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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."
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Incase anyone's wondering, this update doesn't seem to include a patch to zlib to fix the buffer overflow in it.
it is 34% more snappy, and applicaions open with 21% less DBs(dock bounces) than 10.4.1
Everytime there is a post about an apple update it always says "Quietly released". What the hell do you want Apple to do? Major newspaper headlines? Have Steve Jobs land a helicopter in your front yard to tell you the news? Christ, it's a minor update.
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?
Some drink at the fountain of knowledge. Others just gargle.
The widget manager would be neat if I hadn't already turned my dashboard off.
Dashboard itself takes about 20MB of memory. Each widget takes at least 20MB of memory. Most people I've seen have at least a half dozen widgets going (if nothing else, the default calendar widget, a notes widget, a weather widget, calculator, countdown...)
Six widgets and dashboard will take up a good 150mb of RAM right there. I'll save my 150mb of ram and use stickies, weather.com, regular calendar and the OSX calculator instead, thanks.
Dashboard could be potentially useful, but not if it keeps sucking up the resources it currently needs. And not if all people keep making for dashboard are widgets to replicate what OSX already has readily available (why would I use a stickies/notes feature in dashboard for 20MB ram when I could use the builtin OSX stickies at 9MB?).
I see a lot of people complaining on a lot of forums about this bug or that bug. Not that this isn't valid, but hoping that someone from the particular group at Apple will read your post is not a good way to go about getting your problem solved.
Step 1: Go to developer.apple.com and sign up for a free (as in beer) membership (or sign up for one of the expensive memberships if you want free software, hardware discounts, etc).
Step 2: Go to bugreporter.apple.com and fill out a report. You'll have to give up some info about your system and *detailed* info about the behavior, why its wrong, and what needs to be different. And if you can isolate the problem to a particular configuration, it'll help them fix the bug faster.
These enter Apple's internal bugtracking system. Some of your complaints are duplicates of existing ones, but if enough people bitch about a particular issue then there will be more pressure to fix it.
There is no step 3! (er, profit!)
The downside is that you'll likely never hear back from them. Even if the bug is solved, you'll never know until they release a new version. They may decide that the behavior is "works as intended" and ignore you. There is no way to follow the progress of your bug.