Rumblings From The Web

[dotmike]

Let's hope that X.3.8 graphics card drivers and openGL improvements will improve my GeForce 6800 Ultra.

What specifically have you noticed?

 

[rendezvouscp]

Are you sure about this???

I thought the halo effect was something to do with Steve being an angel and protecting us all from the evil empire until the day that hell freezes over. Isn't Freescale a nuclear power plant and reprocessing facility in the north of England.

Sorry fatfish, but hell froze over in late 2003 I believe, with the introduction of iTunes for Windows.
-Chase

 

[SamKva]

iLife 05

I take back my comment about only crashing when importing raw images. It is pretty constant. In fact, it's not usable!

Keep in mind this is a very new system that only has MS Office 2004, Norton AV, and the standard Mac apps running on it. No games or other stuff as it's my photo lab.

Guess it's time to call Apple.

Thanks!
Sam

 

[fatfish]

Well, I'm not sure what pre-install things I was suppose to do but I did follow the directions and I am not new to computers (although fairly new to Mac OS X).

I reverted back to my M$ days and re-installed iLife. We'll see how it goes but so far, it appears the crashing problems happen mostly when importing Raw photo images.

I'm very open to suggestions and I am as surprised as anyone else would be with these problems.

BTW, the only other app that has ever crashed on this system is MS VPC v.7 and I don't really need any Windows apps on it anyway. Overall, it is rock solid!!

Thanks!
Sam

I'm not sure that apple go to the effort of telling you to repair permissions before and after an install, but I would say that's the minimum you should do. Personally I like to do Disk Utility, Diskwarrior and force run the CRON's before anything that requires a restart after install (not that I know iLife needs a restart, but I assume it does)

Any problem with an existing file may cause a new file not to install or maybe not overwrite the old, duplicating files with the same function. There's lots of reasons why if the software your running is corrupt in some way, it will affect your install, reinstalling it will not necessarily work.

Oh yeah, after just saying in another post that only x-plane and appleworks ever crashes (the later very rarely) I do recall I have trouble with VPC (well not actually VPC, it's windows XP that crashes within VPC, which I can't see as a mac issue, but then I'm often wrong and quite willing to admit it)

 

[joeboy_45101]

My 1Gb iPod Shuffle, iLife '05, and iWork '05 all arrived today. All I have to say about the iPod shuffle is that it is freakin' awesome, I was showing all my friends at work. I can't believe it's so small and light. And it sounds absolutely amazing. I've set my "Big" iPod permanetely in my Bose SoundDock, that's my new system.

I haven't fooled around with iLife '05 or iWork '05 too much, but I see that they have greatly improved the Red-Eye reduction in iPhoto.

Everything I have to say, is pretty outstanding. Thank you, Apple.

 

[rendezvouscp]

I take back my comment about only crashing when importing raw images. It is pretty constant. In fact, it's not usable!

Keep in mind this is a very new system that only has MS Office 2004, Norton AV, and the standard Mac apps running on it. No games or other stuff as it's my photo lab.

Guess it's time to call Apple.

Thanks!
Sam

Unless you absolutely need it, remove Norton AV from your system! I believe others will join me in saying that it can be buggy and actually hurt your system. Good luck with iPhoto!
-Chase

 

[SamKva]

Actually, the iLife upgrade did not require a reboot. However, I have done quite a few anyway and it's still extremely unstable, at least on my system.

AppleCare is closed so I'll as many tricks as I can think of until my head starts dropping on the keyboard.

Thanks!
Sam

 

[fatfish]

What specifically have you noticed?

This is going to sound silly, but nothing really.

Although I have noticed that benchmarks given by various sources do not represent the output I had expected from the specs of the hardware. It's not particularly easy to notice any issues when you have nothing to compare against.

My opinion (and opinion only) is that the drivers don't seem to be getting the best from the card, but maybe that's to be expected from a product in it's infancy.

I was just hoping I might see an improved framerate in some fairly demanding apps from X.3.8, as it states it has driver and openGL improvements.

 

[fatfish]

I take back my comment about only crashing when importing raw images. It is pretty constant. In fact, it's not usable!

Keep in mind this is a very new system that only has MS Office 2004, Norton AV, and the standard Mac apps running on it. No games or other stuff as it's my photo lab.

Guess it's time to call Apple.

Thanks!
Sam

Ah.....Norton

Personally I'd rather not comment about Norton as it usually brings it's staunch supporters out of the woodwork to submit endless posts.

