Mac OS X 10.1.5 Update Available

krugdm writes "The Mac OS X 10.1.5 update which was hinted at in the MS Office update changelog is now available through Software Update. From the updater: 'Update 10.1.5 delivers enhancements which improve the reliability of Mac OS X applications, delivers improved networking, security, support for PC Card serial communication devices, and expanded peripheral device support.'"

Comments

Rage Pro

[mr100percent]

It now supports 2D hardware acceleration and Quicktime support for the Rage Pro. Finally, the rev/A iMacs and iBooks can use OS X faster. Works quite well, windows on it seem snappier.

Re:Rage Pro

[berniecase]

Ya know, I wouldn't have believed it was possible, but I got a 300 MHz iBook to reliably play one of Apple's MPEG-4 example movies in full screen. I was quite impressed with that. This update is rocking my world, so far.

Re:Rage Pro

[foobar104]

Ya know, I wouldn't have believed it was possible, but I got a 300 MHz iBook to reliably play one of Apple's MPEG-4 example movies in full screen. I was quite impressed with that. This update is rocking my world, so far.

That's amazing. I tried QT 6 this morning, under 10.1.4, and found it pretty damn lacking. Even the 300 kbps streaming sample movie couldn't play more than 1 or 2 frames per second, even though my network was wide open.

Just now I tried it under 10.1.5. What a difference a point release makes!

Re:Rage Pro

[Alex Thorpe]

A minor correction: It's the Rev/B through Rev/D iMacs that use the Rage Pro. The Rev/A has a Rage II with 2MB video memory. It never was suited to any sort of 3D acceleration.

Re:Rage Pro

[superposed]

Rage Pro acceleration is an enormous improvement, at least on my iBook. For reference, try scrolling quickly through a big Slashdot page in IE or OmniWeb with 10.1.4 -- the scroll "thumb" lags about half a second behind the mouse cursor. Then try it with 10.1.5 -- the "thumb" stays right there with the mouse cursor (maybe 0.1 second behind). Window resizing is also much improved. This makes the computer feel a lot snappier.

Re:Rage Pro

[extra88]

According to everymac.com, beige g3s don't have a Rage Pro card unless they were produced after May 1998. Before then they have a Rage II+.

Nothing about finder!

[xtal]

No mention of updates to the slow-ass finder. Finder as an application is so slow, with large numbers of files and directories it's effectively useless. This isn't too bad, as I usually use the shell. When an application necessitates me using the finder though, it's infuriatingly slow compared to windows explorer.

I'm beginning to get annoyed, I've had my Tibook for a long time now (8 months?) and this issue still hasn't been addressed.

And yes, I run the maintenance files. That does nada. We'll see if there's any improvements tomorrow, but no mention either.

Re:Nothing about finder!

[bsartist]

In other words, it's fast - until you try to use it?

Um... no. In other words, it's fast - unless you're organizationally challenged, and keep every file you've ever worked on in a single folder. If you're going to be dumb, you have to be patient.

Re:Nothing about finder!

[foobar104]

If you're going to be dumb, you have to be patient.

Ding! Fortune file.

bsartist is my hero

Re:Nothing about finder!

[xtal]

I'd like to know how, exactly, this is flamebait. Finder IS slow, and it IS annoying. Otherwise, I love OS X.. oh, wait, independant thought and dissention is bad around here. Oops!

Re:Nothing about finder!

[Analog Penguin]

Yeah, the OS X Finder sucks (hopefully only for now). But there is a decent shareware replacement. I haven't messed with it too much (I gave up on OS X), but it seemed pretty full featured. It's called SNAX. I do remember it being wicked fast, though. And this isn't by any means a defense of Apple or an implication that the user is at fault, just a suggestion to the parent poster to make his life easier with the hardware he already has.

Re:Nothing about finder!

[analog_line]

I love how Mac users will defend the platform to the death, even when they're wrong.

I love how Windows and Linux users will do the exact same thing. It's certainly just as amusing to watch all the holier-than-thous fly this way and that. All these people who don't realize they're just as stupid as the next guy.

Re:Nothing about finder!

