CS3 Updates can cause problems 
Over the past few months we have had issues with automatic updates for CS3 applications - in particular Illustrator. Once installed which can take some time, the CS3 suite will automatically download any new updates. These include of course the Illustrator update.

When updating illustrator the download hangs and as a result the programme no longer wants to load - quitting at startup, ok no problem I thought, I will just delete illustrator and re-load it, unfortunately this doesn’t work, it seems the the installer disk will only load all the CS3 applications at once, if you try to install just the illustrator programme it asks for a second disk which isn’t supplied!

So you end up having to delete all the apps via the uninstall on the CS3 disk and then re-install all the relevant applications, you can imagine how many times I have had to do this before realizing that the updater was at fault.

At the present time it is best to not update the applications once installed until Adobe decide to do something about this, but I have to say that most of the installations I have done only a few have suffered in this way the others seem to be fine, so It could be down to some settings or connections on the mac. This has also not been affected by the type of Mac either, Intel or PPC had the same effect.

If you know of any work around please email me or log in a leave a reply to this blog.  Pete (Pre-Press Manager)

At last the long awaited Leopard Mac OSX is here! and it looks good but how well does it work. Well it seems from the forums that the main issue is actually the installation and which option you choose to use. It would seem that people that have used the basic ‘upgrade’ option have fallen foul of the blue screen, once installed and re-started your Mac hangs on the blue startup screen, this then requires you to completely erase and re-install from scratch, bit of a disaster if you haven’t done a back up.

Undoubtedly the best option is going to be to ‘Archive and install’ keeping the ‘Network and preferences’ button ticked, this archives your old system folder and labels it ‘previous system folder’ and then creates a completely fresh system folder but copies back your old preferences and Network settings. This was the option I choose for my Mac Pro and it has worked well, with just a few application updates needed.
The overall look and feel of Leopard is clean and fast, but there are some slightly irritating issues. When doing a find file now in Leopard, you can’t choose individual networked disks, instead you can only choose ’shared disks’ which is basically any networked disks attached to (mounted) on your desktop, now for the average user this might be ok but what about corporate networks like Gemini Press where we can have up to 7 or 8 mounted network points to search, and I might also know which mounted sharepoint the file is likely to be on - but instead I have to search all of the attached volumes and this is obviously this is going to take longer, from my point of view its not a great improvement over Tiger.

Whilst we are on the subject of finding things maybe I should mention ‘Spotlight’ this was something I was greatly looking forward to seeing as I was lead to believe that in Leopard, Spotlight would be able to search mounted disks, but I was sadly disappointed we are left with the same spotlight that we had in Tiger.

Time machine is one new feature that looks promising, but again Apple dont seem to have gone far enough with it, Time Machine gives you the ability to have a constant back-up always there if you should accidently delete a file or loose one. This requires that you have a suitably sized external firewire drive attached to your mac night and day, why oh why they didn’t configure it to allow backups to be done onto a network disk is beyond me, with a big network of people it would have been so easy to set up a network back-up sharepoint  for everyone to backup to this then could have been backed up to tape for a fail safe implementation.

All that said there are some great improvements in Leopard, spaces for one is a great improvement. Spaces gives you multiple desktops that you can switch between with a click of a button or mouse, if you, like me always have lots of projects on the go and run out of desktop space with cluttered windows everywhere, then you’ll love spaces.
Apple mail looks and feels nice to use but there are problems with it I can see already, firstly sending attachment to windows machines doesn’t seem to work very well with recipients complaining that they cant access the attachment. The other little annoyance is that the ‘rules’ options don’t seem to work at all, I get a lot of spam these days like a lot of people and filtering them out is important but Mail just doesn’t seem to want to take any notice of the rules I have set.

Overall I am happy that all the applications still work as they did and with no major surprises and the system itself looks and feels professional there are some small irritations some of which will get ironed out by Apple over the coming months, but I do tend to feel that that Leopard has been somewhat over hyped.Pete (Pre-Press Manager)