Open File in Leopard

When you choose the Open File command in a program there are two sensible choices for which directory should be selected in the Open File dialog.

The first is that the Open File dialog remembers your last choice and goes again to the same directory. This is what Mac OS X was doing until Tiger.

The second is that the Open File dialog goes to the directory where the file in the frontmost window of the application resides (which is, by the way, exactly how Emacs behaves).

Guess what Leopard is doing.

X11 in Leopard

I installed Leopard doing an “Archive and Install” and then moving some of the archived files to my new account. After that I could not launch X11.app. When trying to launch X11 I could not even see a bouncing icon in the Dock and the message in the Console was:

([0x0-0x24024].org.x.X11_launcher[245]) Stray process with PGID equal to this dead job: PID 246 PPID 1 login

The problem was the file ~/.MacOSX/environment.plist that I had moved from my Tiger system. In environment.plist I had set DISPLAY to :0.0. This setting was useful in Tiger (and before) for launching X11 programs from Emacs. It turns out that setting the DISPLAY is not only unnecessary in Leopard but that if the DISPLAY is set in environment.plist, then X11 does not start at all. After deleting this entry from environment.plist and logging out and back in, the problem disappeared and now X11 starts normally.

iSDK

This is really great news. I had many doubts on what where the plans of Apple on making an SDK for the iPhone, but now it's official: an SDK will be released on February. Perhaps by that time the iPhone will also be available in the Netherlands, or I will get that job in France that I'm after. In any case, I think (hope!) that the iPhone is going to be a great platform for experimentation on mobile applications.

300

Apple has published a list of new features in Leopard. Some things that drew my attention besides the major new features like Time Machine or Spaces:

• Terminal gets (movable) tabs!
• Scripting Bridge: now one can write Cocoa and AppleScript programs in Python (and Ruby). By the way, the page lists this under both "AppleScript" and "Unix".
• Garbage collection in Obj-C.
• Preview gets Instant Alpha and the ability to rearrange pages in a PDF document or combine different PDF documents into one. All these, are things I could have used the previous days and I am sure I will need again in the future.
• DTrace.
• All strings in AppleScript are Unicode. Hopefully no more "as Unicode text".
• Inline editing and attachments in iCal. I was so tired of the previous "information" panel. Now if they would only add hierarchical todos.
• The menu of available wireless networks shows which are password protected and which are not.
• Interface Builder with animations. We will see a lot of silly interfaces. I will make at least one.
• System wide (English) grammar check.
• Automator is getting some new capabilities. I have not figured out yet how to use Automator efficiently and integrate it into my workflow. I will give it again a try after I install Leopard.

And this brings us to the only question: clean install or upgrade?