[bsartist]

Instead of blaming it on the user, why don't you lobby Apple to fix it?

Honestly? I haven't seen the problem. I've heard other people complain about it, but I simply haven't seen it. This is not Steve's, my neighbor's, or my cat's opinion, it's my own, based on my own personal experience, using my Mac daily to make a living.

For one thing, I organize my files, instead of dumping them all into a single folder. Having inherited the maintenance task on web sites where there were literally tens of thousands of files dumped into a single folder, I recognize the value of organization. If your MP3 player requires you to keep all your Jazz files in a folder in order to display them that way, I'd suggest getting a better MP3 player.

For another thing, very, very little of the time I spend using my Mac is spent in the Finder. Like most people who use a computer, I spend my time getting work done, not shuffling files around. If all you do all day is dump a few thousand files into a folder, scroll the window back and forth and move the files around, what are you complaining about? Are you angry because you can't waste your time more efficiently?

If you want to complain, please, complain about real issues that really matter. Ask Apple why the eMac can't be ordered with a DVD-ROM. Ask them why the Finder no longer has labels. Ask them why DVD-RAM disks are read-only in OS/X. Ask them why their RAM is so damned expensive. Ask them why the the iMac only supports mirroring, when the video card it uses is capable of driving two monitors. Ask them why, even though FireWire works great to transfer video from my camcorder in iMovie, I can't use it to download photos from the same device in iPhoto.

I'm no fan boy - far from it. I'll be the first to admit that there are serious issues that need to be addressed. But by constantly whining about trivial non-issues that are easily avoided with the barest minimum of thought and rarely cause problems in the real world, you're helping to divert people's attention from the problems that actually matter.

Re:Nothing about finder!

[bsartist]

I'd like to know how, exactly, this is flamebait.

Aside from a few vocal, attention-starved whiners who have nothing better to do than move files around and scroll Finder windows back and forth all day, most of the people who have made an honest attempt at using it, have found OS/X's performance to be acceptable for getting Real Work done. It's not perfect, of course - nothing is. But the amount of whining that some people do over trivial issues is pathetic and annoying - thus, flamebait.

Re:Nothing about finder!

[bsartist]

You mean like /usr/bin or any other unix system folder?

Now that you mention it - yes. The traditional arrangement made sense twenty years ago, when /usr/bin may have had a couple hundred files in it at most. But these days, we have *nix distros that throw everything *including* the kitchen sink in there, simply because that's the way it's always been done. Tradition can be a good thing - but sometimes people take it to absurd lengths.

Re:OS X 10.2

[Anonymous Coward]

10.2 is supposed to be released 'by the end of the summer' in apple speak Sept. 30th

Quartz AA in Carbon apps?

[foobar104]

This update lets Carbon apps use Quartz text antialiasing, which everybody knows is the very best thing about Quartz.

In about five minutes, I'll let you know if IE takes advantage of this feature yet. I'm betting that it won't without an update.

Re:Quartz AA in Carbon apps?

[jeffehobbs]

Office X.1 does in fact seem to take advantage of the new text smoothing in Carbon -- but it appears to me that there's still two separate text smoothing functions going on. To demonstrate, try setting Entourage's "list view" and "email text" to the same font. The "list view" version of the font seems smooth and Cocoa-text like, whereas the email body text is better than before but distinctly different looking.

But hey, who cares -- I use Mail.app anyway and what a great update! My iBook/300 feels much, *much* faster. And love that new eject button/F12 translucent effect!

~jeff

Re:Quartz AA in Carbon apps?

[foobar104]

In reply to my own comment, the answer is no. IE doesn't use Quartz text rendering under 10.1.5 yet. OmniWeb is my dad.

Re:Quartz AA in Carbon apps?

[foobar104]

But hey, who cares -- I use Mail.app anyway and what a great update!

So far, I agree. Mail.app feels significantly peppier on my iMac (400 MHz G3). I've got about 130 MB of mail on my IMAP server, so I guess I'm exercising Mail.app a little bit. It was never slow, but it feels quite a bit faster now.

Re:Quartz AA in Carbon apps?

