Chatterwocky

I upgraded my MacBook Pro to Leopard a week or so ago, and to be honest except for some UI tweaks and improved search results I hadn’t really noticed much different.

Today’s my last day in the office before leaving to the States, and so of course the backlight on the MBP failed on me. Luckily, we had a loaner that I could borrow for the trip, though I was a bit bummed about not having access to all my apps etc.

As I was copying over some absolutely must-have data from old laptop to new, I noticed that the loaner had a faster processor and twice as much RAM as mine. I asked the sysadmin if I could just trade, and he said sure.

So I embarked on a test of one of Leopard’s shiniest features, Time Machine. As far as backup apps go, it doesn’t seem particularly different than any of the other apps I’ve used, except that it senses external drives and proactively asks you if you’d like to use it as a backup drive, which if you respond to in the affirmative, will automatically run backups periodically in the background. Given that I’ve already lost my home MacMini to two hard drive failures, I set Time Machine up on it immediately after upgrade to Leopard.

So anyway, my goal was to completely transfer the contents of the old MBP to the new one (using an external monitor on the old one so I could see what I was doing). I ran a manual backup from the old one, which took about 3 hours to a SATA drive for about 100gb. I then ran restore from the Leopard installation disk utilities, and it ran for about 2 hours.

Results = completely almost shockingly successful. All applications, preferences, iTunes libraries, etc. were copied seamlessly. My computer booted up and looked exactly like the old one. Quicksilver still knew my shortcuts, FireFox still knew my history, Adobe CS3 ran fine and remembered my recent docs, everything. The iPhone even synced fine. I’m pretty damn impressed.

Skitch has very quickly become an invaluable tool here at Atlassian, we use it daily to illustrate failures in visual design or really anytime we need a screen capture that others can view. For those not in the know, Skitch is a tool that allows you to quickly take a screenshot of anything, add the insults, arrows, or FAIL(s) which most aptly illustrate your point, and load it to a web url that anybody can access (if you give them the URL).

The developers here have taken Skitch to the next level, with the creation of the Skitchslap:

(v) skitchslap: the act of denigrating something by annotating a screenshot or image of it, using skitch. “Man, my CSS didn’t work in IE7 - got majorly skitchslapped for it”.

For a better understanding of what this means (including examples), you’ll have to read Nick’s hilarious post.