Everybody knows that Apple’s iPhone is coming to Canada, eventually. Most people and publications speculate about when this momentous event will happen.
Today, few websites are excited about a blip that showed up on Apple’s site, and are extrapolating all kind of data from this blip.
Personally, I’m not exactly interested in when the iPhone will come to Canada. I know that it will. I would love to get one. But, it all depends on the ‘How Much?’ bit of the big picture.
Those outside of Canada probably have no clue on how ridiculous Canada’s wireless industry is.
For example, I’m with Fido (which was bought out by Rogers more than a year ago). I have their cheapest plan for my phone, which they advertise as “200 anytime minutes for $20 a month”. I have one additional service added - caller ID display - for an additional $3 per month. After fees and taxes and various ‘bend-over-to-stick-it-to-you-some-more’ additions to my bill, I pay $37.05 per month, not including any long distance calls that I may make.
So, the iPhone’s biggest question would be: how much will the data plans cost here in Canada?
Apple has been able to negotiate interesting deals with the carriers for iPhone buyers. I wonder if they can improve the situation here. I’m not too hopeful.
In Canada, the only GSM carrier is Fido and Rogers. But since Rogers bought Fido, effectively, there is only Rogers that can carry the iPhone.
Their only ‘reasonable’ data plan is $100 for up to 200 MB + $5 per additional MB. The cheaper ones are even more ridiculous than their parent company.
Compare the above to ATT’s data plan in the US at $20 for Unlimited data usage.
So while we know the iPhone is coming to Canada, the real question is: When the iPhone comes to Canada, will it be reasonable to buy and use?
Yet another useful feature has been eliminated in Leopard.
The audio controller that the Finder’s column view had for the preview pane when previewing audio files has been eliminated. Why? I don’t know. No logical explanation can come to mind.
In Tiger, if you set your window’s view to the column view and point it to a folder that has MP3 files, when you select one of those files, the right-most column shows a controller that allows you to play the audio file, select the point where you want the play head to be and control the playback’s volume. Leopard: NO MORE!
What you get in Leopard is a silly, YouTube-like preview square with a big ‘play’ button in its middle. No volume control and no skipping ahead. You can always hit the space bar to get a big window showing iTunes like display, and you can skip ahead, but you still can’t control the volume.
Somebody should tell Apple’s engineers that an UPGRADE is when you make things better, not worse.
I’ve been using Leopard as my only OS for 4+ days now. Here is a first report on where I’ve encountered the most problems.
Safari:
I spend a lot of time with Safari (can’t use any other browser as my main browser). It’s the only Apple application that I use so extensively. So far I’ve noticed few thing:
It crashes way more than previous versions of Safari. I guess they’re using a code-base almost completely different from the beta 3.0 version that they released for Tiger. The beta Tiger version was almost bulletproof for me. I’ve had unexplained crashes so far at least twice per day. Most of the crashes happened when I started typing in a form.
It seems to be unable to block certain type of popup windows. I have the ‘Block pop up windows’ preference set, and yet I’ve had two or three instances where websites managed to show me some ads in a popup window. Not good.
Visual glitches: A site I visited changed the size of my main Safari window to a really small size and then back to full-screen. After the expansion to full size, the tabs bar got clipped and only a third of its normal hight showed. I couldn’t get it back to normal size without quitting Safari. (side note: I wish Safari had a resize blocking feature like Camino. I just hate it when a stupid website decides that my window size is not adequate for its display and ‘helps’ me by changing the size of my browser window).
Scripting: Apple changed the behavior of some AppleScript commands. The ‘open’ command used to open a new window with the URL, now it opens it in a tab. The kicker is that Safari doesn’t seem to respond to ‘make new window’ command. (I’ve worked around this one by modifying my code to anticipate a new tab instead of a new window and acts accordingly.)
Spontaneous cookie loss: It has happened few times already. I would be surfing and managing my various websites, (most of my websites rely on cookies for log in), and suddenly, I would be logged out. I looked over cookies and most of the cookies weren’t there. They simply vanished. Not all cookies, just some. I have no clue how to track this bug.