[spike666]

erm... office v.X is cocoa isnt it?

Re:Quartz AA in Carbon apps?

[spike666]

a memory parity error on my part.

Re:Quartz AA in Carbon apps?

[foobar104]

errrr... I assume you're referring to ATSUI text rendering, which has been available in the Carbon API for quite some time.

I'm no Carbon expert, but according to Apple's release notes, 10.1.5 includes support for Quartz text rendering in Carbon apps. I don't know literally what that means, but it's obviously not ATSUI/Carbon, since that was available before 10.1.5.

Re:Quartz AA in Carbon apps?

[foobar104]

Really? Surely Chimera should be your dad.

Nope, sorry. OmniWeb 4.1 beta is faster than Chimera. It launches faster (2 bounces as opposed to about 8 for Chimera) and it renders a lot faster. It's also rock-solid stable-- I haven't used Chimera enough to speak for its stability.

But OmniWeb has this one tiny feature that I simply will not live without: you can filter web addresses based on regular expressions. For instance, I have images2.slashdot.org filtered; no more banners or... uh... whatever you call those big square things that I see in the middle of an article when I'm not using OmniWeb.

No, sorry, OmniWeb is truly my dad.

Re:Quartz AA in Carbon apps?

[foobar104]

Thats great! Windows XP has always provided this feature, and it's great to see that Apple is catching up.

Fucking ACs.

First of all, Mac OS had OS-level text antialiasing long before Windows did.

But that's not what we're talking about here. We're talking about Quartz antialiasing, which is a superior antialiasing algorithm to anything else out there. I believe it has to do with using a floating point coordinate system for subpixel rendering, but I'm not sure about that.

Re:Quartz AA in Carbon apps?

[doooras]

I used the IE that came with OS X for a few months (seemed like years since it's so damned slow) then i started using mozilla which was ok except it didn't scroll for shit (resolved in latest version) then i moved on to chimera which i absolutely loved (even though the v. i have still can't download) but now... i say my rosary to OmniWeb. It (almost) makes my iBook have orgasms. Definatly my first choice for a while.

i'll be damned if i'm going to pay for it, though.

Re:Quartz AA in Carbon apps?

[banky]

I believe that the app in question must be defined programmatically: since it's Carbon apparently it doesn't come for free.

Although there is an IE service release/update coming soon, or so I heard.

Re:Quartz AA in Carbon apps?

[foobar104]

i say my rosary to OmniWeb. It (almost) makes my iBook have orgasms. Definatly my first choice for a while.

i'll be damned if i'm going to pay for it, though.

I don't mean to make fun, but I'll be damned if this isn't the perfect Slashdot comment. "Loved your software. Use it every day. I'll never pay you for it, ever."

Sheesh. Some of us make our living writing and selling software, you know. You could be just a little more tactful.

Re:Quartz AA in Carbon apps?

[foobar104]

This is not true. As much as I am an Apple and mac advicate (and I like to believe I am) the truth is that font antialiasing was available in the Windows 95 Plus Pack....

I do apologize. It was late, and I got all confused between QuickDraw support for antialiasing (way back in '87 or so) and OS-level text antialiasing, which came in OS 8 around 1998. My bad.

But... uh... Windows sucks! ;-)

There are indeed two kinds of antialiasing in the MacOS, and with Quartz Extreme there will probably be three, if I am correct.

I don't believe so. I think Quartz Extreme just uses the same algorithm as regular Quartz, but implemented in OpenGL for advanced hardware acceleration.

Then again, I haven't had any coffee this morning, so I should evidently be careful what I say.

Re:Quartz AA in Carbon apps?

[foobar104]

Look closely at a Mac LCD display - if it was using pixel subsampling, you'd see little coloured bits around the edge. You don't.

Sigh. That's not what subpixel sampling means. When you antialias, you render the image at a higher resolution than you can actually display. For example, you might double the effective resolution, and each pixel on the screen would be represented by four pixels in memory. Each of these rendered-but-not-displayed pixels is called a subpixel.

