Macking 41

OS 8.5
One day before the official release, my press copy of 8.5 turned up in the mail. I was loaded and ready for MacCamp and so the timing couldn't have been more perfect. Well, it would have been better if they could have gotten it to me a month ago so the November issue would have this info, but that's life.
What better place to just mess around with the new system than in a cabin in the mountains, surrounded by other Mackers, some of whom also had 8.5. I had a lot of notes to compare and things to watch out for, so I proceeded to do what some of you may do, against advice, just to see what happened.
I did a "dirty" install, right over my 8.1 system folder.
Actually, I duplicated my system folder onto another drive, and installed onto that. I'm not <B>totally<B> nuts. I wanted to see if it would actually work with all the stuff I was running now.
It didn't. I had freezes and crashes and finally had to give up and do a clean install. It had problems with Virex 5.9, Now Menus, the control panels for Now Contact and Now Up-To-Date, and others I did not even try to track down. I will instead be installing my extensions and panels one by one over the next couple of weeks, carefully testing for compatibility, still on an external volume. Virex 5.9 works fine now, too, except for a known conflict between it and StuffIt SpaceSaver. If you install Virex 5.9 and start getting odd crashes, restart with the shift key down and remove SpaceSaver from your Extensions folder.
It's faster. It looks very good. Several of the preferences and control panels have been combined into the Appearance control pane, which is much more convenient. There are many new options for "Themes," or combinations of desktop pattern or picture, and color choices for scroll bars, window outlines, and selected text. Of course they can all be customized, and Desktop Textures still works, with over a hundred patterns not available anywhere else.
Speaking of patterns, did you know that any image can be made into a pattern? If you would like a single icon to be repeated all over the desktop, simply Copy the icon (from the GetInfo window) and Paste it into the Desktop Patterns window. Then click Set Desktop.
Now built into the Appearance control panel is Smoothing of on-screen type. This used to be accomplished with a shareware panel called SmoothType; version 2.0.2 works fine under 8.5. This is a good thing, because the built-in version is butt-ugly. I was appalled at how bad it looked! Font smoothing is a matter of personal taste, though, and you might not like it at all, or prefer Apple's. People tell me that my type looks fuzzy and is hard to read. It is fuzzy (smoothing anti-aliases type) but to me it is better looking, especially at small sizes.
As of deadline, the following third-party extensions and panels work fine under 8.5: PowerBarPro Key 3.1.2; Snitch 2.6; Microsoft libraries for PageMaker 6; Consultant Activities and Contacts extensions; RAM Doubler 8.0.1 (according to MacFixIt - I don't use RD); *PopChar 2.7.1, *MyEyes 2.3.1 and *Suitcase 3.0.1 which I have loading dozens of fonts and 32 different beep sounds. Be sure that you have the current versions! Panels that don't work have been or will be upgraded to be 8.5 compatible. Now Contact and Now Up-to-Date applications work, but their extensions (QuickDay and QuickContact) don't.
*Do note that although the above extensions do not crash the Mac on startup, I have been having unexplained freezes in Eudora that went away just now when I turned off these three. Suitcase does work, but you can add fonts only through drag and drop; the dialog box method returns an error message.
Costar label printers are not compatible with 8.5, but there may be a fix by now. HP LaserJet 6MP using the HP printer driver 8.3.1 (current) will not print, but using Apple's Laserwriter 8 fixes things. Quark XPress has a problem with text and buttons disappearing from its Print dialog box, but strangely the problem goes away when you have Kaleidoscope 2.1 installed!
Do you need 8.5? Nobody needs this upgrade. As yet, there is no software that requires 8.5 to run. My suggestion is to buy it and put it on a shelf for a couple of months. Don't install it now unless you have a 2nd hard drive or partitioned volume to put it on. You should be able to return to your current system version with a single restart.
If you have a single unpartitioned hard drive, sit tight. Or, if you have System Picker and know how to use it, duplicate your old system folder, do a Clean Install of 8.5, delete the "Previous System Folder" and rename your old one "System Folder 8.1" (or "8.0", whatever) and the new one "System Folder 8.5."
When the bugs and incompatibilities have been worked out, and you have acquired all the necessary updates, go ahead and perform a Clean Install and then move over your fonts, special folders in the System Folder (Eudora, Photoshop-related, etc.) and carefully install or copy over your compatible 3rd-party extensions and panels. Then get ready for the 8.6 update that will appear early next year.
That update should be similar to the 8.0 to 8.1 update: a large download that you simply run on your existing system, with no options to select. The 8.0 to 8.1 update was one of the slickest updates Apple has released.
Finally, just to make sure you take this seriously, here are six warning steps from Macintouch, and my comments:
1. We suggest disabling Mac OS 8.5's automatic invocation of Disk First Aid (DFA) immediately after a crash by using the Shift key to turn extensions off at startup. Save any important files to a backup before allowing Disk First Aid to run.
(I let it run after a crash and had no problem. I think it is a nice implementation of DFA to scour your drive and fix problems immediately. But then, I have an Apple drive and a SilverLining-formatted drive, with tape backups.)
2. As noted previously, we recommend putting the Virtual Memory swap file on its own partition, or better yet, disabling VM.
(Get more RAM. Virtual memory is just a stopgap measure and should not be relied upon unless you seldom use any application that would cause you to need VM.)
3. Consider waiting for a while to enable Sherlock's disk indexing system, particularly if your free disk space is limited, because Sherlock indexing is new, and it stresses the disk subsystem heavily.
(I have also waited on this. The warning said it could take hours to catalog my drive. I will definitely have an immediate backup before I set Sherlock in motion.)
4. We strongly recommend disabling hard-drive sleep in the Energy Saver control panel (set it to "Never") on Macs other than PowerBooks.
(So do I. I set Energy Saver to sleep the monitor only.)
5. Disable the Iomega driver unless you have a specific need for it, and try temporarily disabling it if you encounter problems and you're also using an Iomega drive.
(I installed driver version 5.0.1 and it works fine with my SCSI Zip drive. If you got a G3 with an IDE Zip drive, follow his advice. You might even consider trashing the driver and then putting a copy of the Iomega Guest application on the desktop, launching it only when you actually want to use the Zip. Seems Iomega has a serious problem writing good software.)
6. Alsoft says that its PlusMaker utility cannot be involved in the problem, but we recommend avoiding any extra layers of complexity related to disks and partitions. More succinctly, we recommend reformatting your disk and restarting before Mac OS 8.5 installation, avoiding the use of any non-essential disk utilities in the process.
(I agree. While PlusMaker seemed like a good idea and a way to change your drive to HFS Extended, something just tells me not to trust it but to do things the way Apple intends: Backup your entire hard drive, choose Erase Disk in the Finder, choose HFS Extended in the popup menu, and copy everything else back on. Remember that all of your aliases become disabled after doing this, and many of your utilities will want you to re-enter your serial number.
I also recommend that you use the NotePad application to store your serial numbers and any passwords you use (assuming no unauthorized people have access to your Mac) so that they will be there, handy 6 months from now when you can't remember where you put the original paperwork with your numbers on it.
Finally, the bottom line is that the serious problems that have afflicted 8.5 users has bitten at most 1% of all installs, probably less, according to MacFixIt. So don't be fearful, just be careful. BACK UP YOUR DATA (I can't emphasize this strongly enough) before doing the upgrade.

No Microsoft products were used in the production of this column.

email mp at moonmac dot com. (I took out the mailto link because that's how the spammers find me.)