1.9.5 moves at a snail's pace...
So I’m nearly finished with my huge book project for my architect client, thank goodness.
But Booksmart has proven so buggy, I’m honestly considering whether I’ll make any more books with Blurb at all—and this is after upgrading from the nearly useless 1.9.4.
If I’m not contending with ‘the spinning beach ball of death,’ waiting interminably for the software, I’m dealing with a bunch of other annoying bugs, like:
• preview mode zooms into a large, unusable size every time I click the button;
• though I’m typing white text on black pages, every single text entry defaults to black, forcing me to manually change it;
• it takes forever to switch between edit and preview mode;
• just scrolling through the page templates causes the software to hang for a minute or two.
Sigh,
This software has literally added hours to my workflow in completing this 165 page book, sheesh. Next time I sell a book project to a client, I’ll have to think long and hard about my vendor.
Blurb has been great in many ways—publication, finishing, customer service have all been a pleasure, but I’ve just about had it with their crappy software.
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Hi jimscolari, Ah, the beach ball of death. Sorry to hear about that. Running Software Update is the single best way to improve performance on Macs. If you’ve got a Power PC processor, BookSmart won’t run much faster. But if you’re on an Intel-based Mac, BookSmart should be reasonably quick and running Software Update should help. Best regards and thanks for your patience and perseverance,
Jeremy
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its a nice, new intel mac book, a gig of ram, running at 2GHz… should be speedy, I know, that’s why I’m aggravated.
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Jeremy, I just ran a software update and I am on an Intel-based Mac. It didn’t help. Any other suggestions to increase the speed of Booksmart? In the past this was never a problem. It seems to be the current version that has the bug. Any possibility of getting an older version of Booksmart?
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Howdy all, Hmmm, other variables could be a) the amount of free disk space you have on your HD (10GB or more free is good for maximum use of virtual memory) b) the mumber of other programs you have open (please restart your computer, and if necessary under your Account settings area, remove some programs from your list of startup items) c) memory. While 512MB is minimum, 1GB or more is recommended. And 1GB might not get too far if other programs, especially big ones like Photoshop, are also running. ***Also, please note that while you can now change your book directory to a network or external drive, writing to those drives as you create your book will be slower (sometimes significantly) than writing to your local HD. Hope this helps!
Jeremy
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Does anyone have any suggestions as to another quality vendor?
I am in need of completing a project pretty quickly and I am experiencing the same problems and cannot continue to use this software because of the amount of time wasted waiting.
Christy
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This just happened to me and I’m very upset.
Jeremy or other Blurb staff, please reply with instructions for downloading the previous version of Booksmart (prior to 1.9.5). My very new, very fast Mac is running just fine. All I want is the previous version of your software.
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After I ran software updates, I “repaired permissions” and it seemed to make Booksmart (1.9.5) work fine. I was having lots of problems before.
Click on the spotlight
type…disc utility
Select your Hard Drive
then select Repair permissions
The gurus at the apple store told me to do this every time I ran a software update on my mac.
Hope this works for you.
C
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Thanks re: Repair Permissions. Trying that now.
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I’ve had the same problems. I’ve done a couple of other books before without any difficulties, but now I have to fight the program all the way. It’s annoying….
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I downloaded the update for 1.9.5 and it is unbelievaly slow. It has been 15 minutes and the pages are still loading. I will not work with this update. What will I need to do to go back to 1.9.5?
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The update (1.9.6 or 1.9.7) stores the photos in a quite different way to 1.9.5, what is happening when you first open a book created in 1.9.5 is that it is having to recreate that new style of cache for each page. That does take a long time. But it is worth it, once done you will notice that subsequent uses or Booksmart are noticeably faster. ..........Tony
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A Gig of Ram with a 165 page book? I would expect that to be pretty painful. Unless you have few photos or small ones. People don’t buy their computers for desktop publishing or video editing, then wonder why those very intensive tasks are so slow. I’d bet if you dumped everything into your Word Processor you’d be less than impressed with the performance too. Blurb has to keep all your photos together in memory. Using 1.9.4 I’ve got a 120 page book with 1.46 GB of photos. With a computer with 1 Gb it crawls and page-to-page movements hurt. It wasn’t painful when it was a 20 page book. That’s because I’ve exhausted my computer’s memory and from there everything goes downhill. Desktop publishing requires Gigs of memory. Larger project; larger memory. Photoshop users use dedicated scratch disks to speed photoshop because it can require fast – disk dumps because it eats even gigs of memory. If you are going to do desktop publishing, you need Gigs of RAM and fast disks (7200RPM spec; or 10000RPM if you can afford them). Cheaper computers use 5400RPM and cheap laptops will even use 4200RPM disks. This makes everything slow, especially when loading, and if you run out of memory a slower drive will be excruciating compared to a 7200RPM(making the best of a bad situation) I moved Booksmart to a machine with 4 gigs and after the initial building of all the pages and thumbnails(which is CPU & disk Intensive), I could flip through the book with less than a second of hesitation. I can now work on my book again. You can’t expect ANY computer to be capable of performing EVERY task.
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