That trick with using only the red, green, or blue parts of an LCD pixel to display edges of type ("ClearType," I think it's called) is a pretty lame attempt at increasing apparent visual resolution. In an informal survey of about 15 people around my office, nobody liked the little colored flecks around the letters. One person said it made him feel like his eyes were going in and out of focus.

So, first, you and I are talking about two different things. And second, ClearType is not superior.

Re:Quartz AA in Carbon apps?

[foobar104]

You are incorrect. Subpixeling, however the font was rendered behind the scenes, refers to using the R G B elements of an LCD's "pixel" to increase the horizontal (or vertical, depending on element orientation) resolution of the screen.

No, I am not incorrect. The word "subpixel" has been used to refer to pixel-splitting, but it's not true to say that it only refers to pixel-splitting.

I happen to have here on my desk a whitepaper written by Kurt Akeley of SGI about the Reality Engine graphics system. I can't seem to find a date on it, but it definitely pre-dates "ClearType" by many years.

One representative quote:

Alpha antialiasing of points and lines is common to second generation architectures. Alpha antialiasing is implemented using subpixel and line-slope indexed tables to generate appropriate coverage values for points and lines, compensating for the subpixel position of line endpoints.

So the use of the term "subpixel" clearly can refer either to pixel-splitting techniques (which date back to the Apple II, by the way; remember "double hi res?") or to multisampling at a resolution higher than final display resolution. The person to whom I responded thought I was talking about pixel-splitting when I used the word "subpixel," and I cleared that up. For you to come along behind and say that I had it wrong is just... well, wrong.

Re:Quartz AA in Carbon apps?

[spitzak]

Dammit you guys. "subpixel" means thinking about things that are smaller than a pixel. It does not mean ClearType. ClearType uses subpixel sampling.

There are about 3 ways to do anti-aliasing:

The very expensive way is to examine the actual paths you are rendering, how they intersect the pixels, and calculating the actual coverage of the pixels directly with math. This is probably what the original poster meant by "floating point". This is easy for infinitely long straight lines but very difficult for any other shape to do correctly.

A less expensive way is subpixel sampling, which is to use the normal black & white algorithim to render the letter about 4 times larger and then use 16 pixels (or sometimes weighted overlapping areas for better quality) to calculate the resulting gray from how many pixels are filled in. This can be done by hardware today and I believe is what is used by Quartz, the older Mac AntiAliasing, the new Windows AntiAliasing, and by Xrender for AntiAliasing. Note that some algorithims do the summation at the same time they calculate the subpixels, so there never is any "high resolution bitmap" in memory, but this does not change the basic algorithim.

The third way is to render at normal size and guess by looking at adjacent pixels. This is what Windows "Font Smoothing" did, I believe. A variation on it (producing shapes rather than grayscales) was used by early Macintoshes to render bitmaps onto higher-resolution printers. The primary advantage of this scheme is that it is fast, but otherwise it sucks.

ClearType is subpixel sampling with some multliple of 3 horizontally (not necessaryilly 1x3 as many people think, doing a higher resolution would result in better antialaiasing). These samples are then weighted-summed down to an image with 3 "subpixels" horizontally and one vertically. This is followed by a step I call "error diffusion" which is the clever part, to change the image by adding or subtracting some subpixels so the total amount or red, green, and blue are equal.

Okay, everybody, got it? "subpixel sampling" was used before Bill Gates first saw a computer, incidentally. It is NOT a MicroSoft invention, so stop making fools of yourselves.

Re:Quartz AA in Carbon apps?

[doooras]

I didn't say that I don't pay for software. I said I won't pay for my browser... it IS offered as a free download.

Besides, I was pretty drunk when I posted that. And since when is tact part of the /. experience? :-P

Re:Quartz AA in Carbon apps?

[foobar104]

Besides, I was pretty drunk when I posted that. And since when is tact part of the /. experience? :-P

Since never... you pig! ;-)

Re:Intel?

[Hard_Code]

"But what I'm much more interested in is why you, and lots of other people and trolls, seem to think that such a thing might happen?"

Maybe because it already happened before but was killed because Apple did not want to sell Mac OS for x86?

Re:Intel?

[foobar104]

The source of this questioning is probably the Darwin 1.4.1 ISO image for x86 that's available....

