I wanted to do a clean install this time instead of just upgrading. This is more involved and takes longer but I wanted rid of the junk I’d accumulated during years of trying new software and playing around with my operating system.

The first thing was to get rid of the crap I don’t use anymore and have been meaning to get rid of. Here’s where AppZapper, Singular or Hazel come into play.

I had a look at how my disk space was being currently being used with GrandPerspective (you may want to have a look at OmniDiskSweeper too). Some cruft that could go immediately was littering my downloads folder. I was going to empty my trash before backing up anyway but hadn’t realised that it was using almost 5Gb.

Once everything was as lean as possible I ran Time Machine one last time. At this point I would seriously recommend making a belts-and-braces approach separate bootable backup with SuperDuper² or CarbonCopyCloner and testing your backups to make sure everything is hunky-dory. You could also look at this tip about using Apple’s Backup.app if you’re really paranoid.

At this point remember to deauthorize the computer from your iTunes account. You won’t be able to do this afterwards and you’ll be wasting one of your five allotted machines unless you deauthorize all computers³.

I then repaired permissions, out of habit mainly, inserted the DVD and restarted my computer. When I heard the chime, I held down the c key until the Apple logo and spinner appeared. When the install screen appeared, I moved my mouse to the top of the screen and choose Disk Utility from the Utilities menu that appeared. I took a deep breath, selected my hard drive and clicked Erase. Once this was finished, I quit Disk Utility and started the install process. Everything was straightforward, follow-the-prompts simple but I chose to use Migration Assistant later instead of copying across my old accounts from my Time Machine backup during the install.

After you have installed Snow Leopard you will no longer have an up-to-date install of the iLife or iWork software so go dig out your other install disks and put the kettle on while you work through those installs. Once done, run Software Update to get the latest security patches and fixes.

Only then did I use Migration Assistant to import my old applications, network settings and user account. Now that everything was in place, I ran AppFresh to find which third-party applications had updates available and to install them. The penultimate step for me was to run Monolingual to rid my machine of unused language packs and free-up another several hundred Mb.

Finally, now that I had everything I wanted installed and everything I didn’t want binned, it was time to fire up Terminal.app and tweak things to my liking:

Make hidden applications in the Dock semi-transparent:
defaults write com.apple.Dock showhidden -bool YES

I like my scroll arrows together and at the top and bottom:
defaults write "Apple Global Domain" AppleScrollBarVariant DoubleBoth

Turn off the in store arrows in iTunes:
defaults write com.apple.iTunes show-store-arrow-links -bool FALSE

Don’t litter other servers with .DS_Store files:
defaults write com.apple.desktopservices DSDontWriteNetworkStores true

Restart the Dock and Finder for the changes to take effect:
killall Dock
killall Finder

YMMV – don’t blame me if anything goes wrong!

¹ Or so I thought. It turns out that there’s a nasty – but avoidable – bug in Snow Leopard.
² A new version of SuperDuper was just released. Here’s a review from TUAW
³ See the Apple support page for more information on this.

I have an issue with the first sentence of Wired’s First Look review. Internet Explorer is not the most popular web browser in the world. It is simply the most widely used.

Looking at the IE8 page of the Microsoft website doesn’t bode well for Microsoft’s claims of paying attention to standards compliance or maybe this doesn’t apply to all aspects of their work. Of course, there’s also the __VIEWSTATE nonsense that results from coding your pages with .NET and in this case the hidden form field value is a whopping 68KB which is included in any request.

On visiting the page I was prompted to upgrade the Microsoft Silverlight plugin. I first installed this purely for CNN’s Photosynth of Obama’s inauguration two months ago. The Silverlight 2 GDR1 upgrade was released one month ago which just goes to show you just how low the adoption rate has been from the slew of websites I visit.

Silverlight isn’t the only threat to Adobe’s Flash dominance. Emergent technology like HTML5 and CSS3 Chrome experiments that are being supported in modern browsers like Google Chrome and Apple’s Safari are being used with JavaScript to achieve some promising results. Competition is good.

Speaking of Safari, the browser was also in the tech news on Thursday but for the wrong reasons. Safari was the first to fall to a serious vulnerability – albeit with several hours of preparatory work. IE8 and Firefox fell soon afterward. Chrome was the only browser to resist the attentions of the hackers. Interestingly, there was no mention of Opera. Does it really have that insignificant share of the browser market that nobody wants to try and exploit it?

