Exciting! Bigger numbers! way of thinking. As a consequence it requires a lot of trust by people to buy an operating system that does not offer obvious advantages over its predecessor. Apple’s decision to put a moderate €30 price tag on the update will certainly help with that.

In the following paragraphs I will point out the features that I found noticeable, starting with my favourite ones. There’s invariably some nagging I’ll do while discussing the great ones and there may also be good things I have to say about the bad ones. It’s called dialectics. As the list has become rather long, I will split it across two posts. That way the fanboys can easily skip the bitching in the second half.

Contents

On this page there are the great - or at least partially great - improvements:

• Preview
• Cisco VPN
• Services
• Text Features
• Ejection
• 64bit
• Multiprocessing
• QuickTime Player

On the following page there are mostly what I consider the missed opportunities or questionable changes. The page ends with a list of short notes on other changes and additions.

• Finder
• iChat
• Time Machine
• Activity Monitor
• (Dock) Exposé
• Location Services
• XCode
• Further Notes

Preview

Mac OS X’s Preview application has always been quite good. At latest since Mac OS X.3 it has surpassed Adobe’s Acrobat Reader (these days it’s apparently called Adobe Reader only) for those of us who have no need to view ‘strange’ PDF files. There remained one really nagging problem with Preview: its complete inability to recognise a page’s layout and handle tasks like multi-column text selection:

I am happy to report that this problem has finally been solved in Mac OS X.6:

Preview has actually seen more changes: The improved PDF annotation features may be fit for use in their new incarnation which reveals a new annotation toolbar at the bottom of the window. And - quite importantly - adding a note no longer destroys section and table of contents metadata in the PDF file upon saving.

Other changes in Preview seem more questionable: The application now lets you open multiple multi-page files in a single window. I guess it’s rare that people will want to use that - and, accordingly, there’s a new preference to prevent it. In fact I find the idea quite irritating because it adds complexity and an additional level of hierarchy of file names to the Preview sidebar. The only useful scenario I could see for this is a multi-file search, so I dragged a folder of PDFs on Preview and started a search. This did sort-of work but it was excruciatingly slow for some reason (a slowness that was noticeable in the whole system despite all the magic multicore technology and neither my CPU nor my hard drive being close to their performance limits)

Furthermore this - which is a common usability problem of Cocoa lists - makes it pretty much impossible to move a page inside a PDF document behind the very last page by drag and drop. Even worse, it seems like this new version of Preview completely removes the ability of the application to simply merge a bunch of single page PDFs to a multi-page document by dragging and dropping the pages between documents (this only seems to work when you start with a multi-page document and drag the single-page ones into it. Doing so seems to always create a new document inside the other document’s sidebar rather than adding the pages to the existing document. Also be careful when using the Command-Backspace keyboard equivalent. It seems to non-undoably move files to the trash. (Yikes!) The buttons at the bottom of Preview’s sidebar do not make terribly much sense to me either. Just tell me what they do from looking at them, and tell me how it’s a useful feature worth spoiling my UI for.

Cisco VPN

So far Mac OS X’s VPN support has been pretty crappy. Allegedly the OS has supported VPNs for a while. But neither of the VPN types I need from time to time, Cisco VPN and openvpn, actually worked with Mac OS X’s VPN support. Useless.

Anybody who had to use Cisco’s VPN software will know that it is a big disappointment. Not only because of the extra install one is required to do but because Cisco’s VPN software is among the shittest pieces of software I know. It’s ugly, it’s unstable (kernel panics are rare in Mac OS X these days, but a few of those I had, had Cisco written all over them), it’s virtually guaranteed to not work after big OS updates, it has an abysmal update policy (non-automatic and only behind a password protected page your server people have to provide) and its performance should make any engineer ashamed (on a fast WLAN connection Cisco VPN maxes out one CPU core [naturally the software is single-threaded] at less than 2MB/s, meaning that the network speed is limited by the CPU speed! in the 21st century!)

iPhone OS 2 already suggested that Apple finally got their act together and figured out how to write / buy software that can make their devices speak to Cisco VPNs out of the box. And now that VPN client is part of Mac OS X, part in the operating system’s neat Network preferences.

The details of this haven’t been totally worked out yet (in particular keychain support seems broken [There seem to be opinions that this is a feature rather than a bug if the server requests not to store the password. Bollocks, I’d respond as it’s still user hostile and if that point were correct the OS should make that clear and not offer to store the password to begin with.] and there’s a blatant typo in the German user interface), but the very fact that it works and removes the Cisco piece of agony from my machine is a good step forward already.

The next steps here would be support for importing Cisco profile files, support for more esoteric Cisco setups (at least I’ve heard people say that this doesn’t work for everybody) and then support for openvpn, for which currently third party installations are required. At least there are nice solutions for that thanks to applications like Viscosity.

