Apple Releases OS X 10.4.2 Update

kenthorvath was one of many readers to note that "Apple has quietly released an update for OS X Tiger. New features include a widget manager for dashboard and some 200 bug fixes and enhancements."

Comments

no zlib patch

[inio]

Incase anyone's wondering, this update doesn't seem to include a patch to zlib to fix the buffer overflow in it.

need to fix spolight too

[goombah99]

While I love being able to text search in content, spotlight is so horribly beta I'm almost at the point of disabling it. The thing keeping me from that is that I'd lose my mail search.

The problems with spolight are well known now but I'll recite them:

1) doesn't let you finish typing before it searches. Yeah that was supposed to be a feature, but apparently it wont halt and discard the first search as you try to type. If you are a slow typist and qimply type the letter followed by a pause before typing "uicktime", for example, you have to wait while it finds every document witha Q in it. You cant stop it. No hacker has yet reporeted finding where they store the default time delay so you can adjust it.

2) When you sort by date you can only sort by last access date not creation date. Worse yet, if you click on one of the items on the spotlight list (to get info on it) spotlight "touches" the document and poof it has todays date as its last viewed date. So that's totally useless and even dangerous if you are relying on it to figure out the most recent version of something you were using.

3) in the same vein, over time spotlight seems to touch all the resource or meta data forks creation dates. Or maybe not, I'm not sure. but the net effect is if you try to rsync it to another drive on a unix computer (using apple_double ) to preseve the meta data it ends up detecting that EVERY file has changed and recopies it, totally defeating the point of rsync.

4) you are supposed to be able to disable it from indexing a disk by using the "mdutil -i off "command. This only works some of the time. For example I had a two partition disk and while spotlight indexing is turned off on both, it still indexes one of them but not the other. (yes I deleted the old index). If you declare something Private it does not actually delete the index but simply does not report results for that folder. This is useless for stopping indexing on removable disks.

5) if you plug in a USB thumb driver it may decide to index it even if your just copying files off of it.

6) it's buggy. Often in Mail it fails to find content you know is present. Dont know if thats Mail, Spotlight or the API thats gummed.

7) It's insanely slow on a 1.2 GHZ powerboog or 800 Mhz G4 imac. Oddly it seems somewhat closer to reasonable on a G5

8) there's no simple way to have it default to find by name. in the finder to find by name you have to do the following steps. press command-F, pull down the find-by-kind and change it to find by name, then enter the name in the test field. Dont type slowly or it finds everthing with the first letter you type while you wait for five minutes. You can try to change the default from find-by-kind to find-by-name but most (but not all!) users find this change is not sticky and it reverts to find_by-kind. (and who would want find-by-kind to be the default!)

9) find by name is insanley slow compared to say "locate" in unix. it's not a lot faster than "find" in unix. Apparently they must not have indexed their DB on the name. what were they thinking?

Re:need to fix spolight too

[drdink]

Have you reported these issues to Bugreporter? Even if you think somebody else did, the duplicate count will make it more obvious that people are annoyed by these things.