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

[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....