From my early impressions, Safari 4 has taken the best bits of other browsers and added a bit of Apple polish to them. The Awesome Bar from Firefox, Opera’s Speed Dial, Chrome’s Tabs-on-Top, Webkit’s blazing fast JavaScript engine (but with a sensible name) and Developer Tools. Notice the glaring omission from that list? Yes, nothing from Internet Explorer made the grade. Funny that.

Setting my timezone used to be a problem. No matter what I set it to, when I went back to the homescreen my timezone would revert to London. A full restore the other week fixed this issue but others remained.

Whenever my headphones were yanked out the volume slider would move down substantially. When I plugged back in, the slider stayed where is was but the volume didn’t change accordingly. This still doesn’t seem to but it is nowhere near as bad it was.

The fact that anything stored in the memory of the calculator was wiped if you quit the application. However, the result of the last calculation was still on the display when you went back to the calculator. This has now been fixed and in we get a scientific calculator when the iPhone is held in landscape mode. The calculator buttons also now click when pressed.

The calendars are no longer all lumped together as one. You can choose which ones to display and there is some colour-coding to help you differentiate between events in different calendars.

My contacts that I had marked as a favourite, oft-called number have disappeared but the contacts themselves are still there. Nothing major involved in getting them back as they were.

Alarms for the working week, weekend and occasional alarms used to be listed in the order that I added them but now seem to be listed in chronological order. I’m sure I’ll get used to it.

The airplane symbol now actually flies in and out when the flight mode status is toggled on and off. Nothing gratuitous but I thought it was a nice touch.

I then went and grabbed a few of the free applications from the AppStore (NetNewsWire, Facebook, VoiceNotes, Light and Remote) and also purchased a copy of Super Monkey Ball which may prove to be a mistake if I ever want to get anything done. It is very addictive. NetNewsWire is great and has replaced the iPhone formatted webpage on my home screen. Unlike the Facebook application with does most things that the iPhone did apart from letting me see my wall. On the other hand it does feature the chat capability.

The best application for me though is the much-rumoured iTunes / Apple TV remote. It is simply awesome. Could this be the thing behind the mysterious comments from Steve Jobs four years ago when Apple introduced the Airport Express and AirTunes and Walt Mossberg complained that he would have to get up to play a track and asked how he could control his music from another room.

“Wait and see” answered Jobs with a wry smile.

I have to say that I’m glad Manchester United won. I only actually dislike them now compared with hating Chelsea with a passion and I think that it was somehow a fitting victory 50 years on from the Munich disaster. Bobby Charlton showed so much decorum when Platini tried to give him a winners medal and you have to admire the sportsman in Paul Scholes who went straight to console the opposition.

I had another celebratory pint with the Liverpool supporting barman and then made my way into Vancouver on the Airporter bus trying to spot anything that looked vaguely familiar but a lot has changed in the six years since I last visited the city.

While this in itself is bad enough behaviour for any software company, it is not the main annoyance I have with their practices. I like to keep things organised how I like them. Like my “Start Menu” for instance.

Every single frickin’ time that I update iTunes (and Quicktime) Apple deems it acceptable for them to place a couple of shortcuts in my Start Menu, Quick Launch area and on my Desktop which I then have to delete.

Finally, the tide may finally be turning.

Speaking as a developer I was glad to hear about a project that aims to address the inherent problems with the system with regard to software. Imaginatively called End Software Patents, it seeks to highlight the absurdity in the idea that source code and natural mathematics can somehow be patented.

Microsoft has been sabre-rattling of late, claiming that Linux infringes on hundreds of patents that they hold (read: purchased). Co-incidentally, they do have a very pertinent patent for detecting user frustration when using their software.

Just as I was beginning to think that the UK was understanding some of the problems with legal aspects of software and the implications of software patents it looks like we’re heading in the same direction. The UK government is currently embroiled in a legal case with Symbian which will hopefully clarify things.

Just don’t get me started on gene patents.

Another obstacle is changing attitudes to software. You will no longer own the software that you use but instead be charged either on a pay-as-you-go tariff or, more likely, on a monthly subscription basis.

There is also a gathering trend toward smaller, more portable computing devices with limited hard drive capacity like the Asus Eee PC. New solid state Flash drives offering a reasonable amount of storage are still expensive but these drives offer better battery performance and allow for smaller footprints.

