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MacOS Catalina

You need to look a little closer with microsoft, their recent announcements are very interesting, particularly with regards to the OS.

I think both are poised to change from intel (or at least offer alternatives, MS 15inch AMD offer for instance), and thats interesting, but for me, day to day, its windows all the way. If only they had the trackpad! (but apple can keep the shit shit keyboard)
 
I still use beta 11. Will wait for the official .1 release.
No issues for me so far.
At peace with W10 too, although I don’t like the graphic chart at all.
Night modes are just painful for my eyes.
 
Night modes are just painful for my eyes.

Me too, I can’t for the life of me understand how people can use them in low-light scenarios, I just end up with bright lines burnt on my retinas whenever I look away from the screen! I loved the classic green text of an old IBM monochrome monitor on a DOS machine or AS/400, but that was in office lighting. I don’t think it would work in typical modern ambient house lighting. I have my iPad set to switch to its more gentle ‘night’ colour balance (more warm/yellow) after 9:00pm, and have the backlight brightness quite low, and that doesn’t mess with my eyes at all. I tried the ‘Dark Mode’ very briefly and really can’t use it at all.
 
Night modes are just painful for my eyes.

Same here. Seems we’re in the minority, but screens with white/light text on black backgrounds send my eyes funny. It’s quite unpleasant.

I actually emailed Apple about it the other day to suggest they had a toggle on their website. This was after browsing the site and finding some pages were entirely white on black. I doubt it’ll do anything, but it was worth a go.

No probs with Catalina on my iMac, though I usually only use it for fairly basic stuff.
 
White text on a black background does the same to my eyes. Looks pants to me too, so on sites like these I either go to reader view, highlight the whole page to invert the colour scheme a bit or just leave and go somewhere else.
 
Catalina was a pig to get working in a VM but I did crack it. I was surprised moving from an early beta to the actual release installation. What surprised me in that latter is that after installation I was prompted for network details - haven't seen that before then lo and behold the thing told me that I didn't have a network connection so I ignored it! When the thing finally fired up I had a fully working Ethernet and Internet connection.

Oh and the thing did warn me that the VMWare tools won't work in a future release!

Well thats off to a good start then.

Cheers,

DV
 
Well took the fateful step after 6 hours of sorting VMware and Windows 10 out with the help of their respective help desks. Top and bottom fresh install of both so after time machine back ups decided to load up Catalina.

Problems with a couple of apps not being supported anymore but the two real bummers are some of the album artwork seems not to be picked up although showing on the minimised player and probably the biggest for me, is the inability the for the book app to load the audiobook library.

Apple obviously haven't thought that one through. My work round until they sort it out, is to run iTunes on Windows 10 which still has the option to play audiobooks.
 
Having followed the Apple community discussion about Catalina I am glad I have avoided whatever curiosity I might have had. It has nothing for me.

I hope fishes are free of Catalina miseries
 
I’d forgotten all about this. My 2014 MacBook Pro is still happily on Mojave, and I suspect it’ll be staying there.
 
ditto my 2010 Mac Pro Silver tower running Mojave. Perhaps a premium bond meg win would enable me to get the yet to be released Mac Pro and so catch up with the latest and greatest offerings from Cupertino.
 
Now running .1 beta 2. I had one KP, then OSX got rid of a problematic file on its own.
No worries since then. OS snappy and starts fast.
MBP 2014 SSD.
 
Does anyone have Little Snitch running on OSX? Granted, I opted for iCloud back when it was Mobile Me so the Cupertino clan could mine my email, calendar, Notes and whatever else, but still ... the LS connection monitor provides real time updates of all connections, blocked or allowed, and I kid you not, from a fresh boot it's 6 minutes straight after Little Snitch initiates until Apple stops phoning in and out of the computer with a half dozen daemons repeatedly. It's an absolutely absurd amount of communication at boot time. It also fills the log with 3000 entries in the same time. Contrast that with MS Office that hits the net 2x to check for updates in between Apple's party line to one server after another. I won't miss this mess one iota.
 
Yes, I use Little Snitch. It is a useful tool. As an iCloud and Apple mail user with multiple Apple devices I expect it to phone home very regularly, especially with ‘hand off’ etc. So far my view is Apple are trustworthy with data, basically you buy privacy with the high purchase price of the hardware, whereas Gmail, Hotmail, Yahoo etc etc all provide “free” services in exchange for data-mining.
 
I don’t use it any longer. I think I stopped using LS since Leopard!
I’ll give it another go with Catalina, because I’m curious.
 
Well, the difference is I don't hand over trust simply because I like something. I learned that lesson decades ago with my wife.

In any event, I still think it's a ridiculous amount of data transfer - 6 minutes! - on a standalone desktop computer before I've clicked once.

-my isp gave me a 'free' upgrade to a 100MB pipe. It's still 6 minutes. I could download an entire Linux distro in that time.

-I also view the hardware argument as made thin with threads like the one we're in presently, concerning an OS update that users have been warned not to download, as many updates are. That tends to blow the hardware / guru / privacy expert stance well out of the water: it's their HW, it's their software; it's their ecosystem. If they can't roll out updates without constant screaming why on earth would I trust their privacy claims?
 
I don’t suffer from the same problem at all.

With a lame broadband (at 4 Mbps) it would show I think :p
A look at the logs confirms that.
Do you use iCloud sync?
 
To be honest, I don't know what I use apple for anymore other than I think it's an excellent interface. But I thought that with Tiger.

I know the calendar syncs between the desk, the laptop and an iPad, but the latter two hardly get any use. Mail app doesn't have to sync anything dealing with an imap server other than its relation to the server and only when I launch the app. I no longer use notes or any of the apple productivity apps. And so it's a very, very small amount of personal data moving about.

The lions share of outbound connections relate to the Commerce, iTunes (I don't use it) and Location services. In other words, income streams. All of our reality concerns income streams. Good thing we're conditioned to refer to most things computer in the first person. Helps it go down better, I suppose.

Some would think there's no difference between this and smart appliances with embedded systems having network access. Except there is. Your fridge or lighting control box doesn't have a password store or access to personal documents and photos, and you don't log on to your bank to pay your bills with the icemaker.

This is classic brand evangelism (some would say corporatism) by which Apple has created a consumer hologram where risk simply doesn't exist once you've stuck the spike in your head and gotten comfortable.
 


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