It seems that the update delivered yesterday by Apple has fixed the memory and hick-up problems I mentioned earlier. Today I have been able to just work with the manuscript without pulling my hair out in agony.
Though the jury is still out, I don’t see any strange behavior anymore in the activity monitor regarding pages. On with the book!
I just wrote about my troubles with Pages and trying to write for Wicket in Action. Apple support is really quick: my blog entry was not up for longer than 8 hours, and they apparently already have fixed it!
About Pages 3.0.1
This update primarily addresses issues with change tracking and performance.
I already figured it had to do with change tracking, as before we sent the documents to our editor, we had nothing to complain about performance. However, when we received our feedback, it came in a Word document that had change tracking on.
Installing the upgrade as we speak! Thanks to John Gruber for his update on Daring Fireball.
The new Pages in iWork’08 seems to have some uncomfortable bugs: it claims quite a lot of memory, hogs the CPU, and often freezes my whole OS X GUI. To put it mildly: I have to restart Pages several times a day to make it usable.
It looks like the memory management of Pages 3 is b0rked. While I’m typing this, Pages is trying to shut down (now for over a minute!). It is using one core of my CoreDuo, and about 70-80% of the time it is spending time in the kernel, increasing the real memory usage (now 471 MB).
The shutdown has now finished, in over 5 minutes!!! AAAARGH.
This list is not a top 10 apps I prefer, but a reminder that whenever I am going to reinstall my OS X drive (due soon, again because bootcamp needs an unpartitioned drive to function):
Note that I don’t use all programs at a regular basis. For instance, I don’t use, haven’t used scrivener much, though I do like the idea and think I wouldn’t mind using it.
After a full new reinstall on my Mac Book Pro (first gen), I decided to create multiple partitions and take on backing up my data. Fortunately, Mac OS provides a ton of good backup tools: iBackup and SuperDuper!.
The former (iBackup), is great for the casual backup: it backs up all settings and data from applications. Restoring is very easy and convenient. I had my MBP up and running in no time using this tool. I don’t like that I am not able to easily create bootable disk images using this tool.
For creating (bootable) disk images I discovered that Super Duper! works great. I am seriously considering to shell out the necessary $$$ to use this program. Especially for trying out drivers and updates it has a great solution: sandbox images. I suggest you try both of these apps, because making a backup never has been easier: all you need is a place to store your data.
The 100GB 4200RPM harddisk (G in gibi, not giga) in my MBP is now partitioned into 3 partitions: 1 boot OS X, 1 data and 1 bootcamp (winxp). The latter still has to be installed though, as I haven’t got a slipstreamed SP2 Windows XP disk around. For backup purposes I use an external USB2 drive (320GB, 7200RPM), and that works great. It is fast, easy and very convenient to add my other drives in cases of transferring large amounts of data.
Though I love my Mac Book Pro, I wish I could enlarge the harddisk and make it speedier: 120GB or 160GB spinning at 7200RPM would be very, very welcome. Unfortunately the current offerings in these sizes are available in 5400RPM only.