[X4U] Leopard Features

[Stroller]

On 8 Aug 2006, at 23:15, Michael J. Prevost wrote:
> ...
> What are people thoughts on Leopard's upcoming features like Time  
> Machine?

It looks kinda glitzy to me.

Don't get me wrong - I've wanted a versioning file system since I  
heard about them. There was at least one OS that had it twenty years  
ago, I'm not sure which one but it fell from favour because of the  
cheapness & ubiquity of Unix. Unix hasn't had one since.

But the whole taking-over-the-screen-and-showing-a-starscape seems a  
little over the top to me. I hope there's a way to turn that off.
I mean - they don't black out the screen and show a floating  
background of letters when you go to rename a file, so why go so  
dramatic with this?

If they have a way to access this from the command-line - and I'm  
sure they will - then I will be Mr Melty Pants over it. I'd really  
prefer a right-click contextual item or just an option in the Apple  
menu for the GUI shell, tho'.

> Do you buy into the numbers that Steve gave regarding people who  
> actually perform backups (26% do backups of some sort, but only 4%  
> do regular, tool assisted backup).

I'd say those figures are spot on. I'm sure that less than 26% of my  
customers (mostly PC users) do back ups, but my estimate of Mac users  
is that they're more fastidious about such things.

I have two concerns about Time Machine.

The first is that - unless I missed it in the keynote, I have to  
admit that I enjoyed it but didn't pay full attention - is that it  
doesn't seem to be a backup so much as a versioning file system. A  
VFS is NOT a back up. What happens if the whole drive goes clicky- 
clicky-clicky? You can't go back in time to a file which the disk  
can't physically read anymore.

But they did make a point of pushing it as "backup", and it would be  
easy to allow the user to dump a snapshot to external media, so  
presumably that's a feature.

Secondly, what happens to other files when you go "back in time"? I  
mean, I've edited novel A and spreadsheet B, I realise that I've been  
distracted and my work just hasn't been up to par recently - I've  
been making picky edits to my novel and my writing has lost some of  
the verve that it had when I originally wrote it with my creative  
juices flowing full fast. So I decide to go back a week in time and  
discard all the edits I've made this week, lose the dross and get  
back to the real thing. When I go back in time do I also lose all the  
changes I made to spreadsheet B in the last week? That kinda seemed  
to be left undefined in the keynote, but I'm sure more details will  
emerge; I'm fairly confident Apple will get it "right" and I know  
that if they don't the issues with it will be well documented so that  
I can pursue the work-arounds

> The Widget-builder Dashcode looks great too, don't you think?

Sorry, it just looked like a gimmick to me. I mean, you're not really  
going to be able to edit a webpage with sliders, so presumably all he  
was doing with that Dilbert cartoon was hiding the edges of the page  
that he's not interested in. Whilst that's kinda useful for people to  
knock-up their own widgets, it doesn't seem actually very "clever" to  
me.

The naming convention of the Dilbert comic's image is changed on a  
daily basis - I know this because I have bash script that downloads  
it & emails it to me each day. You can't just download dilbertYYYY-MM- 
DD.gif each day but have to search the webpage & work out whether  
today's filename is that or dilbertDD-MM-YYYY.jpeg. What happens if  
the comic moves an inch to the left or the right each day? If you're  
just downloading the whole page and only showing (x,y) to (x1,y1)  
then it's a risk that tomorrow the bit you want to see will be off  
the edge of the page. Oh, and downloading and rendering the whole  
page, even if you don't see it, is hugely inefficient, too.

But then I'm just a cynical guy who doesn't really get along with  
widgets.

Stroller.