Recently, one of the teachers of one of those classes made the charge that our approach to web programming is old and outmoded. Whether this is true or not is not really the issue. I’ve been looking for new ways to think about the systems end of that workflow because, well, that’s my job, and because it’s an inherently interesting challenge to me. How can we make our web development environment more user-friendly?

One general suggestion has been to make the experience more “OS-like.” And one step in this direction is to have the web server mount on the Desktop, allowing the developer to work on her site as if it were local. That is, rather than firing up one of the popular SFTP clients and transferring files back and forth from the local machine to the server, the developer could mount her site — or actually, the share her site lives on — directly on the local filesystem. I have two options here: MacFUSE and NFS. I’m testing both currently. So far I’ve had a couple minor hiccups with MacFUSE’s sshfs.app, but it looks to be a fairly smart and user-friendly implementation that web developers here might benefit from. And the NFS approach would work well also, though only from inside the network.

I’m curious what other Lab Admins are doing with regards to web development in their environments. How have you facilitated ease-of-use for a process that’s inherently complicated? Or have you? Also, I’m curious if anyone is using MacFUSE — specifically the sshfs component — and what experiences you might have had with it, either positive or negative.

If any of you fine readers have any thoughts on this I would really love to hear them. I’ve been querying students, staff and faculty for ideas, but haven’t come up with much. Maybe things here are perfect, but somehow I doubt it. And, as always, I really just want to make things better.

Please sound off in the comments if you’re so inclined.

/System/Library/CoreServices/RemoteManagement/ARDAgent.app/Contents/Support

/usr/sbin

Really now. Was that so hard?

Oh yeah, and I say, “OS Ecks” as well.

Deal with it.

There’s been almost as much bitching about two other new visual changes in Leopard. The first is the menubar, which is now translucent. I’m ambivalent about this one. On the one hand, I understand that, from a usability standpoint, it’s a bad idea. It’s now slightly harder to read a primary interface element under certain conditions, those conditions being, in particular, the use of busy Desktop pictures and/or patterns. The default Desktop picture for Leopard, in fact, is an image of outer space whose star field can directly compete for visual attention with text in the menubar. My argument to this, however, is that busy, distracting, high-contrast Desktop pictures are a far greater hindrance to usability than slightly-harder-to-read menubar text, and if you’re really bothered by the menubar changes, you should probably switch to a nice, solid or muted Desktop background and remove all distractions from your life once and for all. That’s what I do and, so, while the I understand that translucent menubar is not the best idea for usability’s sake, it really just doesn’t bother me in the least. Actually, I kind of like the muted, lower-contrast lack of in-your-face-ness of the new menubar.

The other big gripe has been about pulldown menu transparency. No. Seriously. David Pogue of the New York frickin’ Times for Pete’s sake:

The most serious misstep in Leopard is its new see-through menus. When the menu commands — Save As, Page Preview, whatever — are superimposed on the text of whatever document is behind them, they’re much harder to read. Often, Apple’s snazzy graphics are justifiable because they make the Mac more fun to use. In this case, though, nothing is gained, and much is lost.

This one I don’t get. Pulldown menus have been transparent in Mac OS X for a long time. (Oh, wait. I mean forever!) The difference between how Tiger deals with them and how Leopard does is extremely subtle.

Tiger Pulldown Transparency: Pinstripes! Ew!
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And Leopard does away with the pinstripes, which to my mind is a huge usability gain. At worst we break even here.

Leopard Pulldown Transparency: A “Serious Misstep.” Really?
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I wonder sometimes if people are forgetting that pulldowns in Tiger were transparent. You’d think, by the level of general annoyance with this change, that they had. Honestly, people. It’s really not that bad. I’m totally on board with the Dock thing (though a lot of people don’t mind that even). But when it comes to the new transparencies, they just don’t bother me much at all. I hardly even notice.

UPDATE:
Oddly, Firefox’s group bookmark pulldowns exhibit the old-style, non-blurred menu transparency, minus the pinstripes of course. I can’t find another application that does this. Weird.