Services

I have been a big fan of Services ever since I started using Mac OS X.0. The concept of making the features of one application available to all other applications is very appealing. And Services provide a simple interface for that. Unfortunately the Services menu quickly became a junkyard with all applications on your drive happily adding their items to it even though you would only ever use 10% of them. NextStep apparently had functions NSSetShowsServicesMenuItem &c for showing and hiding Services menu items which Apple deprecated, leaving people in a chaotic situation and leading to a neglect of that wonderful technology.

Personally I solved that problem with ICeCoffEE which let me choose Services menu items, added them to contextual menus and removed the inactive ones there. And Apple finally agreed to steal exactly those features for good and ship them with their OS.

And hence an adjusted Services menu for a text selection could look like this:

You can set up the Services that are displayed in the Keyboard Equivalents tab inside the Keyboard preference pane. As this is hard to find, there is an item inside the Services menu for getting you there as well. Those preferences look a bit broken in German and suffer from a lack of application icons and resizable split views, but the basic features are working already.

Interesting bonus tidbit: The settings for this seem to be stored in ~/Library/Preferences/pbs.plist, they even contain different settings for the Services menu proper and the services listed in the contextual menu. Perhaps that will be an interesting playground.

Of course Services are best if they do exactly what you need to be done. Most likely that’s only going to happen if it was you who created the service in question to begin with. This has been an easy exercise for a while thanks to This Service which is a pleasant tool for wrapping any text processing script you may have into a service providing application. Mac OS X.6’s incarnation of Automator comes with a template for creating Services as well, so there’s another route to go (even though, knowing Automator, I’m not sure how useful that will be). My favourite home-made Services are:

• Validate CSS - sends selected text to the W3C CSS Validator
• Rotate String - 180° string rotation courtesy of Ǝpoɔᴉun
• NP Checker - inserts information about the currently playing song in iTunes
• UnicodeChecker - all sorts of Unicode conversion, now finally filterable to suit exactly your needs

Text Features

A bit of work has been done on OS X’s text features. To a certain degree this has been available before but the features are more readily available now and suck less. The first one are smart quotation marks. Their style can now be set up in Language & Text preferences (renamed from International):

Many applications that use the Cocoa text system will offer to turn on smart quotation marks in their Edit menus or their text areas’ contextual menus:

The big progress here is that you can now choose the type of quotation marks you want to use, as the English ones will be wrong for most people. (It seems that the system isn’t particularly good at setting the correct quotation mark style for your language by default when you upgrade an account, so it’s worth checking and - if necessary - correcting that.) You can even change the quote-style on-the-fly in the Substitutions palette that you can open:

But once you try these smart quotation marks, you will notice that, for example, the French ones lack non-breaking spaces inside the quotation marks (unfortunately the popup-menu UI for this prevents an easy manual repair of this but perhaps fiddling with NSUserQuotesArray in the user defaults’ NSGlobalDomain may do the trick if you don’t need to use the GUI again later on). It is certainly nice to have this feature, but I am not quite convinced yet that it will good enough to be practical for people who use more than a single language. Without automatic switching or language detection, using this in a correct way may just be too much effort.

Another potentially nice feature is the automatic text substitution (as known from Word 6, I presume) which may fool people into ‘typing’ proper ellipses and dashes because the System automatically replaces things for them. Personally I also see opportunity for convenient access to Unicode characters that are inexplicably missing from most keyboard layouts:

Ejection

I don’t know about you, but I have cursed Mac OS X many times over the years when it refused to eject a volume. Usually this happens when you are in a hurry and the system will just say that the volume cannot be ejected because it is in use. Of course the damn computer knows very well what is in use on that drive and who is using it, but Apple considered it wise to not tell the user (after all, doing so would have seemed so ‘Classic’).

Hence there existed a pragmatic way to solve this problem: Make sure all your documents from that drive are saved and closed and simply pull the FireWire or USB cable. The machine will then tell you off for what you did and you may have damaged something on the drive but you’ll be out of your office quickly. The ‘smart’ way to solve the problem was to run the lsof command in the Terminal to learn about the files and try to quit the applications which didn’t close them properly (usually Preview or a Terminal window in which you cded to a folder on the volume in question) and then unmount. Quite frequently, however, the files were held open by the System (hello Spotlight!) so you could earn its wreath either by killing its demons (bad) or unplugging the drive (bad). [̇I’m still wondering whether running umount -f is better for the drive as, theoretically, the system should have a chance to write everything out when doing that…]

In fact, not too long ago the neat utility Why Not Unmount was published which helps you avoid the Terminal chores and tells you who is preventing the unmounting of what. As existing applications for some task seem to make Apple happier to implement the same feature in the OS, Mac OS X.6 now comes with a similar feature built-in. Try to unmount a volume which is busy and you will see this with an indication of the offending application. Also note that the volume’s icon is nicely dimmed while the unmount attempt takes place:

64bit

OKOK, this is not a personal favourite of mine but it’s so big that it needs to be mentioned: Mac OS X.6 does the whole 64bit thing now. And because 64 > 32 it’s one of the places where the number game works out in this update, so everybody is going to look there.

