sholio | (no subject)

Better living through technology: I installed Tumblr Savior and I absolutely love it. (Missing E, on the other hand, I had on my old computer but didn't bother installing on the new one, because I never used any of its features.) I mostly put it on because I wanted to avoid spoilers for the Captain America movie, if possible. I got so thoroughly spoiled on Tumblr for Thor 2 that I really can't see any reason to watch it (not blaming anybody, it's 100% my own fault) and, even though I'm not super excited about the movie, hey superheroes so I figured I would give this a try. So far it's working like a charm, and I've also been able to filter off a couple other things I really didn't want to see. (For anyone who doesn't already know, I'm laylainalaska on tumblr, with a second one, alltheirfaces, for fandom stuff. My tumblr usage is pretty light and mostly limited to reblogging things that catch my eye, although I keep meaning to put more original content on there, but just never seem to find the time or energy ...)

In other news, it's lightly snowing today, which is depressing, and on top of that, it's supposed to get colder over the next couple of days, plunging to highs around 20F. But after that there's a major temperature upswing in the forecast, and we might really start getting some spring action going around here! We've already lost a lot of snow; there's even some bare ground showing along the driveway - \o/!

My computer is nagging me about upgrading to OS X Mavericks, but based on what I'm reading about it on review sites - HAHAHA NOPE. I'm already not that fond of 10.8, which is really laggy compared to 10.5 (it's sad to go back to the 6-year-old computer and be impressed at how much faster the Finder is ...!). I would be interested to know if anyone's tried Mavericks yet and what you think of it, though ...?

On the other hand, I tried Adobe Creative Cloud this past month for a biggish freelance project, since my old CS2 Adobe apps don't run on the new computer, and I like it a LOT! Basically, Adobe has gone to a subscription model for their software. I thought I was going to hate it, but actually, for my infrequent use, it's perfect -- I thought I'd have to drop $600 on an upgrade, but instead I can license just the apps I need on an occasional monthly basis. (I did buy Photoshop Elements since I have a continual need for Photoshop for webcomic reasons.) You can also do full-featured month-long trials of any of the Adobe apps if you want to test them out. Yeah, it's a little frustrating that Adobe has locked down most of the graphic design market and their programs keep getting more and more bloated and slow, but I'm pretty happy with this and looking forward to seeing how it works out in the long run.

Flat | Top-Level Comments Only

I upgraded to Mavericks a couple of weeks ago. It solved all the problems I had with Safari being slow and the inconveniences have been minimal so far. However, the Applications folder is slower to load, and most programs are slower to open. But once they're open everything is fine. I don't use a variety of programs and I tend to leave them open and in the dock, so it doesn't bother me.

Hmm! Thanks for the info - I tend to leave programs running as well, so that's good to know. I know there is supposed to be some kind of improved application handling in the new version that helps prevent apps from bogging down system resources, which would be helpful for me.

I upgraded to Mavericks a while ago so that I could finally get Ruby on Rails to work. For the most part I don't notice all that much difference – aside from the fact that RoR does in fact work now – but what differences I do notice annoy me. For example:

I used spaces a lot, because it let me organize applications into various virtual desktops; Mavericks doesn't seem to have any configurable spaces. The closest you can get is fullscreening single applications, which then get pushed off to the right of your screen and are accessible through hotkeys or the dock. This means that aside from the main screen, I can't have multiple applications organized into one screen together, and I can't rearrange them easily, and they're all laid out linearly so that if I am using the screen-shifting hotkeys I have to cycle through all of them and can't go up/down/forwards/backwards.

• For some reason, half of the time when I open a new Finder window, it opens by default to a list of every document on my computer. Not only can I not fathom why such a use would be useful – I can search for documents so much more easily than scrolling through a gigantic list – but it always takes a couple seconds to load up, and kinda hangs while it does that.

• TextEdit no longer seems to allow me to set the text to 150% zoom. It's 100% or 200% with nothing in-between. This single change made the program so unusable for me that that's why I switched to Bean.

• Several of my old programs – mostly old games, but also a copy of DreamWeaver I'd been hanging onto for its FTP capabilities – no longer work. (Granted, it was probably high time I got away from DreamWeaver and switched to Aptana, but it was still annoying.)

• I was an idiot and forgot to back up my SQL databases before I switched over, so I lost a ton of data. This is probably not a concern for you, but it was annoying for me. :P

In short, I'm still annoyed at Mavericks because it broke a ton of my workflows, and I haven't run into any features that make me happy I upgraded. Would not recommend.

Thanks for the info - this is really useful! I've found the transition from 10.5 (old computer) to 10.8 (new computer) relatively painless, aside from a couple of minor annoyances like the stupid scroll bounce (WHY) -- but functionally it seems to be very much the same as far as everything that I use regularly. I don't really want to lose that functionality by jumping into Mavericks, so maybe I'll hang out in 10.8 for awhile longer ...