Firefox’s Group Bookmark Pulldown: Old Skool
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I have had one little annoyance, however, and it deals with the fact that, as John Gruber puts it:

Indeed. Let’s take an example: I have my browser bound to and open in Space One. I also have a Finder window open in Space Four, and the Finder is not bound to any particular Space. Currently, I am viewing my browser, and then I command-tab to the Finder. The behavior is to switch me to the Space with the open Finder window, Space Four. Cool so far. But what if I have a second Finder window open in Space One in addition to the one in Space Four. Ideally I’d like a way to switch, via the command-tab Application Switcher, either to the Finder window in Space One (the one with my browser window) or the one in Space Four (the one with the lone Finder window). Fortunately, such a thing is possible through the magic of click-and-hold.

So, if I’m in Space One and the browser is in front, and I want to switch to the Finder window in Space Four, I click command-tab, then hold the command button for a second. This takes me to the Finder in Space Four. But, if I’m in the browser in Space One and I want to switch to the Finder window in the current Space, I command-tab very rapidly and I switch to the Space One Finder window. Not bad.

Now what happens if we add a Finder window to Space Two? Well, things start to get a bit weird. A rapid command-click will still take you to the Finder window in your current Space. A click-and-hold command-tab will alternately take you to one of the other Finder windows in the other Spaces. That is, the first slow command-tab will take you to the Finder window in Space Two. Switch back to Space One and slow-command-tab again and you go to Space Four again.

Confusing? You bet it is. But at least there appears to be some thought going on as to how to manage applications with windows in multiple Spaces. Hopefully this gets refined a bit as time goes on. For now, I’ll take it.

Tiger’s Menu Text: Black, White and Gray
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I’m not sure the reason for the change — perhaps to add a warmth and a softness to the text.

Leopard’s Menu Text: Now in Full Color
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It’s a subtle difference, almost imperceptible. And I’m curious what the thinking was behind this change. If anyone has any clues, I’d love to hear about them in the comments.

UPDATE:
John Gruber has the answer over at Daring Fireball, actually. Turns out this is nothing new and not a difference between Leopard and Tiger. What you’re seeing here, generally, is the difference between standard and sub-pixel anti-aliasing, two techniques for anti-aliasing text. What you’re seeing, specific to my two computers, is the difference between the “Standard” and “Light” Font smoothing style settings in the Appearance Preferences. “Standard,” as you might guess, uses standard anti-aliasing — i.e. shades of gray — to anti-alias text, whereas any of the other settings use sub-pixel anti-aliasing, which uses color to achieve the same effect. Turns out I’ve always preferred standard, even on LCDs. Weird.

More details here.

Since dscl can’t do everything there are some new, and greatly enhanced tools to help you:

• dsenableroot – just like it sounds. This has been on OS X for a while now, but it may be more useful now that NetInfo Manager is gone.
• dseditgroup – also present in 10.4, but will get more usage now. Good for manipulating group memberships.
• dscacheutil – brand new in Leopard. This tools allows you to peek into the Directory Service cache and flush it if necessary. Semi-analogous to lookupd -d.
• dserr – a curious tool. Lives only to lookup DS error codes for you and return the text equivalent of the error. I half expected to find a quick shell script here just grepping the man page for DirectoryService.
• dsmemberutil – now this is a command you can sink your teeth into! Allows you to check group membership and do some debugging on what groups the system thinks a user is in.

That’s about as good a description as I’ve seen on the topic in a nutshell. Suffice to say, this is a day we’ve all been waiting for, or at least expecting. That it’s come with such little fanfare is probably, in retrospect, not all that surprising. It just took me off guard a little.

In the end I think this will basically be a good thing. So far, things once done with NetInfo look at least a bit easier to do with the dscl and GUI equivalents. So, cool. NetInfo has finally been replaced. Of course it’s been replaced with something else proprietary and weird, but it looks like it’s at least a bit easier to manage. But, whatever.

So long NetInfo, we hardly knew ye!

Accounts Preferences: User Types
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Of note is the fact that Leopard, unlike Tiger, does not create a group specific to the user. That is, in Tiger, when the user “systemsboy” was created, a group called “systemsboy” that systemsboy was a member of was automatically created. Apple has done away with this in Leopard for some reason.

Accounts Preferences: Adding Users to a Group
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If you want to add a user to one of your newly created groups, simply select the group and then add the user by checking his name. Multiple users can, of course, be added to a group.

