I frequently read Joel on Software. Spolsky writes well and often picks interesting (if controversial) topics. Often, I find myself in disagreement, and perhaps even more often, I couldn’t agree more with what he states.

In his most recent piece, “Composing in TextMate with MarkDown”, I was surprised to see him mention that he uses a MacBook Pro at home, and that a few recent articles of his were written on just that — even though his own content management system, CityDesk, doesn’t actually run on Mac OS.

John Gruber will be delighted to read that Joel uses his Markdown script, in conjunction with TextMate, which also happens to be my preferred text editor for most (but decidedly not all) cases. Joel highlights several advantages of this combination, and then proceeds to point out two problems he has encountered, both of which are actually with Mac OS X in general, not Markdown (which is cross-platform anyway) or TextMate.

1. Quartz’s anti-aliasing vs. ClearType. In the end, this is a matter of preference; you can do research all you want, and people will, for numerous reasons, still prefer one or the other. So I don’t think there’s much to comment here other than Joel’s vagueness on whether he has tried different options. Apple menu, System Preferences, Appearance, Font smoothing style. I find myself using “Strong” most of the time. Since Joel criticizes the result as “blurry on the edges”, he may indeed want to try out switching to “Strong”.
2. Network connectivity issues causing stalls. I’m a little confused by his statement that “the Wifi network would go down for a second, something which happens to everyone”, unless, of course, he means that he moves around a lot with his laptop. The way it’s worded, it sounds like his access point is rather unstable, which would indicate a deeper problem — and an OS-agnostic one at that — , but I suppose he actually means that his reception (on the MacBook Pro’s end) isn’t all that great to begin with. Whatever the case, Joel describes a “crash” “about every two hours”, which is obviously inexcusable and a horrible experience (imagine a beginner going through this!).
   (Pedantic aside: in order to further track down this problem, it would be beneficial to know if Joel is referring to a stall, or, as he repeatedly says, a crash. His “[..] the beachball will still be spinning” remark points to the former. Either are, of course, software bugs, and indicative of mistakes or oversights on the developers’ end, but there’s a clear difference. In fact, if it had been a crash, Joel should have gotten a Crash Reporter dialog, at least after a while, and possibly no beachball at all.)
   What he’s describing sounded to me at first like good ol’ Finder hanging. He probably has a network share or two mounted, and whenever the connection dies, Finder freaks out. But, as he says: “everything is frozen. Everything.” Not just the Finder. This, then, sounds more like a lookupd hang, which is an even older problem, dating all the way back to NeXTSTEP days. This has me rather confused; while I’ve experienced this a lot in the past, I can’t remember having had this again with Tiger, and especially not on my MacBook Pro. That said, Unlockupd might be a reasonable cure. Joel, if you’re reading this: try installing Unlockupd (the site comes with uninstall instructions, and it really doesn’t do any harm to leave it running anyway). If that doesn’t help, I’d love to know, at least, if you can still reproduce the problem while you don’t have any network shares mounted (which I’m assuming you usually do).