Instead may I point you to the Apple discussion forums on the Apple site, where you can type in Norton in the search field and form your own opinion.

 

[SamKva]

I'm not really an advocate of any AV software and that's one of the great aspects of the Mac. Norton was disabled during and since the iLife 05 upgrade.

Thanks!
Sam

 

[fatfish]

I'm not really an advocate of any AV software and that's one of the great aspects of the Mac. Norton was disabled during and since the iLife 05 upgrade.

Thanks!
Sam

A couple of posts ago you said Norton AV was running, anyway maybe that's not your issue, but if you read the posts on Apple discussions, you'll see it's not just problems runing Norton that seem to crop up, but also systems that have run Norton in the past.

Going to bed now it's 4.20 in the morning here, I hope everything turns out OK for you.

 

[beatle888]

My only real gripe about iCal is that it won't print monthly/weekly/daily calendars nearly as well as Outlook or Entourage. Otherwise, I think all three apps are pretty much the same as far as functionality and ease of use.

my opinion is that entourage outperforms ical dramatically just by the simple fact that the calendar is works so close with mail...AND its address book.

with apple, for some reason they have ical, mail, and address book as separate apps. that might be fine for the consumer but for the business professional its hardly a solution. sorry to say it but entourage kicks apple in the balls...but its still ugly.

 

[SamKva]

You folks have been great!! However, I can not import anything, even directly from my Nikon D100 camera which is on Apple's list of supported cameras. I am basically out of production at this point and I'm not really sure how I can get back to iPhoto 04. Any advice would be greatly appreciated.

Thanks!
Sam

 

[beatle888]

did you check your camera to see if it was powered (sufficiant batteries) and on the correct setting for transfering files? did you try a different cable?

hope it works out for you. have a good weekend and worry about it after a beer with your friends.

 

[rendezvouscp]

I suggest that you remove all traces of iPhoto except for your iPhoto library. Then do a search in the library (in the Finder) for files that aren't your pictures— like .data files. Then, install iPhoto 4 and drag-and-drop your photos back into iPhoto. Sorry things haven't worked for you.
-Chase

 

[Mainyehc]

With all the crashes you experience, I'd seriously look at your system, you shouldn't be getting them.

Hum, so you mean Mac OS X should be even MORE crash proof??

Maybe I'm not expecting too much because I'm a switcher, and a preety unlucky one at that! I had a terrible experience with Windows since Windows 95 (3.1 was rock solid, as we usually say, "It just works[ed]") and through Windows 98 SE and now Windows 2000; even without viruses and crapware I still had unstable systems. And my brand new iMac G5 suffered the deathly effects of bad, defective RAM: I had too many KPs and my filesystem's B-Tree was all screwed up. I was fed up and didn't bother to rescue my data, so I just did it the Windows user's way: wipe it out and start all over again. Now I have a proper RAM stick (making up for some nice 1,25GB ), stuffed into this sweet system (iMac G5 20'', even more stable than my old iMac G4 17'' 1,25GHz, stock), a crash every month or two in an app I use very often doesn't seem that bad.

As I've said, CorelDraw seems to emulate its Windows version's behaviour, down to the bugs themselves. I'd say it's the app's fault, its code is probably crap (and I don't use it anymore, just if I really need to do something I only know how to do with that specific app, and for compatibility, in case I need to print something in its .cdr format). And as for FreeHand... I identified one of the causes for crashes (corrupted fonts, which seem to be a perfectly understandable cause for crashes, given that font management in OS X is far from perfect). But you know, besides that font-related crashes that happened everytime I scrolled through the font menu ( ) it must have crashed twice since I have started using it, in October '04. I only remember those two crashes (and I'm positive one of those was font menu-related) because I lost 1-2 hours worth of work, no big deal. It only reminded me that I should save my work more often

And iTunes had a minor glitch today, I wanted to restart it so it would update my iPod, but it wouldn't respond. The iPod was already unmounted, so I disconnected, iTunes finally shut down, I reconnected the iPod and iTunes popped up again. Even though that qualifies as a "crash", it was easy to solve, in an intuitive way (hey, it was still weird that force-quitting didn't do the job...), and everything ran fine ever since. Maybe it was because I was fiddling with track volume adjustment in iTunes and sound check settings on the iPod while trying to update, dunno... It's just one of those non-issues that happens less than once every two months, which would happen DAILY on a Windows system. If that isn't rock solid, tell me what it is!