Also of note, control-clicking the user’s or group’s account and selecting “Advanced Options…” from the pop-up will reveal additional account options formerly configurable only from within the now-defunct NetInfo Manager.

Accounts Preferences: Advanced Options
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I’d say this is mostly nice, or at least certainly a general improvement over NetInfo. I could talk a client through this over the phone. NetInfo, not so much. I do think this is a clumsy interface for dealing with large batches of users, but maybe such things are best left to the Workgroup Managers of the world.

In any case, now you know. And knowing is half the battle.

Yo Joe!

Right off the bat I want to point you to the best and most thorough review of Leopard. Every time a new cat is born, John Siracusa not only reviews many of the new features, but goes deep into the depths of the OS to tell us geeks what’s really changed and what it means for the future of the platform. It should be required reading for anyone seriously interested in Mac OS X changes.

Also, I want to point you to Apple’s infamous list of new features. It’s pretty comprehensive for the surface features, and even touches on some of the things I’ll deal with here. And speaking of, my particular perspective on Leopard will be less about productivity features (though there will be some of that, to be sure) and more about Leopard from an administration and maintenance standpoint. So, let’s get started!

Time Machine
The most highly touted new feature in Leopard — and rightly so — is Time Machine, which automatically makes backups of your data to any external hard drive (or even, I’m told, partition). The whole idea behind Time Machine is that it’s so simple, and requires so little thought, that anyone can — and, more importantly, will — use it. It’s backups for the masses. And while Time Machine is really made for the end-user, the fact that such a beast now exists as part of the OS is a huge boon to SysAdmins.

Time Machine: Drop-Dead Simple
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I maintain a backup system for all staff members in my department. Anyone who’s ever had to deal with such a system knows what a pain it is to implement and maintain. In the old days, we used to back up to tape using Retrospect. But as data storage became increasingly large, and tape increasingly expensive, the system grew unwieldy. An unwieldy system, as you surely know, is not reliable. A few years ago (in fact, with the introduction of Mac OS X, come to think of it) we moved to the free, scriptable, and very reliable rsync (we use the RsyncX version). This allows us to back up over the network to a large RAID drive. But still, the scripts require occasional maintenance, staff must be sure to leave their computers on. There are numerous points of failure. And most inconvenient of all, if a staff member does lose data, they have to come to me to retrieve it, which is inconvenient for both them and me.

Time Machine removes that last step from the equation. Time Machine puts the end-user in control, not just of their current data, but of their backups as well. Now, if a staff member accidentally throws away a file, or makes changes they don’t like to a document, or whatever, they simply activate Time Machine and roll back. No freak-outs. No calls to the SysAdmin. No worries. Time Machine is frickin’ beautiful.

I will continue to make backups to the RAID with rsync for the foreseeable future. It doesn’t hurt to have an extra backup, and, Hell, the system’s already in place. But I’ve also bought all staff a firewire drive specifically for Time Machine as well.

Time Machine: Limited Options
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One thing to note about Time Machine: It is geared towards the idea of backing up everything. Like in Spotlight, you can add exclusions to Time Machine, but the default is to back up all your data. A fellow SysAdmin complained that he needed the ability to select what would be backed up, not what wouldn’t, if this were to be useful in a production environment. Yes, my friend, but this is not made for production. It’s made for people. So the default is, back up everything. What could be simpler?

The Finder
I won’t spend too much time on the Finder. In a nutshell, I’m mostly happy, though I’m a bit peeved that the first thing I felt the need to do was hack that ugly-ass Dock.

The Dock: Ugly-Ass
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Seriously. Ouch. I can see liking it on first glance. I mean it is shiny. I know people like shiny. But damn is it intrusive, and not the least bit of an increase in functionality. Yikes! What were they thinking?

The Dock: Now That’s Purdy
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There are a few awesome new touches in the Finder, though. Quick Look is probably my favorite. Hitting the spacebar to view a preview of a document is a great productivity boon. Students in the art department where I work will love it for presentations as well. It’s beautiful, useful and extremely well-implemented. I only wish it were more key-command-able. (Or maybe we’ll discover that it is.)

The Finder: Quick Look
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Speaking of key-commands, the Desktop now has a presence and key-command in the “Go” menu (it’s command-shift-d). Sweet!

