Miscellany + Mavericks Review

1) Hubble Space Telescope proposal turned in Friday, plus a big meeting Tuesday. This past week has been nuts. But very science-y.

2) Not so much knitting lately--finishing up a few things here and there. I'll post more in a bit

3) Upgraded my computer to Mavericks, the new Mac OS. So far I am not a fan. There's still a way to do multiple desktops, though it's a bit trickier than before (also hard to make them have the same background image. Seriously?). My main complaint is the changes to Finder, which is the GUI that lets you browse your files. It is customizable, but my favorite thing to do was sort by date (on the Snow Leopard version, your options were Today, Yesterday, Last Week, and maybe Last Month, I don't really recall). Since I'm usually working on so many things at once (I used to have 6 desktops, for pete's sake), Today and Yesterday were essential for finding the latest draft or program. Now instead, one clicks on "All My Files", and indeed everything is listed. Then you can sort by date created or modified. Not a huge problem, just not as convenient.

They also seem to have made Photo Booth completely useless. Instead of holding the pictures in a folder that allows them to be, you know, uploaded, it holds them in the Photo Booth Library, which is... an application that displays them. So no uploading. You can click and drag them to the desktop and they'll become real files though, which is kind of funny and a huge clutter.

ALSO. If you use LaTeX or TeXWorks, be warned! putting Mavericks on my computer changed... something. So TeXWorks was no longer properly referencing the TeX folders, so basically it didn't run any more. I did download TeXShop instead and no problems yet (and it has the benefit of a) color coding your .tex file and b) putting FREAKING LINE NUMBERS on the page so when there's an error you can actually find it, hallelujah).

Now, for the pros of Mavericks...

well, it allowed me to download the proposing tool that submits proposals to StSci, so I guess that's good. And I'm sure it's nice to have the software up to date and not complaining. The new download notifications are less intrusive, appearing in the upper right corner. They seem to be more persistent. There's also this Notifications thing in the upper right corner that... might be useful. I haven't fully explored it yet.