Filed under: TUAW Business, Podcasts, Leopard
Sunday night talkcast: Mac OS X gripefest + Ask TUAW
Last week's talkcast featured the dulcet tones of guest host Christina Warren and a passel of MacBook Air owners sharing their experiences with the newest laptop in the Apple lineup. Download direct, listen in your browser or subscribe to the TalkShoe feed in iTunes.Join us again on Sunday night for our next live show, 10 pm ET, where Mat Lu and yours truly will be taking a break from the Oscars telecast (if you're DVRing it, be sure to say so -- we don't want to spoil anything!) to take your questions, gripes and wishlist items for Mac OS X. Got display problems or wireless issues? We want to hear about it. Everything running smooth as silk? We want to hear about that too, but be warned that the people with problems may be very annoyed with you.
As always, you can join the conversation on TalkShoe either with or without an account by using the shiny new browser-only client (no downloading required and no registration needed). Just click the "TalkShoe Web" button on our profile page at 10 pm Sunday. You can also listen in on the Talkshoe page or call in on regular phone or VOIP lines: dial (724) 444-7444 and enter our talkcast ID, 45077.
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Reader Comments (Page 1 of 2)
p2rjade said 6:16PM on 2-23-2008
How do you do the ichat background of peoples faces that you can then talk through their lips. Like on the Keynote presentation?
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David G. said 8:41PM on 2-23-2008
I too, am wondering about this.
Kyle Derouen said 7:15PM on 2-23-2008
Haha, brilliant idea! I've never tuned into one of these, but this is a pretty cool topic, so I may join in.
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Jeff Allen said 9:13PM on 2-23-2008
I have plenty of gripes, why do Macs suck worse than a PC? I bought a Macbook in October because a lot of friends suggested I do so, but I've had more problems than I have ever had on a Mac and I run Windows Vista on another machine.
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Alan said 10:23PM on 2-23-2008
Please don't feed the troll, peoples.
John said 9:26PM on 2-23-2008
I just made the big switch with an iMac 24" a few weeks. Absolutely no gripes, I'm loving it. Leopard runs smooth and I've been throwing a lot at it. My wife, a non techie, loves it as well. I have to admit that after a lot of worry...migrating from a PC to Mac was a helluva easier than any of the PC to PC migrations I've done.
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Rob said 12:09AM on 2-24-2008
Just made the switch too, after 20+ years on winBlows I finally was fed up with having to act as a babysitter for my laptop every day that I didn't get viruses, spyware, malware, etc., etc., ad nauseum.
And I COULDN'T BE HAPPIER! The switch was far, FAR easier than I had imagined it would be. WinBlows taught me that computing was a chore, so I was apprehensive. But owning a Mac now has taught me easy computing can, and should be: a Pleasure.
To all Winblows owners: SWITCH!! You WILL NOT regret it! :-)
Luigi193 said 12:07AM on 2-24-2008
I've all of a sudden had issues with my Airport Extreme (802.11n) with the 10.5.2 upgrade... Im not alone either.
The only cure is to unplug the frickin thing and run web sharing from the iMac... there is NO WAY im buying another one... HURRAY UP APPLE.
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potato said 12:27AM on 2-24-2008
How about we address THE most fundamental problem (IMHO) with MacOS, and that is the piss poor Finder. File management on Mac (without resorting to CLI) is the worst out of all of the major OSes.
Step 1 on that list IMHO is folder merging. If I copy a folder into another, and a folder by the name already exists, it should let me merge the contents of the two, like EVERY OTHER OS DOES ALREADY, instead of simply prompting me to cancel or replace. This is something that we've been begging for since 10.0, and it's sad that something this basic isn't even in.
Step 2 is editing multiple file properties at once. Go now, try this - select a bunch of files, and then go to Get Info, it brings up an inspector for EVERY single file, separately. What it should (and what every other OS does) is merge the settings into one pane, so I can do things like mass-editing of file extensions, or file permissions, or anything else.
