Some tidbits from the NetNewsWire beta list (sorry no info on the beta itself, other than it rocks)...

It turns out that there's a nice leak checker built in to Panther. If you do something like this:

export MallocStackLogging=1; open -a ~/Applications/NetNewsWire.app

then you can run the leaks command on the PID of the app, and get a nice memory leak report. Cool. But scary to see other stuff that is leaking. I suspect that trying this out on FireFox would be educational.

If you are running XCode 1.2, then you have the option of doing this. But I'm not. Yet.

Since getting the Powerbook, I've taken to leaving my machine on all the time, something I never did with my Windows box, largely because it sounded like a small jet engine. One of the side effects of doing this is that I have a lot of processes open at once, especially since I'm using virtual desktops. My copy of Firefox, which is where blogging related pages wind up, has 38 tabs open at the moment. My copy of Safari, which is where work related pages wind up, has 10 tabs open. I have 3 ITerms with 4 tabs each open. There are Multi-Gnome-Terminals on two linux boxes via X11. Plus copies of Emacs, SubEthaEdit, iChat, Snak, xchm, Preview, etc. All open and spatially laid out by desktop.

I'm really enjoying working this way. But one thing I've noticed is that crashes and reboots are a bigger deal. I have days of work spread out all over my machine. If I crash, it's like a partial brain wipe. Having to reboot for upgrades (and I have both XCode 1.2 and OS 10.3.4 queued up) is a big deal and requires some planning. I made a remark to this effect in a reply on the list, and another list member replied (yes, I asked him if I could quote him):

I'm sorry but I just wanted to mention the "warm fuzzy" seeing this gave me.

So nice to have an OS where you actually have to "plan" to reboot. :)

In fairness, I think that this would be true on an XP or Linux notebook or always on box as well, but when you are used to turning the machine off every night, it does mean a different way of working. Problems that are masked by a daily reboot all of a sudden are much more noticeable.