Feline frustrations

I upgraded to Tiger a little while back. Frankly, I’m a little underwhelmed.

There’s that terrible new interface on Mail for a start. Run, don’t walk, to download the replacement Mail Stamps icons.

Maybe it’s just because I’m so used to Quicksilver, but Spotlight doesn’t seem all that revolutionary to me. Maybe I’m judging too much on surface impressions. I’m sure it’s very impressive under the hood.

On the whole, my move to ten point four has involved losing, rather than gaining, features.

Take iChatStatus, for instance. I used to have this little application set up to do quite a few tasks. It would grab the current track from iTunes and update the status in iChat with the name of the track. It would also set my buddy icon to the artwork of the track’s album. Then, it writes a short text file, opens an FTP connection, and uploads the file to this server. When it gets here, the file makes a call to Amazon and runs a search on the album and artist. The album cover image returned from that search is then displayed here on the site.

That’s the way it used to work. Now, iChatStatus doesn’t work at all. Instead, Apple have implemented their own half-assed version. It grabs the current track from iTunes and updates the status message in iChat. Then… that’s it.

I guess I’ll be ditching the "music" box here on my journal.

Dashboard looks interesting to me, but only from the point of view of a developer. I love the idea of little XHTML/CSS/JavaScript packages but I honestly can’t see myself using any widgets on a regular basis.

My main peeve with Tiger is that it seems to be hogging all my iMac’s memory. This could be something to do with my machine: I haven’t noticed the same problem on my iBook.

I need to do some more investigating using the twin powers of Google and the Activity Monitor application.

Right now, my desktop machine is showing a ridiculous amount of CPU usage. A system process called "update" appears to be the main culprit, hogging between 60% and 70% of the computer at any one time. Compare that to my laptop machine where the system is using between 1% and 5% on average.

Something’s not right here. I think the cat did it.

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Responses

Previously on this day

17 years ago I wrote Wireless Wonderland

Well, my stint as compère at Silicon Beach is over.

17 years ago I wrote Cute

I was just emailing with Dave Phelan about tonight’s Silicon Beach event. I told him I’d probably be able to recognise him from his webcam pic and asked him to give me a wave.

17 years ago I wrote Silicon Beach

Apparently, I’m going to be the compère for tonight’s Silicon Beach event at the Sumo Bar on Middle Street.

17 years ago I wrote Hercubush

Satire: Keeness and severity of remark; caustic exposure to reprobation; trenchant wit; sarcasm.

17 years ago I wrote Ah, Venice

Richard’s pictures of Venice are giving me really itchy feet.

18 years ago I wrote What's on in Brighton

If anybody in Brighton is looking for a good evening’s entertainment tonight, head on over to the Hanbury Ballroom.