Before Christmas, I had had enough with Mac OS X 10.7 Lion. Despite my Late-2008 Aluminum MacBook having 8 GB of RAM and a speedy hard drive, Lion would consistently drag to a slow crawl. Generally, the RAM hog was the new Safari, but some system processes were also taking hundreds of MBs of RAM. Of course, when my Free RAM disappeared, the system would become sluggish. I thought that all of this was very odd, not just in the memory usage by the OS, but also in Safari, since I don’t run with Flash or any extensions enabled.

So, I decided to go back to basics. I made a bootable 16 GB USB drive with two partitions: one for Mac OS X 10.5 Leopard and one for my MacBook’s application restore DVD. I made each partition 8 GB, and I created the first partition with a GUID partition table so that it would boot on the Mac. I then restored the Leopard and applications DVDs that came with my MacBook to each partition respectively. Finally, I booted from the USB drive, formatted my internal hard drive, and reinstalled Leopard, Apple’s apps, and other apps that I regularly use (e.g., Microsoft Office 2011).

As they say, Leopard was built for speed, Snow Leopard for security, and Lion for Apple’s increasingly firm grasp on the desktop computing experience. I might not have access to the Mac App Store, iCloud, or the latest version of Safari, but I do have a snappy computer again that does everything that I need it to do. I might not expect any future security updates, but I can be smart about my online computer use, run ClamAV in the background, keep installed apps to a minimum, and patch any holes in the software that I do run.

I suppose there is a point where Apple’s regular release cycle of faster operating system experiences for older hardware had to end. I also suppose that we have passed that point with the transition from Leopard to Snow Leopard to Lion. Apple has big plans for Lion and its increasingly iOS-like user-experience. As they layer those things that work well on touch-devices like the iPhone and iPad on the non-touch Macs, it begins to weigh down what was an otherwise agile operating system. This trend increasingly makes me wonder if convergence is such a good idea. I am growing more dubious of this trend as time goes by. Additionally, I am growing increasingly concerned about the hardware and software development cycle. Getting people to buy more things certainly drives innovation through sales, but I see a lot of good things in older technology like Leopard. Also, what is the effect on the environment by our continuing desire to own new computer technology while discarding the old?

I am investigating hardware and software of a long bygone era in old PCs. Certainly motivated by nostalgic feelings, I want to uncover in the archaeology of computing things that used to work that we have gotten away from. What works and could still work today despite being 10, 15, 20 years old? What can we learn from old software? What can we continue to enjoy from old software? I will write on this more in the near future.

I have been playing around with Automator, the workflow automation software for Mac OS X. Apple has a good place to begin with learning how to use it here. Also, MacStories compiled a list of Automator actions and resources here.

Once I have something working, I will share the results here.

One of the security innovations of iOS is sandboxing. To sandbox a program means to run a program within a secure space that limits its access to files on the systems, to other processes running, and to hardware. Essentially, the program is walled off from everything else in the running OS. This is good for security, because a single compromised app cannot bring down the rest of the OS or delete/damage files in the sandboxes of other programs or subvert the OS by direct access to the system hardware.

There are two reasons why sandboxing programs on Mac OS X bothers me:

1) Apple is enforcing these changes through its Mac App Store. Developers need Apple’s App Store more than Apple needs the developers. Apple realizes that a centralized marketplace with its ease of use will encourage users to buy and install programs from the App Store more readily than through traditional boxed software or shareware. It is only another step after making developers build their software to be sandboxed to enforce an install new programs only through the Mac App Store.

2) If all programs eventually must be sandboxed to run on Mac OS X, then the ability to multitask in several programs drawing on a shared set of files will be a pain. Perhaps through iCloud or other cloud services, it will be possible to access files across apps, but I like to have my files stored locally in one place that I can easily locate and backup on my own. This kind of new app behavior will disrupt my workflow to the point that I would have to reinvent the workflow wheel.

