maniacal rage

Several people have pointed out that I might be mistaking multiple copies of my iTunes library in Time Machine with hardlinks, which is the Unix magic Time Machine uses to keep references to unchanged data in its backup. In this case, however, I don't think I am.

A hardlink to a file doesn't take any additional space. When I checked the amount of space consumed on my backup drive two days ago, it reported 92GB had been filled. Then, this morning when I woke the iMac up, Time Machine started doing its thing. It was running for longer than normal, so I opened the preference to see what it was doing and it reported it was copying ~50GB to disk. When I used FileMerge to compare the last two backups, the second had a full copy of the library—not hardlinks only—and the space consumed had changed to 142GB.

As far as I understand it, creating hardlinks does not require copying data to disk, and it wouldn't report more space as consumed. So in this case I believe I'm being affected by strange backup behavior, and not a misunderstanding of the underlying technology. Or, possibly, Finder is lying to me about free space.

Leopard installed on my new iMac in about twenty minutes. Granted, this was a fresh install and I skipped the DVD verification as well as opted out of installing all but the Gutenprint drivers and English languages, but that's still pretty fast. So fast that I missed the new Leopard intro movie. I walked out of the room expecting the installation to take an hour and came back shortly after to find the setup panels waiting for me.

I had seen the leaked movie on YouTube a while back, but that's not exactly high quality. And since Leopard is the first version of 10.5 to be released in a fully HD age, I was looking forward to seeing the new movie. Luckily, ArsTechnica uploaded it as part John Siracusa's excellent and exhausting review, so I could finally watch it in high resolution.

It's gorgeous. If this was your first Mac, and your first experience with an Apple computer was the intro movie, you'd be in heaven. Hell, it's my 7th Mac and I fell in love all over again. These little touches are part of what continues to separate Apple from the rest of the pack. Contrast this excellent movie with the Windows Vista boot "orb" to get a better idea of what I mean.

I'm having some OS X deliver déjà vu here. I just noticed that my Leopard FedEx delivery, which was scheduled for delivery by 10:30AM this morning was updated with an exception: "Future delivery requested." Enraged, I called FedEx. The representative told me this:

Apple is shipping lots of computers [sic] today. Like over 130,000 packages in NYC alone. So we're having trouble delivering them. Apple guaranteed 10:30AM delivery through us, but we're too busy so we're pushing it back. You'll have it by 5PM today, we promise.

I would have been okay with this response except for the fact that this is exactly what happened with Tiger two years ago in NYC. And with Tiger, the delivery didn't happen until Monday.

Here's what they did last time (and what I'm betting they do this time as well): They change it to "future delivery" and promise it will be here by 5PM. Then, at 5PM, they update it with a new exception that states a delivery attempt was made but no one answered. Except they don't even try.

There's no way to prove FedEx didn't come to the house and once the delivery exception says failed delivery, you have to wait until the next business day (FedEx ground will deliver on Saturday, but not overnight, so we're talking about Monday). All FedEx has to do to lighten their load is update customers with bogus information and they have until Monday to deliver.

Why does Apple rely on a company who has "trouble delivering them" for a release like this?

Update: Wow, it actually got delivered! When the FedEx guy handed me the box he asked, "Can I ask you what this is? I've got like 500 more in my truck!" I told him it was a new version of Apple's operating system and he just sighed. Then he said, "Well, I'm really, really busy because of it!"

Macworld has a new feature story called Picking Our Favorite Leopard Features, wherein various staff rate their favorite new stuff in 10.5. Among the selection are the commonly-touted features like iChat screen sharing, Cover Flow in Finder, Spaces and Time Machine, but Rob Griffiths chose something no one else mentioned, and a feature I'm particularly thrilled with: AutoFS.

There hasn't been a lot said about AutoFS, but I consider it to be one of my most-requested features for OS X: Putting network mounting on separate threads. Griffiths defends his decision to include it in his list (at number two no less) and describes it thusly:

Why give up such a high draft pick for this seemingly obscure technology related to networked volumes? Because AutoFS in OS X 10.5 is, quite simply, a revolution. AutoFS is responsible for the mounting and dismounting of network shares, and in Leopard, it will uses separate “threads” for these tasks. What does that mean in English? It means the end of the spinning rainbow of doom you see when you, for instance, click on a network share in the Finder, only to remember that you put the shared computer to sleep earlier.

One of the most irritating issues with OS X is the Finder's inability to deal with network-mounted disks gracefully. I need an abacus to count how many times in the last week alone the Finder has hung for two minutes because my Airdisk became unavailable or Katia's iMac was sleeping when I tried to access it.

Since switching to the Mac in 2002, this has been one of my biggest (and most common) complaints with OS X and I'm absolutely thrilled it has finally been solved. While it's nice to have lots of shiny new GUI features in 10.5, I can't help but be even more excited by the simple core functionality updates like AutoFS.

With all the talk and speculation and rumors about OS X Leopard being close to release quality, and with "spring 2007" coming closer and closer, I'm beginning to get a little worried that the new version of OS X won't have a new visual look.

Many months ago, when Jobs mentioned that there were super secret things in 10.5 that they didn't want to announce yet, I was really hoping one of them was a refined user interface. I kept holding onto that dream until some time last week when I realized that there just isn't time.

For Apple to have a new user interface they still haven't shown testers seems insane to me. It doesn't leave nearly enough lead time before release, even if "spring 2007" means June.

Obviously, I hope I'm wrong. But it's beginning to sink in that I might not be.