Sure, Darwin has been available for IA-32 for a long time. But Darwin isn't OS X. The question remains, why would anybody think Apple would port their flagship operating system-- meaning OS X, not Darwin-- to a different architecture? Isn't that kind of like asking when Tivo is going to port their software to Replay TV's hardware?

Re:OS X 10.2

[daeley]

The AC was correct, that the next major rev will be released in late summer. Officially, however, it is codenamed 'Jaguar' and is not being referred to by Apple as 10.2. Doesn't mean it won't be 10.2, but officially it isn't yet. Check out the full details here.

Much Faster on an Ibook

[linuxbert]

my iBook 300 is much faster rendering windows after this update. I ve been waiting for this one.

I cant wait till 10.2 comes out. that is supposed to be much snappier on slower g3 based systems.

Thank You apple

Re:Much Faster on an Ibook

[RevAaron]

"Thank You apple"

While I'm a Mac user, I find this funny. It's like when a retail joint marks everything up 30%, and then has a "massive!! one time!!" sale, everyting 20% off. Consumers, not knowing better, rejoice. Apple gives us a slow OS, and then makes it a little faster, and everyone sings praises.

Last week, OS 9 ate my HD. So I've been using my NeXT cube- 25 MHz 68040, 24 MB RAM, running NeXTSTEP 3.3. The sad thing is, it feels as fast as my iBook 500 MHz running OS X 10.1.4 most of the times, sometimes faster. So, no, it didn't have to be this way. Alas, it's still good that they're improving it!

Re:Intel?

[foobar104]

Maybe because it already happened before but was killed because Apple did not want to sell Mac OS for x86?

Sure, the Star Trek project. That project failed for the obvious reasons:

1. Apple didn't think it likely that PC vendors would choose to bundle a Mac OS for Intel with their systems, and Apple didn't like the odds of trying to sell an after-market OS to customers that already had one for their computers.

2. Apple didn't want to start a political battle with Motorola by appearing to endorse Intel's CPUs over the PowerPC.

3. Apple was-- and is-- a hardware company, not a software company. Porting the OS to another platform would do nothing but reduce Apple's hardware revenues, which would very quickly be self-defeating.

Same reasons Apple wouldn't want to port OS X to any other architecture. So the question stands: why would anybody assume that Apple would want to port their OS to a non-Apple hardware platform?

Re:Nope, poster was just a dope

[GMontag451]

That must have changed since I last looked at it then. The standard technique for getting OS X to boot on unsupported Macs used to be to make a new Install CD with a Darwin kernel in it compiled to support the older Mac replacing the OS X kernel.

Re:Intel?

[doooras]

3. Apple was-- and is-- a hardware company, not a software company.

This statement is posted quite often, but I have to (somewhat) disagree. Apple is not just a hardware company. Apple is a COMPUTER company. They make the whole shebang, the hardware, the OS, and a lot of the best software for the platform. Very few other companies can say that. (Sun, IBM, HP, perhaps... with various Unices in ONLY the server market)

I am glad that Apple doesn't port to x86. As a long time windows/linux user, I can say that I was surprised at how much I love my Mac systems. OS X, how I love thee. /3

Re:OS X 10.2

[ScumBiker]

I'll be upgrading my one OS X Mac when I get home. Is there any info anywhere about upgrading an OS 9 Mac to OS X withoput blowing away the old stuff on it? I've got a beige G3 and a slightly older G4 dual running DNS, 4D mail/webservers on them. I just bought out my ISP, actually, so I'm still learning about my new hardware/software.

DiSKiLLeR, I have to ask. Does your toilet water drain counter-clockwise? I now the seasons are reversed, I'm wondering about the coriolis effect of the earths spin.

Kernel Panic for DoubleCommand users !!

[tarkin]

All powerbook users that use DoubleCommand to turn the useless second enter key into another beware ! 10.1.5 crashes at boot time due to DoubleCommand.

Delete the folder in your Library/Startup Items folder !!

Re:Kernel Panic for DoubleCommand users !!