As far as I can tell there are two advantages to using 64bit software on Intel Macs today. The first is the usual 64bit advantage which means that an application can address a huge amount of memory without any extra effort. From what I have read on this topic (say in Apple’s developer documentation) this may come at the price of making applications a little slower as there may be more unused memory to achieve proper alignment and all pointers double in size, putting more stress on the caches and so on. However, the remarkable benefit of Apple’s switch to Intel chips is that Intel’s 32bit architecture seems to be so remarkably bad that switching to 64bit can actually improve speed a little, simply because that architecture is better. Hooray!

More seriously, I think that it’s a good idea for the system to become a 64bit system. Not because many applications are going to need more than 4GB of memory. But rather because that’s how things will work in the future.

In fact I am wondering / cowering in fear about the question how Mac OS X.6 handles usage of huge amounts of memory: Mac OS X.5 will happily give an application as much memory as it demands until the magic 4GB barrier (minus ca 600MB of mystery crap) is hit. The consequence of that is that you will have a single application using almost 4GB of RAM. Which is unpleasant. Your machine ends up in swapping hell and in case you only have 2GB of RAM restarting is the quickest way out of that. With 4GB of RAM you may get away without the restart, but things will still feel sluggish. Whenever applications ran amok in this way, I was thankful for them to be able to request 4GB of memory at most. What would have happened if they were 64bit applications and could have requested a few fantastizillion bytes of memory? Does Mac OS X.6 provide any safeguards that stop applications from misbehaving in this way and ensuring that the GUI remains responsive even after such a RAM amok run?

While Apple themselves tried (well not really hard, cough cough, iTunes) to convert their applications to 64bit binaries, third party software will need a while to be updated. While you could already run 64bit binaries on Mac OS X.5 it didn’t really seem worth the effort unless you needed the RAM (which means that only httpd and Chess were running as 64bit processes‽). And if your application needs to run on Mac OS X.4 as well, things start being a little tricky, both because you will have to go through some nerve-wrecking conditional compilation setup in XCode’s inspectors and also because Apple’s 64bit sanctioned data types like NSInteger are not available in Mac OS X.4. Ugly ugly ugly.

Another interesting (in the sense of frustrating) aspect are plug-ins. Some rule in computing says that an application can only run code of the same architecture (unless you have some clever 1990s stuff like Apple’s 68K-for-PPC emulator running). As plug-ins are code, this 64bit story must be a nightmare for plug-in developers. To a certain extent Apple made an effort to address that, there are separate demons ‘mdworker32’ and ‘quicklookd32’ which will run 32bit Spotlight and Quick Look plug-ins and extra processes QTKitServer for running 32bit QuickTime Codecs as well as WebKitPluginAgent to run old browser plug-ins (another neat way to move Flash’s crashiness out of Safari as well, I suppose).

For preferences, Apple made less of an effort and the System Preferences application simply relaunches in 32bit mode when a 32bit preference pane has to be loaded. You can also set up any application to launch in 32bit mode by clicking a check box in its Finder Information window. Other pieces of software just don’t make any effort to bridge the architectures: 32 bit screen saver modules are not run which essentially breaks all the non-Quartz Composition screen savers I may enjoy. Of course that seems like a pile of bullshit once you remember that 32bit machines can run the same OS and once you accidentally open the Screen Saver preferences when System Preferences is running in 32bit mode.

Even other plug-ins, like those for the Address Book (I have one of those and it seems a nightmare because the code isn’t very new and there also seems to be disagreement about autorelease pools, grrr) or Quartz Composer (yup, got one of those as well, but Apple seem to have nicked the idea now and included it in Quartz Composer proper), just fail to work quietly and do not load.

The final point is the kernel. As people will be shrieking left and right by the time you read this: shock horror! Mac OS X.6 does not boot a 64bit kernel in consumers’ hands. People know this by looking at the kernel_task line in Activity Monitor or, if feeling more l33t by typing uname -v into their Terminal and seeing a result with 386 rather than x64 in it. My claim is that if Apple had simply faked those outputs there might be less ‘outrage’. On the other hand it would be harder to tell which people to shoot, in particular, the people crying about the ‘scandal’ of not running a 64bit kernel seem to be unable to even say in which way their machine would run better when doing so.

