Mark Lindsey's Profile

Please, please... just don't make the new Mactel startup chime that damn "bing bing bing bling!" (no offense to the artist). :)

Chris, I had a similar experience when I added an additional monitor to my PowerBook rig,which I now use as my main CPU (holding out for those dual-cores ). While the 17" PB screen looks pretty nice, it's not like having a 19 or 20" - but after I tossed in a cheap COSTCO $300 17" on the side, life became much easier. I would still prefere to have a giant cinema display, but for now, I like to keep my iChat and other misc. windows open on the side monitor, while my PB screen focuses on the task at hand. When coding, I love having my paste templates and other ref. docs on the side monitor, not to mention using it for my ProTools mix window while I tweak tracks on the main LCD. I'm not sure how I managed all these years without 2 displays (or a single giant one), but I doubt I'll ever go back to anything smaller than a 20" or so.

At the expense of sounding completely girly <bg>... I swear that since I bought my 1G shuffle, I've used my old 20G way less than I used to, and I'm a music producer with ear-buds practically surgically sewn into my ear canals. I dig taking the shuffle in the car because it seems less fragile than the big old guy, but I have to carry the 20G around for business because my entire production music library is on there. I wish the damn battery would die already so I could justify a 60G. Greg, get the 60G - that way you won't have as much envy when the 80 and 120's come out.

Slopes, I'm not going to take the bait in your last paragraph, but despite our combined and repeated attempts to drive it out of you, what EXACTLY are YOU trying to do with your Desktop that you can't in OSX and used to in OS9? (besides the file refresh problem) Perhaps you just need some OSX driving lessons. :)

Actually, slopes, I was merely defending the insinuation by Nathan that I wasn't a "power user" because I would opt to use a workaround for the Finder update problem that we have all agreed is a problem. Your car analogy is flawed - nobody dies because they have to click on a folder to refresh a file list, unless you sit there waiting for hours and forget to eat. Besides, who's suggesting that users not make a fuss, as long as it's positive? I've submitted bug reports and feedback for this issue (several times since X came out). I trust you have as well. Repeatedly bitching about "eye-candy" isn't what I would consider a "valid contribution."

Actually Nathan, it's a waste of time bagging on it if you're not interested in helping to fix the problem. A power user will find work-arounds when confronted with inadequacies in any OS, not simply play dumb and wait for the OS to do something. I won't even touch your last comment - it's not worth my time. ;)

I couldn't agree more Hadley, and I don't think there will be much contention on this one. :) As you mentioned, I would like the OS to repair it's own permissions after installing OS components (although I understand why they have left this to the user) - better yet, an defaulted option to auto-repair the default system permissions after an installation would be nice. Secondly, I'd like to see a more intelligent implementation of the daily/weekly/monthly routines that the OS runs in the middle of the night. Many people are not even aware of these, and if they shut down their system every night, they may be missing out on these auto-repair utilities - A notice from the OS that it hasn't run one of these routines in a certain amount of time would be nice, giving the user the option to run them right away, or to CRON them for a specific time, etc. I would also like to see better conflict resolution with fonts. I've had to spend way too much time moving fonts around, removing duplicates, and resolving duplicates - There should be a smart interface whereby the user can choose "Move all non-system fonts into User Library," or the root Library, etc. And, another to "Permanently remove all duplicate fonts" would be nice. How about one that "Disable all Foreign fonts" so they don't keep magically re-installing themselves. :) I've also had a few FireWire 800 problems as of late, when using a FW400 DV capture device and trying to write to a FW800 drive. Every so often, a FW400 drive (that I'm not actually using at the time) will go totally AWOL, meaning it's just not mountable, and Disk Util can't rebuild it. The only tool that seems to work is Disk Warrior, which always brings the drive back (after 30 minutes of profuse swearing). I know this isn't really an OS maintenance issue, but perhaps more intelligent monitoring of the disk access would prevent a directory corruption like this. :) -Mark