Couple these new machines with a wireless connection, offline synchronisation and advancing online applications and you’re not a million miles away from the thin client model of computing in the 1970s. The major difference I can see between the aged dumb terminals and the new emerging way is a matter of the public perception of security and trust online. Throw in reliability (or lack thereof) issues, encryption bottlenecks and the economics of dealing with a serious amount of bandwidth into the mix and it’s clear than there is still a lot of progress to be made.

“Bad artists copy. Great artists steal.”
- Pablo Picasso

Imitation is rife. Apple may just have been inspired by Braun design from the ’60s and ’70s for the iPhone calculator, iPod and G5 tower. The Apple vs. Microsoft vs. Xerox GUI copyright lawsuits are well known.

Over the past couple of years I’ve noticed more and more pieces of PC software that try to achieve one thing: make the PC behave more like OS X. The application notifiers Growl and Snarl. The application enhancers Quicksilver and Colibri. The window managers Expose and Exposer. Unsurprisingly not one of them quite match-up to the Apple versions.

Now after years of mediocrity it seems that the PC manufacturers have finally realised that good design will set them apart. The days of the big beige box are thankfully long gone but until very recently the aesthetics of the offerings from Dell, Gateway and the like have been distinctly poor. Dell have upped their product design staff to 90 (from just six a few years ago) and are already receiving plaudits from the industry for their efforts.

In this years Microsoft CES keynote Bill Gates boldly predicted that we’ll be relying less on the keyboard and mouse in the next five years. Gosh Bill, do you really think so? What a revelation! Take a look at some bleeding-edge design concepts for some examples that might just make it to market over the next few years.

A couple of stand out things from this morning before the conversations paired off as things are wont to do in group dynamics. Ewan briefly demoed Seesmic which seems to be some kind of video Twitter. I’ve never sent a “tweet” in my life and do have difficulty of seeing the point of it if I’m being honest. At least with Seesmic, there is an element of a two way thing going on.

Via Will Richardson, I found this video of Johnny Chung Lee turning the tables on the light sensing aspect of the Wiimote to produce an interaction whiteboard for around £40 much more interesting:

Cocoa widgets played a big part in me installing Bon Echo (which is the Mac Intel optimised version of Firefox 2) but now with Firefox 3 Mozilla are giving us native form controls themselves.

Look-and-feel is one thing but for a web developer at a design agency more important than this and the memory usage is the support of standards. Firefox now follows the lead of both Opera and Safari and passes the ACID2 test. ICC color profiles are now fully supported (again, a good few months after Safari) although the not enabled on default installs. You can switch it on using the special about:config URL of Firefox (you can safely ignore the cute warning message for this), changing the gfx.color_management.enabled setting to true and restarting. You can see the color profile support in action at color.org.

(Microsoft security may well be an oxymoron. It is a much ridiculed aspect of the company and their software but did it really deserve a spot on the list of 2007 worst jobs in science?)

Slightly less than a year on and even with the release of the first service pack, 90% of IT professionals still don’t want it. Within six months of release, “Vista only” games were cracked to run under XP and then Microsoft themselves had to simplify the downgrade process for top OEM’s who wanted to revert back to XP.

First Microsoft tried monetary sweeteners to entice people to adopt Vista and then opted for what smacked of pleading to many. Positive press releases were rolled out but others later presented a different view of the state of things claiming that poor sales would hit their profits. Obviously statistics can be presented to spin things in more than one way and it would be a better man than I to try and work out the true figures and motives behind each announcement. Regardless, the sales rate of Vista started to tail off and then actually fell. Piracy may be rampant in China but even so, the sales figures in China were particularly dismal.

The wishlist for Microsoft 7 (the successor to Vista — previously codenamed “Vienna”) emerged last week. Strangely enough, I didn’t see any reference to actually being an improvement to the old OS or not sucking but quite a few features did look familiar for some reason.

Not being one to miss an opportunity, Apple’s PC/Mac adverts soon started to play on the apparent wavering confidence of the computing public. An especially clever piece of online advertising caught my eye this morning.

Japanese OS X Leopard sales figures seem to suggest that the campaign is having the desired effect for Apple, claiming over half of all boxed OS sales in October despite only being on sale for the last six days of the month.

In my opinion, the new security updates alone were worth the update. Time Machine facilitates an easy backup solution. The geek in me loves the AppleScript and official UNIX status. The exhibitionist in me loves the iChat screen sharing and Photo Booth backdrop effects.

