Jared W. Smith

I successfully updated to Mac OS X 10.7.3 the other day via Software Update, but there were a lot of people who didn’t. Looks like Apple is now pushing the entire 1.3GB Combo Update package at least temporarily until they find and fix the delta update.

For what it’s worth, 10.7.3 has been great so far. Wi-Fi after wake is much faster and I’m not quite seeing the discoloration issues I once was switching to my external monitor. Fingers crossed…

Looks like Mac OS X 10.7.3 is close. I’m hoping that’s the case, because I’ve suffered from an incredibly annoying bug where portions of the user interface are discolored when I attach or detach from an external monitor (a configuration I switch between a couple times a day). It’s not just me, so here’s hoping that a fix will be along sooner rather than later. 10.7.2 was a pretty rough build of Lion in general so it will be good to get an update.

I’ve been eagerly awaiting the release of Mac OS X Lion for the last few months — thus, I’m pretty excited for today’s release and plan on acquiring it as soon as bandwidth allows. I’m looking forward to many of the user interface changes in Lion, with full screen apps and Mission Control the things I’m looking forward to the most. I am an obsessive user of Spaces, so anything that can make that feature more intuitive and powerful I’m all for, and being able to take apps full screen will be incredibly beneficial to my as-yet-undiagnosed case of ADD. It’s not all golden: I could probably care a bit less about Launchpad, which arranges apps on the screen iOS-style, I think I will immediately turn reverse scrolling off and will make sure that the lights indicating running applications in the Dock are re-enabled. What are you looking forward to?

I’d noticed that Google Chrome (on my Mac, at least) was taking longer and longer to get started, and then I’d still have to wait for several minutes for any of my autocomplete history or favicons on the bookmarks bar to show up. As it turned out, I’d never cleared my history before, and that was really killing startup performance on what is otherwise a very, very fast browser. Of course, after clearing my history, all the URL auto-complete history I’d built up over months of use has to be restored, and that is mildly frustrating — but not necessarily as frustrating as waiting for the browser to get started.

In the end, I didn’t have to go very far to find a Mac-native Twitter client that was capable of real-time User Streams; there was one already in my Applications folder: Echofon for Mac. I had forgotten that they had opened User Streams up to every user (and not just paid Pro users). After self-updating, User Streams was turned on for all my accounts. Echofon is tiny and sits out of the way — really what I want from a Twitter client (though interface-wise I still think the enigmatic Tweetie for Mac wins). TweetDeck is just too immersive for passive Twitter usage, which is more of my mode these days.

My favorite Growl theme, Mono, has finally been updated to version 1.5 to fix strange display issues that cropped up with the Safari 5 release. 1.5 also seems to have a tighter appearance, which makes the theme even more attractive than it already was. Christopher Lobay’s other themes, Basics and the new Eleven, are also very sweet, but I like Mono best.