I updated OS X to 10.9 Mavericks yesterday. This isn’t a full review, but a few observations after using it for a day and trying to get things working.
After re-installing XQuartz (which is prompted for when you try to launch IDL), IDL seems to work fine. But I haven’t had to install IDL on Mavericks and that usually seems to be the worst problem.
The Xcode command line tools are installed in a bit different way than in Mountain Lion. Evidently you don’t have to install Xcode, you can just do:
xcode-select —install
I had to work a bit, but GPULib builds again with the new tools.
There are a couple things in general that I am looking forward to using more:
- Better handling of multiple displays: you can have a different full screen application on each monitor, you can have a separate set of spaces for each monitor.
- The skeuomorphic Contacts and Calendar applications have a cleaner design. Getting rid of the leather texture in Calendar was worth upgrading.
- More efficient power management: I haven’t really noticed any differences, but I am really hoping for a bit better battery life. But I’m still having trouble using CUDA with the discrete graphics card on my laptop, which I’m thinking has something to do with the power management features.
In general, I think Mavericks is a lot of incremental improvements, which is exactly what I want.
UPDATE 10/30/13: I have noticed that X11 is always listed as using significant power. Updating to the development build for XQuartz 2.7.5 seems to fix the problem.
November 9th, 2013 at 9:14 am
Hello Michael,
Thank you for this useful report. I am an IDL user and I got a bit in trouble when I upgraded from 10.7 to 10.8 since Apple had swapped the en0 and en1 interfaces. I had to get a new license file from Exelvis in order to make IDL run again. I hope the definitions of en0 and en1 remain the same in 10.9 as in 10.8. I saw some reports from people running other licensed software that also uses the ID of the en0 or en1 for authentication and that could not make the software work in 10.9. Maybe they did the upgrade directly from 10.7 to 10.9.
Cheers,
Geir
November 9th, 2013 at 9:33 am
I have network license on my desktop and a node-locked license on my laptop and I didn’t experience any problems. But I didn’t experience any problems with 10.7 to 10.8 either, so take it with a grain of salt.
I have heard other people have experienced sluggishness with X11 even with the latest version, but I have not experienced that either.
July 22nd, 2014 at 7:17 am
I had IDL 7.1 running perfectly on my MB 10.6.8 and moved to mavericks some months ago. IDL7.1 is still running but there is problem when I want to open a file by clicking on the button in the IDL tool bar: nothing happens. Idem with the menu save as … no Finder window opens…
I tried to restart the Finder after deleting the Finder preference files, but it didn’t solve the pb. Well, I still can open .pro file by double-clicking on the file in the Finder, and it opens in IDL, so the fact that I can’t do it from IDL is not blocking. But I would like to know what’s going with IDL and the Finder on my mac. Comments welcome !
July 22nd, 2014 at 10:55 am
@lux I would write to support at Exelis VIS to see if they have any workarounds for that.