mac nerdiness

[egypturnash]

I'm not sure if I should be finding Apple's new Time Machine feature mildly cute, or completely drool-worthy.

Because I'm not sure if it's just a really snazzy interface to a normal backup tool, with nightly backups, or if it's a really snazzy interface to nightly backups and automatic file versioning. I haven't read the reports on WWDC too closely, but I've seen both suggested.

If it's automatically versioning files, that will kick so much ass. More than once I've wished for a versioning file-system when a program (usually Flash) saves garbage over what used to be a good file. Doing it manually is a habit I can't really seem to train myself into, and I'm not quite geeky enough to start using Subversion for my working directories.

Even if it's "just" an integrated backup solution, it'll still be a pretty nice feature, what with being able to dig into various Apple formats for individual pieces of data, and automatically recognizing external drives and offering to use 'em. If it's really clever it'll be able to version stuff on your machine, then dump old versions to the external drive when it's plugged in.

Comments

[eriscontrol.livejournal.com]

Leopard looks pretty nice I guess, but I can't help but think to myself that Spaces is just a prettier face on the very same multiple desktops that I used in Linux a long time ago. It was never terribly useful to me, either.

Some of the new stuff looks kind of neat, though. I'd love to try out Core Animation!

[zeeth_kyrah]

It is.

I like multiple desktops, though, just because it allows me to separate certain tasks and windows structurally to fit my mental state as I deal with them. Background stuff in the background desktop, console works in the console desktop, file shuffling over here, main working area over there, bouncy apps bugging me on a different desktop so I can focus on what's in front of me here...

[eriscontrol.livejournal.com]

It's incredibly useful, in theory. But with a couple of years of experience using Linux, I'm afraid I never really found myself using it. I even had some desktops set up for myself, and I always just said "Fuck this" and ran GIMP right in front of everything else. :D

[porsupah.livejournal.com]

It appears to be automagic file versioning - save a file, and a copy of the old file gets squirreled away for safe keeping at the same time, with no need to wait for some special time of day/night for a monolithic backup to be performed. I'd imagine it'll have exclusion controls for things like large video files. Hopefully it'll be simple to control where the backups are stored - it'd obviously make sense for a setup with multiple hard drives to keep the current and old copies on different physical drives.

One thing I'm particularly looking forward to - it's probably not difficult to fudge it with Tiger - is having Spotlight work across a LAN. That'll be very handy for me, given I tend to have two or three 'books on the network - one search covering them all would be a very sensible progression.

Interesting that display resolution independence wasn't mentioned at all, given that seems like a Leopard certainty. I'm thinking SVG's going to be playing quite a large role behind the scenes in Leopard.

[sebkha.livejournal.com]

I've been very impressed with the way the SVG support is progressing in the Safari nightlies (http://nightly.webkit.org/). We're finally getting to the point that all the major browsers directly support vector graphics. It's just a bit awkward that IE does it via VML instead....

[dv-girl.livejournal.com]

Subversion and RCS aren't hard to use. Actually, you could go to your unix shell and make a cronjob that scanned certain directories, looked for changes agianst your repository, and added a backup as needed.

You mgiht even be able to be smarter than that and make an AppleScript that listens for file writes, checks the directory of the write, and makes a backup, but I'm pretty skeptical this would be easy, perhaps not even possible.

[mattlazycat.livejournal.com]

Can do even better than that with Subversion - if you set up the mod_dav_svn things in Apache, I believe you can map it as a folder in Finder and then every save becomes a commit. Obviously that makes it rather slower if it's not local (and, frankly, even if it is, because Finder's WebDAV and FTP support seem to attempt to do some weird things with XML), but you do get a versioned filesystem out of it. :)

I think the page is http://svnbook.red-bean.com/nightly/en/svn.webdav.autoversioning.html :)

Hi! I'm a paid Microsoft shill!

[kistaro]

Well, Windows Vista's got it implemented as automatic file versioning, even beyond deletes unless you explicitly tell it to shred your backups...

[http://users.livejournal.com/innerlife_/]

I think the real story here is how the terrifyingly vast and infinite void of space apparently lurks just behind the MacOS desktop. I hope the glass of peoples' monitors is strong enough to resist the vacuum.