Mavericks
After some playful teasing from Mark in October about staying on Snow Leopard (10.6), I finally finished updating both of my Macs to Mavericks (10.9) this month. Despite my Mid 2007 iMac being the oldest system to qualify for the upgrade, it performs beautifully. Very smooth and efficient while using only 4GB of RAM, which is the maximum amount my system supports.
Thankfully, a series of great articles from Macworld helped me to successfully clean install Mavericks onto my iMac. I actually had to install Mavericks twice, once in order to create a bootable Mavericks disk that included the createinstallmedia tool, and the second, to install Mavericks with the OS X Recovery HD partition enabled. Without the recovery partition, I would've lost the ability to use FileVault 2 encryption.
Why did I never upgrade before? Well, one reason was that on the iMac, I occasionally used some legacy PowerPC apps which required Apple's Rosetta translation software. A few months after 3D software developer Daz released Bryce 7, Apple released Lion (10.7) which officially stopped supporting Rosetta. Since then, Bryce has been stuck in development limbo with no apparent plans for an update in order for it to work under a modern Mac system. Sigh.
After upgrading the iMac in November, I had to wait over three months to upgrade the MacBook Air because of the application I use most often, the Foundry's MODO, had a somewhat severe, viewport performance issue while running under Mavericks. It was recommended by Brad Peebler of the Foundry not to upgrade but wait for a software fix, either coming from them as a service pack or from Apple as an OS X update. With the release of MODO 701 SP4 late last month, the issue has been resolved and OpenGL speeds are now lightning fast again.
With Mavericks on all my machines, I'm finally enjoying features everyone else has been using such as iCloud note and bookmark syncing, tabbed Finder windows, notifications, Facebook and Twitter integration, iOS style Maps and iBooks applications and OpenGL 4.1 (finally!). The cleaner, flatter iOS7 look of the newer OS X interface is also most welcome.
Thankfully, a series of great articles from Macworld helped me to successfully clean install Mavericks onto my iMac. I actually had to install Mavericks twice, once in order to create a bootable Mavericks disk that included the createinstallmedia tool, and the second, to install Mavericks with the OS X Recovery HD partition enabled. Without the recovery partition, I would've lost the ability to use FileVault 2 encryption.
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| Mavericks on my 24" iMac (Mid 2007). |
After upgrading the iMac in November, I had to wait over three months to upgrade the MacBook Air because of the application I use most often, the Foundry's MODO, had a somewhat severe, viewport performance issue while running under Mavericks. It was recommended by Brad Peebler of the Foundry not to upgrade but wait for a software fix, either coming from them as a service pack or from Apple as an OS X update. With the release of MODO 701 SP4 late last month, the issue has been resolved and OpenGL speeds are now lightning fast again.
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| Mavericks and MODO 701 playing nicely together on my 13" MacBook Air. |
posted by Robert at February 18, 2014
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