Do those two things and maybe MacOS can be on its way to becoming a respectable OS in terms of file management (which, IMHO is a pretty core aspect of the OS).
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Sean Routt said 4:34PM on 2-24-2008
"control + option + i"
Your entire post is now discredited.
Mo said 4:55AM on 2-24-2008
Press Cmd+Opt+I for the “multiple item” inspector.
potato said 4:56PM on 2-24-2008
Thanks Sean, way to be a fanboy. You're going to discount my entire first point (which IMHO is FAR more important than point #2) because I didn't know about a keystroke that, IMHO, should really be in the GUI? Editing file permissions on multiple files is NOT a power user feature, where intimate knowledge of keyboard shortcuts should be required.
You still can't copy-merge two folders in MacOS. Linux can do it. Windows can do it. It's infinitely useful in all manners of cases... Why can't MacOS, despite having five major releases since inception?
Sean Routt said 8:41PM on 2-24-2008
How mundane is your job that you copy-merge folders enough that this bothers you?
Bob said 6:50PM on 2-24-2008
After the upgrade to 10.5.2 Spotlight has been flakey. It's been indexing my drive for weeks now. Spotlight says '-2147483648 hourse remaining' (yes, that's a negative).
I used Spotless and totally clean up the indexes and removed Spotlight and restarted Spotlight from scratch. No change.
I've used Disk Utilities found no problems. Disk Warrior 4 finds no problems.
Went to the Apple Store, they delete the cache files, Disk Warrior 4, some other "magical things" in the back of the store, but still Spotlight continues to index and take 100% of my CPU.
Any recommendations?
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John said 3:50PM on 2-24-2008
I had a question about how to transfer DVR'ed programs to my Mac, or if there was someway to put a TV-tuner of some sort on the mac? I've heard of products like EyeTV, etc. I have no idea on what these products do.. Thanks! I'm basically just trying to record TV programs so I can transfer them to my iPod, iPhone, etc. Thanks!
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DPaulsen said 4:56PM on 2-24-2008
Could you each talk about what kind of Microphone you are using for the talkcast? Michael Rose, you usually sound the best, but I was not sure if that was because you are hosting or if you just used a superior input device.
Thanks.
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DPaulsen said 5:11PM on 2-24-2008
Also...Sorry for the double post....If someone could discuss converting an ISO file so it could be manipulated in iMovie, I would appreciate it. (I am trying to put a highlight reel for my brother's sports team together, but all ew have is dvd's of the games after they were dumped from an HDD camera.
Thanks again.
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Stephen Macklin said 5:27PM on 2-24-2008
In 24 years of using the MAC professionally I have never once noticed the absence of the option to merge the contents of folders. I guess I always simply copied or moved the actual files I wanted to copy or move.
I don't really feel I have suffered.
If they added that feature tomorrow I doubt I would ever use it.
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Swampash said 11:55PM on 2-24-2008
Re: copy/merge
Over the weekend I suffered a hard disk controller failure during a copy operation, and the failure deleted about 5% of the data on the disk. The problem is, the data lost was spread out over almost every directory. One file from this directory, two files from that directory, nothing at all lost from that directory, one file lost from that directory - you get the idea.
I had a full backup on a NAS so nothing unrecoverable. But OS X's copy behaviour meant that I had to copy over EVERY FILE rather than just those files that were missing. In order to make sure that I restored every missing file, OS X forces me to copy over the top of a very deep directory tree -- well on the way to a terabyte of data, when the missing files might measure only in the hundreds of megabytes.
Darwin's crippled "cp" wouldn't even let me issue "cp -R -u".
Sorry, but that's retarded. I shouldn't have to go out and buy a backup and restore program when an EIGHT-CHARACTER instruction at a bash prompt would do the job.
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Michael Rose said 12:05AM on 2-25-2008
cp is the wrong command. Try 'ditto' instead. http://www.hmug.org/man/1/ditto.php
Or use FileMerge, part of the developer tools:
http://www.macworld.com/article/49584/2006/03/cmpfldr.html
Or read this: http://lowendmac.com/misc/05/1024.html