Oh, I almost forgot Microsoft Office and MSN Messenger... It's too big a coincidence that the most buggy applications I have running here come from... [drumroll please...] MICROSOFT!!

But the computer ITSELF (or should I say, Mac OS X) never crashed since I did the erase and install a few months ago. Anyway, thanks for the suggestion, if I feel my system is unstable, I'll give DiskWarrior a try.

 

[SamKva]

Oh don't worry, there will be beer o'plenty with friends during the final round of playoff games this weekend.

Everything on the camera appears correct. Although, I must say, I have never downloaded directly from the camera. This was a last ditch test in light of my current iPhoto problems.

I just uninstalled all of iLife and ran through a complete re-installation. Now, the import function is working fine. I'm not totally convinced the performance is up to what I expect out of my hardware suite but no crashes in the past few minutes.

Not sure I recommend this course of action for everyone that installs iLife 05. However, it does give me more info to pass on to AppleCare.

More to follow....

Thanks!
Sam

 

[SamKva]

A Little More iLife 05 Progress

At 2:00 I decided sleep was a good thing. This morning I deleted my iPhoto library and restored from my pre-upgrade backup. This allowed the conversion of the library to take place again. Good news is the library appears to be in good shape. Maybe a glitch occured during the first upgrade?? Maybe Norton AV caused some problems although it wasn't in real time protect mode??

Importing from CF cards is working for JPEGs and Raw images. However, iPhoto crashes everytime if the library is set to view "Film Rolls". I can't explain why, but it happens 100% of the time.

Performance is not what I would expect for my hardware suite but it's not bad if you view without Film Rolls. I have about 5000 photos in my library. Search function is great and gives an even better reason to add keywords and useful comments. Albums are a nice improvement. iDVD appears to be much better but I have not been awake long enough to really dig into it. I don't do much with the other apps at this point.

Hopefully, everything will remain stable and this information will be of use to AppleCare. Even better, I hope I am alone with these problems.

Thanks for all your help!!
Sam

 

[billyboy]

G5 Powerbooks? No thanks!

If my experience so far of G5 is anything to go by, I´m looking forward to not buying a G5 Powerbook! My Titanium PB is a beaut and absolutely rock solid and snappy since the RAM was changed out a couple of years ago.

Compare the old technology to this superb looking but fricking 1.8 G5 PowerMac sat under the desk. All the apps are solid and a little bit faster than Im used to - except the most important app of the lot - Finder!!!!!!! which is making so many basic actions like ejecting disks, double clicking on folders and re-starting a completely Windows like lottery and trek through molasses.

I will reserve judgement though till I have reinstalled 10.3.7 combo over the top of what Im putting up with now. I hope to god this trick works.

 

[Maxiseller]

-Confusion-

Hey, I'm just reading through what you guys are saying, and there seems to be a familiar theme : "Cant wait till next Tuesday" - is this the specific point that Apple updates all it's online stores or somthing? Me confused!!!

 

[Damien]

Hey, I'm just reading through what you guys are saying, and there seems to be a familiar theme : "Cant wait till next Tuesday" - is this the specific point that Apple updates all it's online stores or somthing? Me confused!!!

Apple always release new products on a tuesday. Because the rumors suggest that release is very close everyone expects them this tuesday, or the following tuesday

 

[Zaty]

Apple always release new products on a tuesday. Because the rumors suggest that release is very close everyone expects them this tuesday, or the following tuesday

Well, I'd have to say they usually update products on a Tuesday. However, they sometimes release updates on other days. E. g. the first revision of iBooks was released on 10/22/03 (a Wednesday) and the current revision of PBs war released on 04/19/04 (a Monday).

 

[aswitcher]

Well, I'd have to say they usually update products on a Tuesday. However, they sometimes release updates on other days. E. g. the first revision of iBooks was released on 10/22/03 (a Wednesday) and the current revision of PBs war released on 04/19/04 (a Monday).

A minor PB G4 speed bump seems right on now...anything else would have made the recent keynote...

 

[Lacero]

It's going to be at least 2-3 more weeks before we see another announcement. Apple still wants to advertise the mini and the shuffle on the home page.

 

[wdlove]

It's going to be at least 2-3 more weeks before we see another announcement. Apple still wants to advertise the mini and the shuffle on the home page.

Anything is possible with Apple. I imagine when they have the product ready, it will be released. There would still be room on the front page, just rotate is needed.