Go Menu: Go Desktop!
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Also, a long-standing (read: never solved) problem with Tiger’s inspector, wherein the inspector would not properly update file ownerships, has been fixed.

I also rather like the look of the new Finder. I’m pleased as punch that there’s finally a window standard, and that it’s not brushed metal. While I’d probably prefer a lighter shade of gray, and apps in the background to be darker rather than switching to a lighter shade (dark recedes; light comes forward, at least that’s what they always told us in art school), the current iteration is really quite nice. The Sidebar is also, in my opinion, more efficient than it once was. And Cover Flow in the Finder might even prove useful at some point.

Other nice touches:

• Clicking on a file name only highlights the file’s name, not its extension, thus making file renaming a lot quicker and easier.
  
• Drop shadows are larger and darker and generally more dramatic, making windows easier to discern.
• Drop shadows are also now included in screen captures of individual windows.
• File sharing, which is now possible on a per-folder basis (hooray!), can be activated and configured right from the Inspector.

One oddity: the Finder seems to be a bit more fascistic about what you can and can’t do with your data. In fact, it disallows trashing key folders in your home account. I was unable to trash, or even rename my Library folder from the Finder. This might be great for the home user. But it could slightly complicate troubleshooting from an admin standpoint. Not a big deal, but I’m not crazy about the trend towards over-management of user data. It’s fine for Time Machine. Not so sure about the Finder.

Finder: Data Nazis?
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Still, that’s a lot of good and very little bad. Overall, the Finder’s a big win for me.

Disk Utility
Probably the best thing about Leopard is that there is so much good stuff for SysAdmins. Each OS upgrade has brought us a couple goodies, but Leopard is chock full of them, and the goodies are so… Uh… Good…

First off, Leopard now handles broken disks more gracefully. Attach a damaged external firewire drive, for instance, and if it’s mountable, Leopard will mount it and allow you to copy any data that might be salvageable. This actually happened to me in the beta days, and Leopard provided successful, albeit partial, disk recovery where Tiger simply refused to even mount the damaged drive. That’s a pretty sweet improvement that no one but SysAdmins are likely to see. Kudos to Apple’s Disk Utility team for that one!

Disk Utility: Plays Well with Broken Disks
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Another huge advancement in Disk Utility is the ability to re-partition a drive without wiping it, within limits, of course. Actually, it might be more accurate to say that Disk Utility allows partitioning — or splitting — of partitions. Let’s say you have two partitions. But you want to turn that into three. In Tiger and before you had to erase the entire drive and repartition. In Leopard, you can cut one of your two partitions in half (or quarters, or whatever). Leopard will even indicate the free portion of the disk and cut it at the right point. It’s pretty damn cool, and something I’ve been wanting for a long time. For forever, really. I’ve already used it in the beta, and it seems to work great. Cool!

Disk Utility: Splitting Partitions
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The one caveat to this dynamic partitioning is that the disk must be formatted using the GUID partition map, which Apple has adopted for the move to Intel. It’s GUID that makes all this possible. The old style Apple partition map won’t allow non-destructive partitioning.

Disk Utility: GUID is the Wave of the Future
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The final touch in Disk Utility — and actually, this appears to be true through much of the new OS — is that the wording of dialog boxes and information panels has been made much clearer. This should do a lot to make scary disk operations a bit less scary.

Disk Utility: Clearer Language
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Directory Utility
The application formerly known as Directory Access gets some love in Leopard too. Now called Directory Utility, the application does more with less. It’s simple, four-tab interface still allows the configuration of services, but there’s just a lot less to configure. The only services left now are Active Directory, BSD Flat File and NIS, LDAPv3, and Local. Gone are the services that were never really configurable in the first place, save for turning them on and off.

Directory Utility: Do More with Less
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But Directory Utility allows for the configuration of Directory Servers now in a separate panel, and this is where you’ll most likely set up your Open Directory server (though the option still exists in the list of services as it always did). Setup is super simple: check the type, and enter the name. That’s it!

Directory Utility now also has a panel for configuring NFS mounts. This is also really easy to use. Simply type the path to your NFS server, and type in the mount point. Directory Utility will verify that the server is functioning and then, when you hit apply, it will mount it. Neat-O!

