In Nomine Jobs, et Woz, et Spiritus Schiller ☀
But there’s also the sad, sorry bastards like me. The laity. The “Power Users.”
I’ve lived on a Mac every day since January of nineteen hundred and eighty-seven, and I know how to make this thing do some shit that would curl your hair. But, I’m NOT a developer. Not by any stretch of the imagination. I don’t know an NSWhateverTheFuck from a Nib from a .plist from a .DS_Store. No idea. And THAT’s how I likes it.
For better or worse, I AM several other things.
For one, I’m a guy writing a book on deadline. Which guy dislikes it when his right hand crashes unexpectedly with a generic memory error for 2 or 3 days.
I’m also a ham and egg graphics guy who dislikes that (a supposedly up to date copy of) Photoshop CS 3 crashes on save. That one was hilarious.
I’m also a demi-nerd user of Quicksilver — an app that, I’ll stipulate, lives out its final days in palliative care, more dead than alive. Still. It’s responsible for a giant amount of how I do what I do and now it’s not working. It’s basically dead unless I upgrade and wipe the App Support folder whose 5 years of usage == what makes QS useful at all. And, YES! You are correct. I cannot, by any reasonable technologist’s point of view, blame that on Snow Leopard. And I don’t. But it’s true. It worked before, now it doesn’t, and the Lord giveth as the Lord taketh (my triggers) away. Dominy, dominy. Peace be with you.
Plus, I’m other things too. Including a 1-person IT staff who accepts that he has to stop doing real work for a day and a half in order to make sure that a new point-something OS upgrade is working properly on five (5) computers in two locations.
…
/memo to disgruntled mac user and longtime computer user who should know better: never ever auto upgrade a major OS update, database platform or any other mission critical production application until you are 99.99% certain of eluding any post installation ills.
A work mate handed me a Snow Leopard disc on Friday. It sat on my desk until Monday, at which point, after checking the Snow Leopard Compatibility List, confirmed my reluctance to upgrade. I had already advised my fellow coworker to wait until 10.6.1, but he eagerly ran out and purchased a family pack, as soon as it was stocked at the local Apple Store. Let someone else beta test it. Then I discover, from perusing the applications list, I would have been in a world of hurt.
Due to the present economic climate, there are a number of applications on my work machine sporting older versions (i.e., CS3, Parallels) that may or definitely be grief inducing.
Yes, eventually we all must upgrade and one day the sun will set on all of those non-current (and current current versions too!) versions. Hopefully, at that juncture, my employer (and personal bankroll, for my home macs) will shell out coin for shiny new versions of all my other software.
