The Anna upgrades to Lion report

So yeah! Decided after reading the ginormous Ars Technica writeup of Lion, and after reviewing my system this afternoon to see what PowerPC apps I still had (answer: nothing I couldn’t live without), I decided to go ahead and install Lion tonight. It was definitely the easiest OS upgrade I’ve ever done, I’ll give it that.

And in no particular order, here are things I’ve noticed about it:

One, once I rebooted into the new OS, things were quite a bit sluggish for several minutes–but there were two reasons for that. One, Spotlight went and reindexed everything on the drive. Two, I launched Mail as pretty much one of the first things, and that also needed to do significant updating of its database. So things were pretty pokey until both of these finished up their business.

Two, trying to launch iTunes got me an error message about not being able to open an iTunes Library file, but this was easily fixed by doing a quick check for software updates and downloading iTunes 10.4. iTunes then proceeded to load as per normal.

Three, goddamn, Mail is very… gray now. I’m not sure I approve of that, but we’ll see if it grows on me. Ditto for the new gray scrollbars.

Four, I quite like Launchpad, a new icon at the top of the Dock that’s basically a quick and dirty way to get at all of the apps on your system. If you’re an iPhone or iPad owner this interface will look very familiar, and it lets you swipe through it as well if you have a touchpad on your laptop like I do. You’re supposed to be able to organize the icons into folders like you do on iDevices, but I haven’t tried that yet. I like it less because of the similarity to iOS and more just because it means I can lose several less commonly used icons off my Dock.

Five, I discovered entirely by accident that you can set individual desktop backgrounds on the individual desktops available in the new Mission Control feature–which is cool. It’s a much nicer version of Spaces + Expose and even after playing with it for only a few moments, I’m grooving on it. And now I can go fwip-fwip-fwip-fwip through the Dashboard and all four of my desktops in a quick line, and I see LION! ELEPHANT! ISLAND! GREAT BIG SEA! It’s neat.

Six, if I have a Terminal window up and I’m connected to the MurkMUSH and I get paged, the icon starts bouncing at me and showing a little number on it indicating there’s something that needs my attention. Didn’t do that before.

Seven, hrmm, the Ars Technica review was talking about the dots on icons on the Dock that indicate which ones are launched going away. However, I still see mine!

Time Machine is now doing a massive 9.52GB backup–over our house LAN, no less, so this’ll be a while. But on the whole the upgrade appears to have gone swimmingly. I still need to verify that I can reboot into Win7 as needed, and that I can also launch Parallels to run that Win7 install as a VM, as before. (I did update Parallels since they deployed an update to talk to Lion, or so they took pains to inform users.)

Also still need to see if Safari’s new Reading List feature will seduce me off of Firefox, and what the new document handling model will be like once I get a hold of a version of a word processor that can talk to it. (Mac Word 2008 does not.)

But so far so good. And oh yes, speaking of Mac Word 2008–if you’re using Mac Office on your system, you WILL need 2008 or later if you want to upgrade to Lion, what with Rosetta support being removed. Be on the lookout as well if you’re at all reliant on Microsoft Query, which is part of Excel. That was one of my few PPC apps left on the system, and a bit of judicious Googling showed me that Microsoft has word out that they’re advising anyone reliant on Query to not upgrade yet until they fix that. They’re also reporting that Outlook is having trouble importing data out of Mail once Lion is installed, so people this might affect should keep an eye out for that.

AND! Since I am a Big Fish employee, it does behoove me to point out that older Big Fish releases, being PowerPC games, won’t run on Lion either. Be on the lookout for our powers that be to issue word on what Mac customers should do about those specific games. If there are particular games you don’t want to lose the ability to run yet, you might hold off a bit on the OS install.

More as I observe it! (And dammit, why don’t I have a Lion icon for posting to LJ and Dreamwidth?)

Mirrored from annathepiper.org.

And okay yeah fine more books

Barnes and Noble tempted me with its 15 percent off coupon temptations, and there was this Borders, like, y’know, right there and stuff, with a going out of business sale and 30 percent off of Nora Roberts titles and um…

Yeah, I know. Any excuse in a book hiatus, right? Right.

Anyway! Picked up in print:

• Midnight Bayou, Divine Evil, and Genuine Lies, all by Nora Roberts. Picked up since these are standalone romantic suspense titles of hers that I hadn’t read yet, and I tend to like those of hers better than her paranormals. (Special side note to kisanthe if she reads this: I know you didn’t like Midnight Bayou, but I wanted to check it out for curiosity’s sake, and hey, 30 percent off.)
• Johannes Cabal the Necromancer, by Jonathan L. Howard. Picked up because I had a coupon, and also because the blurb on the back described it as a “charmingly gothic, fiendishly funny Faustian tale about a brilliant scientist who makes a deal with the Devil, twice”. Noted it because Book 2 was on the new releases table at B&N, and it looked interesting, so I went back and found Book 1 to actually read first.

