Mike Cohen

I agree with Glenn Wolsey on this. I see a lot of complaints about the ads introduced in Twitterrific 3.0, which don’t bother me at all. Pownce’s ads are a lot more annoying, and they seem to appear more often than once an hour.

Twitterrific 2.1 had some very annoying update glitches in Leopard. It bothered me enough that I had switched to Twitterpod, which seems to crash pretty often. With 3.0 I’m happy to be able to use Twitterrific once again with Leopard.

The folks at IconFactory explain why they did it:

Twitterrific has gone from a fun side project to a full-fledged application that is enjoyed by tens of thousands of users every day. This growing user base reports bugs, requests new feature sets and regularly sends support questions. All of these things take time, and ultimately money, to make a reality.
Adding inline advertising via The Deck allows us to keep the app “freeâ€? without crippling any of its features. Hope you can understand our point of view. Thanks for listening.

Of course if you don’t want to see the ads, you can pay $15 to register and eliminate them.

Many users are reporting problems with wireless networking in Leopard. I’ve seen a slightly different symptom on my MacBook Pro. Instead of progressively slowing down, I find that my Airport connection suddenly dies. A few times I’ve seen an alert saying “the network appears to have been compromised and will be disabled”. Other times it would simply stop responding without any message.

Although I was able to get Time Machine to recognize my external drive when connected to the Airport Extreme base station, it was nearly useless. That base station would randomly hang or I would lose the connection. I finally ended up connecting that drive to my iMac and sharing it.

For the last day or so, I was completely unable to connect to my Linksys WRT54G’s 802.11g network. Even removing the entries for that network from my keychain didn’t fix it. Renaming the network finally fixed that problem.

As you’ve probably heard, Leopard’s Time Machine won’t work with a disk connected to an Airport Extreme base station. However, there’s a very simple work around.

Connect the drive directly to your Mac and tell Time Machine to use that drive. Disconnect the drive and connect it to your Airport Extreme Base Station. Connect to the base station and mount the drive. Time Machine will now recognize the drive and start backing up to it.

However, I find that AirDisk in general is very flaky. Even in normal use, I find that it often drops the connection at random times.

The only major problem I had with Leopard is that it won’t see my Brother HL-1440 laser printer, which is connected to my Linux box and shared via CUPS (which I had reported as a bug).

It turns out that Leopard only uses Bonjour to discover shared printers by default. However, CUPS browsing can be easily enabled.

Edit /etc/cups/cupsd.conf and look for the following lines:

# Show shared printers on the local network.
Browsing On
BrowseOrder allow,deny
BrowseAllow all

Add the following line after it:

BrowseProtocols all

To activate the change, restart cupsd (sudo killall -HUP cupsd). You should now see any shared CUPS printers and be able to add them.

I’m now running the final version of Leopard on my MacBook Pro. I had been running various developer builds on my iMac since WWDC, but I never installed it on my MacBook Pro since this is my main personal and work system.

After doing a full backup to an external drive and verifying that I could boot from it, I did an upgrade install rather than archive or clean install. It took about an hour, although at one point it said the install would take 5 hours. The upgrade went smoothly and everything worked without any problems.

Although MacFixit tries to frighten people about OS upgrades, and in particular using anything other than archive or clean installs, in most cases it’s perfectly safe.

Leopard feels a bit faster than Tiger on my MacBook Pro and almost all of my applications work with no problems. However I really miss SAFT’s safari enhancements and Chax’s iChat enhancements, since neither of them work in Leopard. Input Managers (including SIMBL and most Safari enhancers) are no longer supported in Leopard.

The dock appearance in Leopard never bothered me, even though I put my dock on the right side of the screen. The new plain dock does look nicer, though. I never did like the translucent menu bar, but it doesn’t look bad at all if the top part of the desktop picture is a solid color. I use Hamad Darwish’s Vista Wallpapers, which work nicely with the translucent menu bar.

I rarely bother with Text To Speech, but the new high quality voice Alex sounds a lot better than any computer voice I’ve ever heard.

The picture screen saver has a great new mosaic style. It assembles a mosaic of each selected picture from your iPhoto library.

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