Web clippings don’t work: I’ve tested the Web Clip feature and it doesn’t seem to work. When I make a clip of a page, it appears correctly in Dashboard, but whenever I reload the Dashboard, the clip is empty. I tried it with various sites with the same result.
Folder Actions:
To show my geeky side, one of Leopard’s features that I anticipated the most is the enhancements to the Folder Actions engine. In Tiger, if you had multiple folders with folder actions, those actions don’t run concurrently. They run back to back. So if folder 1 fires its action and it takes a while to complete, folder 2 won’t fire its action until folder 1’s action ends. Leopard’s feature list promised to fix this.
However, not only they didn’t fix it, a bug seems to have broken Folder Actions further. Now, even if I have multiple folders with folder actions set up, only the first active one works. All the other ones don’t work at all. So now I have to choose which folder action I can live without and which ones are too crucial.
One of the ugly new interface “features” of Leopard is its translucent menu bar. In my opinion it’s ugly, distracting and serves absolutely no useful purpose. I have no clue why any sane person at Apple would want to implement it.
There have been many complaints about it on the internet since Leopard reached people’s hands; and unlike the shiny Dock, so far, the menu bar has no workaround to fix the problem and make it opaque.
However, I found a very simple solution after two minutes of looking at this annoying eye sore.
It’s simple. Open your desktop picture in any image editor and fill the top 22 pixels with white. Now because the system caches the desktop image, the change won’t appear until you log out, or simply go to the System Preferences and through the Desktop & Screen Saver panel, select a different picture for your desktop and then select your original white top image again and done. You’ll have a white menu bar without the visual clutter.
You don’t need to add the mime type for php, because it’s already done for you under leopard. The last line in the .conf file is:
Include /private/etc/apache2/other/*.conf
The ‘other’ directory contains a .conf file for php5. That takes care of the mime type and the index.php configuration for php sites.
If you develop multiple sites and you need virtual hosting functionality, scroll down to the end of the .conf file and uncomment the following:
# Include /private/etc/apache2/extra/httpd-vhosts.conf
That’s all the modification that I had to make to to the httpd.conf file.
Next, you’ll need to setup whatever virtual hosts you have in the virtual hosts file /private/etc/apache2/extra/httpd-vhosts.conf
For example, for each line that you set up in your hosts file like so:
beta-site-1.com 127.0.0.1
You need to make an entry in the httpd-vhosts.conf file like so:
<VirtualHost *:80>
ServerName beta-site-1.com
ServerAlias www.beta-site-1.com
ServerAdmin webmaster@beta-site-1.com
DocumentRoot "/Library/WebServer/beta-site-1"
ScriptAlias /cgi-bin/ "/Library/WebServer/beta-site-1/cgi-bin"
<Directory "/Library/WebServer/beta-site-1">
Options FollowSymLinks MultiViews Includes
AllowOverride All
Order allow,deny
Allow from all
</Directory>
</VirtualHost>
One good thing is that the ‘upgrade’ install of Leopard does not mess with your hosts file, so whatever virtual domains you may have set up won’t be affected.
If you had Mysql installed previously, good news too, Leopard’s installer won’t touch it. I found mysqld running just like before the upgrade.
One thing changed with Leopard is the socket for Mysql. It moved to /private/tmp, so you may need to configure your php.ini file to point it to the new location.
To do so, open the file ‘/private/etc/php.ini‘, (if no such file exists, then make a copy of ‘/private/etc/php.ini.default‘ naming it ‘php.ini‘) and edit that.
You have two lines to modify:
mysql.default_socket =
becomes:
mysql.default_socket = /private/tmp/mysql.sock
and mysqli.default_socket =
becomes:
mysqli.default_socket = /private/tmp/mysql.sock
of course, from the sharing pref pane, stop the server and restart it and voila!
In Tiger, if you set your window’s view to the column view and point it to a folder that has MP3 files, when you select one of those files, the right-most column shows a controller that allows you to play the audio file, select the point where you want the play head to be and control the playback’s volume. Leopard: NO MORE!
What you get in Leopard is a silly, YouTube-like preview square with a big ‘play’ button in its middle. No volume control and no skipping ahead. You can always hit the space bar to get a big window showing iTunes like display, and you can skip ahead, but you still can’t control the volume.