NetInfo (RIP)
NFS mounts were once handled in an obscure admin utility called NetInfo Manager. NetInfo Manager is now dead. Leopard has moved all of its arcane functionality into other more GUI-friendly apps. Directory Utility handles NFS mounts. The Finder and Sharing Prefs handle per-folder file sharing (which was once the domain of a little app called SharePoints, which configured properties in NetInfo). And home account location can now be configured by using the Accounts Preference Pane and control-clicking the account in question, then choosing “Advanced” and selecting the appropriate options. It’s true, I can’t think of too many more reasons to go to NetInfo Manager.

But wait… How do I activate root?

AutoFS
autofs is the new automounter daemon in Leopard, and boy is it cool. I’ve watched with envy for years as my Linux counterparts dynamically mounted NFS shares — or folders within NFS shares — as they get called by the OS. I realize that autofs does a great deal of good for hangs caused by network dependencies, but what I’m most excited about is the dynamic nature of autofs. Prior to Leopard we used automount, which I simply could never coax into doing what autofs does out of the box. With automount, we basically just hard-mounted our NFS server at /home at every boot. With autofs, however, we can specify a wildcard in our map file. What that allows us to do is to never keep the entire NFS server mounted, ever, ever. Instead, when the needed share is requested, autofs mounts the portion of it that was requested.

Perhaps an example is in order. Currently, our NFS server gets mounted in its entirety at /home on every client in the lab. This happens using an arcane Startup Item that contains a truly Byzantine script that I made. It’s horrible. Not only does it require this crazy-ass script, it only happens at boot or when automount is specifically restarted. It also requires (for reasons I can’t recall) a series of symlinks to land in the /home folder properly. And, worst of all, it keeps the entire home account server mounted over the network on every client all the time. Yuck!

By contrast, autofs requires no such Startup Item. You simply edit one tiny text file (/etc/auto_home, if you’re interested) and you’re done. Not only are you done, though, but the entire process is now dynamic. No reboot required. In fact nothing happens. The home account server doesn’t mount… Until it’s called! That’s right. No home account server is mounted until joe_user comes and logs in. When that happens, autofs springs to life and mounts the user’s home account. And here’s the other thing: it only mounts the user’s home account, not every folder on the share. This is a huge savings in terms of network overhead. It’s also much easier for me to maintain and manage. For me, a working autofs is a huge, huge deal, and it’s the thing I’m most pleased about. SysAdmins doing any kind of NFS home account mounting will totally understand where I’m coming from here, I’m sure. This is fantastic. My job just got easier, and my network and Mac systems just got a helluva lot more efficient. Awesome!

Other Notables
There’s a whole other list of new features that should make SysAdmins and even regular folk pretty happy. Here are my faves, in no particular order:

• Preferences and applications (i.e. Sharing, etc.) that can be applied to specific users now list network users and groups.
  
• Login, remote login (SSH), and file sharing are all now configurable on a per-user/group basis.
  
• The firewall is now configurable on a per-application basis.
• There is now a built-in guest account that gets deleted at logout.
• Software Update now logs you out for certain updates where your presence might cause problems.
  
• Software Update now remembers what it’s downloaded and will use that if you postpone an update, rather than having to re-download it.
• iCal event entry doesn’t suck as bad now, and is reminiscent of Google’s method of contextual calendar entry.
• Dictionary now includes Wikipedia and can easily toggle the three views (dictionary, thesaurus and encyclopedia) or view them all at the same time.
• Spotlight works well now, like it always should have.
• Spaces might actually be useful as well!
• Screen Sharing! For free! Cool!

So, that pretty much covers my initial impressions of Leopard. We’ll be holding off on installing it in the lab until I can run the majority of major applications (currently, AfterEffects is listed as not working, and that’s a deal breaker). Until then, I will run it on my test machine.

And happily. Leopard has been extremely stable and reliable so far, and I must admit I really rather like it. I was never a big fan of Tiger, actually. I found everything “cool” about it to be buggy or annoying. Spotlight sucked, Dashboard was stupid, and there were all manner of problems, and few features to recommend it over Panther, at least not from a SysAdmin standpoint. Leopard, on the other hand, is completely the opposite. There are tons of new, useful features for both users and admins alike. So far, I’m very happy with this release.

Nice job, Apple people!