We do not yet know if Apple will enforce sandboxing for any application installed on Mac OS X including those not obtained through the Mac App Store, but we do know that Mac App Store developers have until March 1, 2012 to implement sandboxing and submit their apps for approval for additional privileges [read more here on TUAW]. There are already over 500 comments on Slashdot regarding this news here.

Run Software Update from the Apple Menu to upgrade your Lion install.

I searched online to see if anyone else is having similar issues. I found a thread started by scryedz on the Apple Support Communities, who began the discussion by writing:

Hi everyone! Safari become very lag when I open a new tab or pages, and when I checked Activity Monitor, the one that made my mac lag is Safari Web Content, it can eats 80-90% of CPU.However, it only happened if I open new tab/pages. I never experienced lag with other browser such as Firefox before. Anyone ever experienced this? Any suggestion or solution will be appreciated. Thanks.

via Safari Web Content high CPU usage: Apple Support Communities.

Following the thread, it sounds like others are experiencing Safari’s resource hogging and system sluggishness. Some suggestions to fix the problem include deleting Safari’s cache files manually (~User/Library/Cache/com.Apple.Safari) and uninstalling all Safari Extensions.

Hopefully, Apple will address this problem more assertively with a software update to Safari.

Y and I got back from our trip to Europe earlier this week. We traveled to Poland for the annual Science Fiction Research Association conference, which was held in Lublin this year. We also traveled to Switzerland and France to visit friends and to vacation. We had a very good time abroad, and I will write about our experiences, soon.

Since we returned to Kent, we have been trying to get caught up on many things. Cleaning house. Applying for travel grants. Playing with Miao.

Another thing that I was looking forward to was powering up my MacBook for the first time in three weeks. We brought our iPhones and iPads to Europe, but we left our proper computers at home. Additionally, I knew that Apple was about to release Mac OS X 10.7 Lion this week. Unfortunately, I had a terrific migraine on Wednesday, the release day, so I had to wait until the evening to download my copy of Lion. After I did, I followed these instructions and I copied Lion to a flash drive so that I could perform a clean install on my MacBook instead of merely upgrading my existing Snow Leopard installation.

The reason that I chose to do this is that I wanted to experience Lion “out of the box” even though no box was involved. I wanted to see what Lion was and how it worked without any of my preset preferences or file structures. I haven’t had much time to fully explore Lion, but I can say that the scrolling behavior is the hardest thing for me to master despite my regular use of an iPad. Lion rolls much of iOS’s touch behavior into the user interface, which I believe is a good thing. However, the touch behavior on computer mice have replicated mechanical processes of rolling rather than touch movement as we have in Apple’s iOS-based products. It is interesting that I keep getting caught by this behavior, but I am sure that eventually my brain will rewire itself to accommodate this new across-the-board behavior in Apple’s UI.

If you are still running Mac OS X 10.5 Leopard, Apple also released a new security update that is available here.

iCloud is probably the biggest announcement: 5GB of free storage in the cloud (Apps, eBooks, purchased music, and Photos are free). If this service really works as well as promised, you will be able to seamlessly access your content across any Apple device (iPhone, iPad, or Mac). More information is available here.

There was no iPhone 5 announcement, but Apple delivered the goods with iOS 5–the next iteration of the iOS platform. The big features include setting up an i-device without needing to own/use a computer and wireless syncing of your i-device data if you do use it with a computer. There will be new camera, gesture, and notification technologies built-in, too. Go here for a rundown of the new features.

Mac OS X 10.7 Lion was given a July 2011 launch date. Perhaps more interesting than the new technologies wrapped into the latest version of Mac OS X is the fact that it will be available for immediate download through the Mac App Store. This means you can purchase and download it over the Internet without needing to buy bits packaged in a cardboard box from the corner store (Larry Ellison’s biggest gripe about software distribution). TUAW, however, offers a guide here on how to burn a bootable Lion install disc after you purchase the installer from Apple.

Other tidbits: iTunes is now available as “iTunes in the Cloud beta” version 10.3 here. Also, iBookstore is now part of iTunes (finally!).

After you install the update, consider protecting yourself with some advice that I offered in a previous post.

Stay safe in cyberspace!