[nachoman]

For those unfortunate enough to have installed 10.1.5 without removing DoubleCommand this will probably help you get rid of it.

I'm not 100% sure on this as I'm not sure when DoubleCommand is loaded... but if it's loaded after user login (and you have login enabled) then you can try logging in as user name '>console'. That will drop you to a console and allow you to delete the folder before aqua is loaded.

I always keep login enabled just for cases like this where things could mess up.

One wierd change

[elliotj]

My tsch prompt in the terminal has changed. I'm pretty sure it's b/c of this update.

When I launch my terminal.app this the prompt:
[elliot\032johnson\226\149\146s\032comput er:~] elliotj%

but if I "pwd", it reports that I'm at:
/Users/elliotj

Wierd. Any ideas?

Re:One wierd change

[Anonymous Coward]

yep. Looks like you have some characters encoded in Octal (the \### sequences).

Notice that if you convert them, it'll say
[elliot johnson's computer:~] elliotj%

which is the name of your computer, followed by the current directory (~), which is equal to /Users/elliotj/, followed by your username.

if you don't want it to say "elliot johnson's computer", then you can rename it in the Sharing Preferences panel under System Preferences.

but this change isn't really a change at all - I've had a similar prompt (sans login) on all OS X versions, including 10.1.5.

Re:Nope, poster was just a dope

[Strog]

It is easier than that to install OS X on an unsupported PowerMac. I used Xpostfacto to install 10.1 on my PowerMac 8600/300.

I thought OS X would totally crawl on it but I went ahead and tried for the perverse pleasure of saying I did it. It actually works decently if you aren't in a big hurry. I moved it to the side of my desk and it plays my music, chat and general webrowsing while I'm working on my main system. Probably wouldn't like it for my primary system.

si, it's faster on my G4 400mghz/Rage128/1.1GB

[johnpaul191]

i have the G4 400mghz tower, rage 128 card and about a gig of Ram..... the install went smooth as ever..... everything does seem a bit snappier. restarts seem faster (though i usually only restart every few weeks if i need to goto OS 9 for something). in general apps seem to launch a lil faster too. i am noticing a MASSIVE speed increase trolling through my pictures in iPhoto. i have about 800 pictures in the library and it used to be a bit pokey changing thumbnail size or scrolling through the list.... it is at least a good 4 or 5 times faster. i was never sure if the lag was due to my graphics card or my seemingly now older processor.... but it has gotten a lot faster. idisk is faster too, but i have not played with it too much. i have heard the developer copy of 10.2 is faster even on older machines,a nd after installing this somewhat minor update, i an quite optimistic. anyway, no issues so far for me..... when i rebooted it moved my second display tot he right side (Apple default setting) but so far everything else i see is unchanged. even mouse speed stayed fast... that occasionally resets to some mid tracking speed. overall i give it the big thumbs up.

10.1.6

[cryptochrome]

I've heard rumors about 10.1.6, so that's not entirely true. Presumably the usual mix of bug fixes and driver additions.

And semanticly, I'm sure there will be plenty of free updates beyond 10.2 (such as 10.2.1).

Re:Intel? - No Transmeta

[dbrutus]

I'd bet more of my money on a Transmeta PPC compatibility layer being released as a firmware update and Apple signing OEM contracts with HPaq and other hardware manufacturers to put an Apple case/label on their hw where Apple isn't producing an entry in that field. With Jaguar's Inkwell handwriting recognition being rolled in, an OEM Apple machine sporting a Transmeta chip would actually fit the Steve desire for clones, something that would add, not cannibalize from the Apple lineup, something that would strategically benefit Apple like if HPaq sales channels would offer the Apple OEM line to their enterprise customers), and something that would generally fit with Apple culture. Steve hates fans, Transmeta is a very cool chip, Steve might be tempted here in a way that he wouldn't be with an intel line.

Transmeta would be validated as well since they would become the hardware to go for if you want to protect your investment. After all, if MS and/or Intel implodes under a Supreme Court ruling, you have maximum flexibility to the point of changing your emulation layer to the new most viable chip line.