On the other side of things the firewall is awful (and shipping with the firewall turned off by default has just staggered me. This is a huge goof and most un-Apple of Apple.

The audio popping issue that first reared it’s head for some people (although not for me) in 10.4.10 is plaguing me. When nothing is playing and my external speakers are doing nothing, they’ll sporadically emit a click or a pop. This may (or may not) be the same audio sleep issue as before or it may be something to do with the new AAC-LD compression.

The Bluetooth toys from Address Book have disappeared. I can no longer send SMS or dial from address book. Good news for Mira Software I guess. I did tend to use these features a fair bit and will actually miss them.

Mail persistently crashed. I thought that it may be the encryption plugin as that was the only modification I made so I removed the GnPG Mail bundle. That didn’t solve the problem and I was starting to toy with the idea of a reinstall. I then discovered that it was a problem with GrowlMail but it took me another few days to work out how to delete it. Disabling or removing it from System Preferences wasn’t working and it would appear again once I started Mail up. I finally realised that I had to remove the bundle from /Library and not ~/Library where I’d been looking beore.

Apple have released the first Leopard update in the three weeks that I’ve been using Leopard. More will come in time — I just hope the audio popping issue is one thing that will be fixed ASAFP.

In the world of software — in particular operating systems — the effect seems to be harder to gauge. Apple’s announcement and iPhone induced delay of Leopard (OS X 10.5) didn’t appear to dent their financial results. On the flip side, developers of third-party software are likely to have suffered. I know that I have personally held off purchasing several applications while waiting to see how Leopard addresses the situations in which they have proven to be valuable while using Tiger (OS X 10.4). In particular, the brilliantly useful utility Hazel and Power Manager.

I knocked together this Perl script which is run via cron at the start of each month to archive old calendar files and remove events older than one month to try and keep file sizes more manageable.

I’m glad to report that it wasn’t just me being weird. The developers of e obviously value this functionality as highly as me. Actually, scratch that. Higher than me as they’ve extended how this tool works to embrace multiple sections and a column mode.

It’s not quite perfect just yet. Line bookmarks and a split-screen edit mode are missing. A more powerful search and replace is also conspicuous by its absence. One final downside is that after a lot of excited discussion of new features with my colleagues it will probably be expected that I’m at least 15% more efficient!

A couple of things annoy me in Safari however. I can’t start up with the windows and tabs from my previous session. Control+Enter still top-and-tails what I type into the location bar with http://www. and .com but does so in another tab. I guess I’ll get used to it. Also while I’m actually building sites I’ll still be using Firefox mainly due to the fantastically useful array of developer tools available.

What’s prompted this change? The reasons are many and varied but mainly:

Memory usage
Firefox leaks like a sieve. Some say that this is by design but there is no reason for it to regularly get up to (and indeed, over) 300,000K after a couple of days of being open. It’s also really sluggish to respond to my first few requests of the morning.

Speed
Safari and the recently released Opera 9.5 are both blazingly fast for page rendering and JavaScript processing.

General shininess
Look at the WebKit Inspector. See how I can drag my tabs around. Observe Google searching using Inquisitor. Beautiful enough to warrant a place in OS X. Inquisitor may not be around for much longer though unfortunately.

Plugins
I love Firefox extensions but it became apparent that the only ones I actually ended up keeping were to replicate the capabilities of Safari (with Cocoa Gestures). The only one that I’ll miss is the ReloadEvery extension.

Standards
Safari passes the ACID 2 test. Firefox still does not. Maybe this will change with the impending release of Firefox 3.

Fine detail
It’s also the little things that Apple pay attention to. How each different tab retains the text in the integrated search panel and the SnapBack functionality are just two examples. With recent patent fillings it doesn’t look like Apple are resting on their laurels either.

I also took the opportunity to have a quick play with the very cool Jing project for these screen grabs.

Meta information is becoming more and more important and, by extension, useful to me. Finding things quickly is just one outcome. Being able to put together auto-updating Smart Playlists in iTunes (for example, 20 songs that I’ve rated with five stars but not listened to in six months) or Smart Albums in iPhoto (again, as an example, family pictures from Christmas) are simple examples of what can be achieved but using these in conjunction with Automator can really demonstrate the power of meta information.

Of course, it’s a lot easier if you’re disciplined and keep on top of things!