And picked up electronically, since it was a freebie that I saw mentioned in passing on Google+:

• The Midnight Eye, by William Meikle. Detective story, and hey, free book.

138 for the year.

Mirrored from annathepiper.org.

Book Log #9: Truthseeker, by C.E. Murphy

My rating: 4 of 5 stars

There are a few fundamental constants about my reading tastes. One of those is that any book with a decent treatment of the Sidhe is guaranteed to appeal to me. The other is that any book by C.E. Murphy is guaranteed to do the same. Combine these, and the result is a tasty little urban fantasy that pretty much has “read this, Anna” written all over it.

Lara Jansen has a strange gift: she can always, always tell when someone is lying. Compared to many high-powered, badassed urban fantasy heroines this days, this may not seem like much–and neither does Lara’s quiet profession of tailor, when you put her up against all the bounty hunters and detectives and assassins and whatnot that populate the genre. But her ability proves to be of critical importance when the Seelie prince Dafydd seeks her help in clearing him of a charge of murder.

And, unsurprisingly given that this is in fact a C.E. Murphy novel with the Sidhe in it, I enjoyed the hell out of this. It’s not a hundred percent perfect; the relationship between Lara and Dafydd started closing in on True Love a bit fast for my tastes, for example. That however is a fairly small quibble against all the things I liked about the story.

One, the heroine is indeed refreshingly not a high-powered badass at combat, either magical or physical. Her truthseeking gift has interesting character connotations for her; I liked that it made her shy away from reading fiction because it parses as “false” to her (even though, as a voracious reader, I have a hard time understanding people who don’t like to read for pleasure!), and I liked even more that it let her ramp up very quickly to accepting the truth of the existence of the Sidhe, thereby neatly sidestepping the whole traditional OMG MAGIC IS REAL?! reaction that also inundates the genre.

Two, I also like Dafydd as a hero, and I find it fun that his cover identify in the human world when the story starts is that of a TV weatherman. His relationship with the brother he’s accused of murdering is well drawn, as are his reactions as the consequences of his enlisting Lara’s aid start mounting.

To wit, three, there are indeed good strong consequences to Lara’s discovering Faerie. I particularly liked that the old-school difference in flow of time between Faerie and the human realm is used here, to very good effect and with distinct consequences for the major characters.

Given that this is a duology, the story is not resolved as of the end of this book, so be prepared for that if you go in. But fortunately, Book 2 is out later this year! And I will, of course, be reading it. For this one, four stars.

Mirrored from annathepiper.org.

Book Log #10: The Young Widow, by Cassandra Chan

My rating: 3 of 5 stars

I saw Cassandra Chan’s Bethancourt-Gibbons mysteries recommended on LJ and decided to check them out–and wound up being very glad I did. The style of the series is very akin to Dorothy Sayers, enough that unless you’re paying attention it’s easy to mistake these books for period mysteries; they aren’t. That it takes a bit to realize this in Book 1, even with such obvious technological markers as cell phones and the Internet, is one of the reasons the series takes a bit to get its feet under it. But hang in there, because there’s a lot to like here.

The foundation of the series is the friendship between Phillip Bethancourt, a son of British nobility who’s dabbling in assisting police investigations, and the sergeant Jack Gibbons. Bethancourt gets away with participating in Gibbons’ investigations because his blue-blooded father has expressed strong interest in his son’s being able to productively occupy himself, and because he has an aptitude for it. For his own part, Gibbons is the more prosaic, earnest foil to Bethancourt’s elegance. The two men have an excellent chemistry to their friendship, even in this first book; I found myself a bit regretful that it’s already in full swing when the story starts, because it would have been great fun to see how these two characters meet and establish their relationship.

The case in The Young Widow gives them plenty to work with, at any rate. Wealthy Geoffrey Berowne has been poisoned, and the prime suspect, his young third wife Annette, is disturbingly alluring to Gibbons. The two friends uncover the expected pile of dark family secrets in their investigation, but what really drives this plot is the chemistry between Gibbons and Annette. It’s important character development for Gibbons that affects him throughout the succeeding books.

Three stars for a decent start to a series.

Mirrored from annathepiper.org.