Tag Archives: progress meter

Maybe Get Some Coffee

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I got this message when I was rebuilding my father-in-law’s 2007 iMac. It happened at one point when I was trying to install on OS on the boot drive.

This might be the most realistic time-to-complete estimate I’ve ever seen in an Apple installer:

(I haven’t talked about that computer. I got it a couple of years ago and I’ve been meaning to upgrade it, just like I did with our own 2007 iMac. The only difference from that upgrade plan was I only used a 1 TB drive for the boot drive. The use case is to back up some computers at work, so I added a 4 TB external drive. I would have prefered making it internal, so I could use the SATA connection rather than a USB 2.0 external drive. But … sigh. Apple. There isn’t really room for another drive (yes, I know about replacing the Superdrive with in internal drive) but beyond that, getting at the drive, in case it fails and needs replacing is so incredibly hard, that I decided I could live with slow backups.)

Cool MacOSX feature

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I’ve found it increasingly hard to approve of Apple for the last while (like seven or eight years) so I wanted to point out something I like. I don’t know when it appeared, but I only just noticed it myself.

You may have noticed that MacOSX apps are good at tracking changes to the filesystem. You can be editing a document in one app, and you change it’s name in the Finder (or the Terminal) and the first app notices that and doesn’t try to save it under the original name. Good job, Apple. All the OSes should do that.

But here’s the feature I just noticed. I’m downloading a file (using a non-Safari browser) and I notice that it looks like this in the Finder:

Notice the grey progress meter next to the file? Pretty slick. I don’t know what the API requires on the part of the web browser, but it’s nice that the rest of the OS can be aware the file is open (easy enough) and it’s 85% done (pretty impressive).