Scot’s Newsletter Blog

Stop the presses! Something appears to be wrong with Apple’s Leopard OS X 10.5 upgrade-installation process — at least on some Macs. I ran into the problem on one Mac. It manifests itself as a never-ending “blue screen” (not a Windows term, mind you) after Leopard completes “successful” installation, on the first restart. Many others have encountered the same issue, and you can see evidence of that in the Apple Discussions area in the thread titled Installation appears stuck on a plain blue screen.

If you read through the thread (as well as many others on other forums), you’ll find that various things are blamed for the problem, including an add-on customization utility called Application Enhancement (APE) by Unsanity.

The Apple Discussion thread offers a solution that involves booting in single-user mode, which requires you to hold down the S key while your Mac boots. Apparently that works for some people, but on my MacBook Pro 15, the only boot option that worked at all was Target Disk Mode (which lets you plug in a firewire cable and address the drive from another Mac as if it were an external drive).

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With Apple’s new OS X 10.5 operating system due to ship at 6PM (wherever you are in the world) tomorrow, the question millions of Mac users are asking themselves is: Should I spend $129 on this thing yet? The short answer is: Yes and no, but probably not in that order.

At Computerworld, we’ve put together the quintessential examination of the new Apple OS commonly referred to as Leopard. Check out: In Depth: Apple’s Leopard Leaps to New Heights. Be sure to check out the First Look at Leopard Image Gallery for a complete visual tour of the new OS, complete with a screencam of the Stacks feature.

I like Leopard. The new OS X has over 300 new features according to Apple (I didn’t stop to count them). There are literally oodles of small tweaks and changes. Things like, when you select Shut Down from the Apple menu, the new default countdown time is 60 seconds, not two minutes. (Yeah, I went for something pretty mundane that you probably haven’t read in a hundred other Leopard reviews.)

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Beginning immediately, I will be switching Scot’s Newsletter to primarily a blog with a text-only notification newsletter.

In the text-only, October 2 issue of the newsletter, I described two possible format changes for Scot’s Newsletter:

Option 1. A blog presentation with a text-only, blurb-and-link notification newsletter.

Option 2. An HTML-only newsletter, without a text alternative.

The main reason to change formats is to save production time for yours truly. It takes almost as much time to produce and send the newsletter as it does to write it. (Of course, the majority of the time I put into the newsletter is spent on research.)

Now five days after the newsletter went out, I’ve received over 2,700 votes. With voting beginning to slow down, the votes for the blog outnumber the HTML-only newsletter option 2:1. In other words, I’ve received a little more than twice as many votes for the blog as I have for the HTML newsletter.

There is much to be done on the blog site, in revising the template for the new text newsletter, and on the Scot’s Newsletter website to pull this altogether. It’s not all going to happen overnight.

Several people who voted requested navigation changes to the blog site that I’d already been thinking about. I’m also considering how to work through the archiving system, how to make the site print better (although it does print OK for now). Please be patient while I make modifications, which will come over time — a little bit here and a little bit there.

WordPress geeks and designers: If you’ve got experience, I might need your help!

For those of you who wanted HTML or who preferred the text newsletter, I ask you to give this a good try. And let me know what isn’t working for you. I can’t promise to fix all problems, but I do care and will fix anything I can.

Thanks to all those people who voted, and the many people who expressed their intention to support Scot’s Newsletter no matter what change I went with. That means a lot to me.

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