All posts in Apple

Apple’s approach to Windows – that whatever exists there is crap and it’s our mission to offer a glass of water to those in hell – continues with interesting push technique.

First there was iTunes – yet another media player, one of many with its own idea about the interface. Microsoft is not less guilty here, with each new version of Windows Media Player bringing yet another graphical experiment that has no connection to actual OS interface. Then, with iTunes 7 (can’t really remember which minor version) came Apple’s Software Update. It controlled QuickTime and iTunes, since they came bundled together.

Now it seems that Safari is being pushed through it, even when you did not have it at all. Continue Reading →

Last night I installed the 341MB System Update 10.5.2 and then Leopard Graphics update (48MB).
The size of the update re-iterates my belief that Leopard release was rushed with Apple cutting corners wherever it could to get it by end of October. 10.5.1 fixed only the most glaring issues – this looks to be much closer to what final version was supposed to be.

The most important issue fixed (for me) is the severe graphics problems that plagued nVidia 8600-based MBPs (like mine 2.2GHz model). As soon as the update finished installing (graphics update has several restarts during installation) I ran iDVD.

Preview of the 7.0 theme (Revolution) based DVD interface, with videos in the background drop-zone, now works without problems and creating the DVD image also worked.
Now I can finally finish my wedding DVD. :)

A fine switch this is…First a fuck-up with the ExpressCard driver, then the intolerable mess of loose threads that iDVD ’08 is. This is the single most frustrating part of my Mac experience so far.

iDVD does not work. The only way for my MacBook Pro to survive through DVD burning (particularly menu rendering) is to not use background photos or videos on anything but Main menu. At least main menu rendering never failed. So far. It does not matter do you use 6.0 or 7.0 themes, if you max them out with videos and slideshows all over drop zones, this piece of unstable crap will halt entire Mac OS X.

During that, system.log is filled with repeated messages like this:

Dec 11 00:12:03 AV-MBP kernel[0]: NVChannel(GL): Graphics channel timeout!
Dec 11 00:12:03 AV-MBP kernel[0]: NVChannel(GL): Graphics channel exception! status = 0xffff info32 = 0x3 = Fifo: Unknown Method Error
Dec 11 00:12:03 AV-MBP kernel[0]: 0000000b

Every 10 seconds. And this on 10.5.1 and iLife 08 with all the updates. The fact that final version of Leopard with one system update already out is still having driver issues is utterly unacceptable.

Just works, my ass.