No man is an island

After my DeveloperTools installation from the Leopard setup DVD i had a look around at the tools.

First let me say that the new tools are all great. Especially Instruments is quite useful. Being a Python guy i remembered something about a new version of PyObjC coming bundled with the DeveloperTools. In fact it should be version 2.0. So i created a new python-project in XCode and it seemed to work fine - but i was using the old PyObC version i had installed before on my Python 2.4. I tweaked a few paths back then to get rid of the 2.3 version of python which was delivered with Tiger. I somehow expected 2.5 with PyObjC 2.0 to be installed and setup by the DeveloperTool’s installation.

In fact it’s all there in all it’s greatness. First make sure you didn’t override some paths/symlinks or whatever. Starting python from the console should start the Version 2.5.1. It’s home is in /System/Library/Frameworks/Python.framework/Versions/2.5/ and it comes with a bunch of packages

• PyRSS2Gen - 1.0.0
• Twisted Xish - 0.4.0
• Twisted - 2.4.0
• altgraph - 0.6.8.dev
• bdist-mpkg - 0.4.3.dev
• bonjour-py - 0.2
• modulegraph - 0.7.2.dev
• numpy - 1.0.1
• py2app - 0.4.1.dev
• pyOpenSSL - 0.6
• pyobjc-core - 2.0
• pyobjc-framework-AddressBook - 2.0
• pyobjc-framework-AppleScriptKit - 2.0
• pyobjc-framework-Automator - 2.0
• pyobjc-framework-CalendarStore - 2.0
• pyobjc-framework-Cocoa - 2.0
• pyobjc-framework-Collaboration - 2.0
• pyobjc-framework-CoreData - 2.0
• pyobjc-framework-CoreText - 2.0
• pyobjc-framework-DictionaryServices - 2.0
• pyobjc-framework-ExceptionHandling - 2.0
• pyobjc-framework-FSEvents - 2.0
• pyobjc-framework-InputMethodKit - 2.0
• pyobjc-framework-InstallerPlugins - 2.0
• pyobjc-framework-InstantMessage - 2.0
• pyobjc-framework-InterfaceBuilderKit - 2.0
• pyobjc-framework-LatentSemanticMapping - 2.0
• pyobjc-framework-LaunchServices - 2.0
• pyobjc-framework-Message - 2.0
• pyobjc-framework-PreferencePanes - 2.0
• pyobjc-framework-PubSub - 2.0
• pyobjc-framework-QTKit - 2.0
• pyobjc-framework-Quartz - 2.0
• pyobjc-framework-ScreenSaver - 2.0
• pyobjc-framework-ScriptingBridge - 2.0
• pyobjc-framework-SearchKit - 2.0
• pyobjc-framework-SyncServices - 2.0
• pyobjc-framework-SystemConfiguration - 2.0
• pyobjc-framework-WebKit - 2.0
• pyobjc-framework-XgridFoundation - 2.0
• pyobjc-xcode - 2.0
• python-dateutil - 1.2
• setuptools - 0.6c7
• wxPython-common - 2.8.4.0
• wxaddons - 2.8.4.0
• xattr - 0.5
• zope.interface - 3.3.0

I generated this List with Yolk and modified it a little to exclude packages i installed already and added a few that yolk seemed to have missed.

First off i find it remarkable that wx is included. I don’t know the reason for this. I use wx so this is great for people like me. Secondly py2app was kind of obvious (XCode bundles python projects up in the build phase to produce a stand-alone app) but i was really surprised to find twisted in there.

I got my hopes high when i heard about Apple being officially more supportive towards dynamic languages like Ruby, Python and Perl and i am not disappointed - and yes ruby on rails is there for those interested.

The integration in XCode and it’s tools seems to be nice but i didn’t have enough time to dig into it.

So, today at about 12:30 AM Leopard was delivered.

I did all my Backup and cleaning stuff yesterday, including a disk repair from the tiger startup discs (which was necessary as some stuff fucked up). My system is fairly tweaked and customized. I use custom icons all over the place. I also have a huge Fink installation, tons of additional Frameworks i use from time to time and a couple of addons like DiscTop or Perian (add codecs to Quicktime). You get the picture. The only thing i did additionally yesterday was to grab the new version of googleDesktop, which according to Google fixed some Leopard compatibility issues. I did expect the upgrade to work fine but a few things not to work after the upgrade.

I can happily report that this upgrade was SUPER-SMOOTH. It all works. All my settings and apps and addons and so on work and are intact. That is great! Really great!

Currently Spotlight and GoogleDesktop have an indexing competition which i notice on the system’s performance.

One thing to remember is that you may not see the quicklook icon in your Finder’s toolbar. If that is the case customize the toolbar and drop the icon where you want it.

Not at all revolutionary but nicely done and integrated in the whole mac desktop experience is Spaces. I already got so used to it that i cannot imagine working without it. It blends completely in.

Next station: Dev Tool installation