This should be the right solution

[tarkin]

No , DoubleCommand is loaded before your machine reaches the loginwindow. So you can never login.
Because I booted into Jaguar and removed the folder that way, I can't say this works. But if DoubleCommand doesn't get loaded when booting in single usermode this will certainly work:

The only way to fix it is to boot in single user mode using holding cmd-s while booting. And then remove the folder in /Library/StartupItems/DoubleCommand.

See this page for more boot and startup commands :

Hibernation with SCSI PCI Card

[Lev13than]

Just want to add that my Sawtooth 400 with Adaptec SCSI 2906 now hibernates!

There was a problem in previous versions where (if I recall correctly) the OS didn't know what to do about supplying power to SCSI PCI cards when the system tried to hibernate, so they just disabled the feature. With the upgade to 10.1.5 it now goes into a deep sleep, which is a big improvement!

Update breaks Radeon 7000 support

[cloudscout]

The 10.1.5 update both fixes and BREAKS support for the Radeon 7000 PCI cards.

An incompatibility with Beige G3 systems has been corrected but now the video gets scrambled when the system wakes from sleep.

Unsanity hack to enable Quartz AA.

[teridon]

At the risk of perpetuating advertising for Unsanity... today I received this email from Unsanity (I use several of their "haxies"):

Dear friends,

When we saw MacOS X 10.1.5 out this morning, we got all excited about the ability of Carbon applications to use the native Quartz text rendering for ultra-smooth, antialiased text display. In order to take advantage of this feature, however, every Carbon application needs to be updated .

"That's not fair" - we thought, so we sat down and wrote a small freeware haxie, called Silk (smooth as silk, get the feeling?). Silk enables the Quartz text rendering and smoothing introduced in Mac OS X 10.1.5 for all Carbon applications. This means antialiased text in Microsoft Internet Explorer, Mozilla, and many others. And if it doesn't look right in some application, you can add it to the Exclude list to get it to the way it looked before.

So, grab it now:

http://download.unsanity.com/silk-10.sit

More information and some pretty screenshots:

http://www.haxies.com/silk/

Thank you for your support and participation!

Re:Unsanity hack to enable Quartz AA.

[cpeterso]

Why and how do Carbon apps need to be updated to use Quartz text smoothing? If Silk (apparently written in less than one day) is able to enable Quartz text smoothing for all apps, why couldn't Apple do the same?

Re:Unsanity hack to enable Quartz AA.

[PsychoSpunk]

It probably intercepts system calls and "fixes" things. Unfortunately, this means that you have to have an extra layer to capture the calls and it adds overhead. This is, as they say, an elegant hack for the meantime.

Re:Download 'em while you got 'em

[mr100percent]

Apple gives you 90 days to upgrade to their new OS for a discount. See Mac OS Up-to-date. I believe it comes to $20.

Re:Intel?

[bsartist]

Steve is a smart businessman (especially since NeXT taught him a thing or two)

I once saw an interview with a venture capitalist who said he wouldn't invest a dime in a company unless the founder had had at least two failures prior to starting it. Failing, and learning from the experience, is part of the path to success.

To bring this back at least somewhat on topic, the inclusion of better Rage Pro support in the 10.1.5 release, and the release of the eMac to the general public, is evidence that Jobs has learned from his failures, and is a better CEO for having been through them. The "old Steve" would have stuck to his guns and defended his decisions in these areas to the last. The "new Steve" better understands the price of stubbornness.

Re:Download 'em while you got 'em

[analog_line]

Within the box your hardware came in there are 3 coupons for free software (OS) upgrades, that give it to you for basically the cost of shipping. Shill thyself out.

The biggest disappointment...

[danamania]

...is that it's still not running on my Quadras.

(back to recompiling darwin on 68k for me... 3 months & seventeen days and gcc's STILL going...)

a grrl & her server

Iomega CDRW USB works!!

[themacboy]

I have spent the last 2 Months writing Image files using toast in OS X then writing them in OS 9 which is a pain in the ass! (created Desktop folders when viewed in X)

I have been emailing Iomega support and bitching about the lack of drivers

Installed the update, and toast now sees the Iomega drive in OS X

Happy Happy Joy Joy!!