Allegedly XServes actually start with a 64bit kernel, allegedly having ‘64bit EFI’ in your computer is necessary, allegedly the restriction to ‘64bit EFI’ exists but is not the reason from a technical point-of-view, allegedly holding the ‘6’ and ‘4’ keys on your keyboard when the machine is powered on starts it with a 64bit kernel. Ho-hum, I’m sure people will have a fun field day with that. And I guess the two people who actually need this will be able to figure out what to do while I simply enjoy that I can still use my old 32bit kernel extensions without needing to worry.

Multiprocessing

Under the hood, Mac OS X.6 comes with all sorts of gizmos for more efficient usage of multi-core processors and graphics chips. That’s most likely a smart move as recently processor technology developed exactly in those directions. As dealing with multi-threading and even GPU computing is tricky, having an operating system that does most of the effort for you is great and will make it more likely that people can actually benefit from their n-th CPU core.

The thing is that this is not the only difficulty on the way to mastering multi-core computing and that a lot of software will remain philosophically single-threaded or dependent on external resources which will lock it up regardless of the multi-core cleverness.

It is probably great to have technologies like Grand Central Dispatch and OpenCL but it is hard to see a benefit in them now (although you can spot dispatchy stuff in your crash logs if you are into that kind of thing). I will need a Graphing Calculator equivalent for these technologies to convince me that they open new avenues for computing. Currently I perceive the limiting factor of my computing speed to be the hard drive’s speed rather than the CPU’s, hence I do not see where the benefits from these technologies are coming in. But I am looking forward to be surprised.

QuickTime Player

For some reason Apple felt compelled to include a completely new QuickTime Player with Mac OS X.6. It has one good feature: Screen Recording which can be very helpful to send people a short recording of what they need to do. Like the other screen capture applications I have seen, it can only record a single screen (the main one) and its image quality is lesser than the competition’s. Yet, I am sure they can kill a reasonable fraction of a ridiculously vivid software market for screen recording tools. Which is a shame for developers but not necessarily bad for users.

The Screen Recording window already gives away the new black chique in QuickTime Player (wasn’t QuickTime Player an early adopter of the ‘brushed metal’ look as well?). Once you click around in it you will discover the menu hiding in the downwards-pointing triangle of that window and the record button. Clicking the record button reveals must be what I consider one of the most ridiculous user interfaces I have seen in a long time:

Perhaps, just perhaps, the billion dollar corporation from Cupertino could have found someone qualified to create an equally powerful interface for this without needing a non-standard slightly transparent window, a click, a sheet full of text with more strange elements in it and another click to start the recording. This just doesn’t make sense.

As a bonus, Apple ship their German keyboards with Command keys labelled with ‘cmd’ and ‘⌘’, meaning that the person who’s considered helpless enough to need all that text will have to figure out that the word Befehl in the sheet refers to the same key.

Film playback is a bit weird as the new-style window will hide its title bar after a while. The idea sounds all nice, clean and efficient but I find all the additional appearing / disappearing animation triggered by it worse than the waste of space a persistent title bar would have caused. The playback controls now appear on top of the film and fade out as well (making the width of the controls the minimum width a film can be played back at). Unfortunately the controls and the ‘scrubber’ have a fixed width and don’t grow width-wise with the window to allow easier jumping inside films. Although the playback controls can be moved to a position of your choice in the movie, QuickTime Player immediately forgets about your preferred position for them and displays them in the standard position for the next film you open.

The playback controls also contain a strange icon with an arrow in it. That icon contains oddball export options for iTunes, MobileMe and YouTube. Personally I have never exported things to any of them, but rather exported to files. To do that, however, you cannot use the Export menu but you will need to go to the File menu as usual. Curiously that Export menu also contains a non-Export command named ‘Trim’ which is probably the only good new thing about the film window and lets you cut off the beginning and end of a film if you wish. That can be quite useful, for example when using the screen recording feature.

A further interesting - but not convincingly well-implemented - change in the new QuickTime Player is how it handles films with chapter marks. It offers a little preview screen that lets you easily jump to each chapter. While I’m not totally convinced by that, it’s an interesting idea at least, one that triggers the question why the OS ships with three distinct applications (DVD Player, QuickTime Player, iTunes) for playing back films.

The new QuickTime Player should be fine for simple playback as it makes that simpler with a strange user interface. But its very simplified Export options lack any information or detail and its AppleScript dictionary seems to be incompatible with that of the old QuickTime Player. There also seems to be no support for multiple video and audio tracks or subtitles as offered by Perian. Altogether that is not too flattering - and I didn’t even mention the new icon. Mentioning which, I also feel compelled to mention that the small document icons in the Finder are much harder to recognise (polite way to say ‘worse’) than the old ones were and that for me some film files open in the new QuickTime Player while others open in the old one which still ships with the OS but requires you to explicitly check it in the Installer’s options. It will be called ‘QuickTime Player 7’ and located in the Utilities folder then.