Mac OS X 10.5.2 Update Brings Welcome Fixes

jetpack writes to make sure we're aware that Apple's OS X 10.5.2 update is available and that it contains plenty of improvements and fixes that users have been asking for. Macworld enumerates some of the big ones, saying that the update "shows Apple listens to users" (sometimes). A couple of the new features simply restore Tiger (10.4) capabilities that Leopard (10.5) had inexplicably withdrawn. You can now shut off the much-maligned transparency of the menu bar, and organize your Dock stacks hierarchically and display them as folders. And Apple has provided welcome access to common Time Machine functions in the menu bar.

Comments

Re:What about the Parental Controls/Dashboard bug?

[the_proton]

To quote the release notes:

Addresses an issue in which Dashboard widgets may no longer be accessible after switching to or from an account that has Parental Controls enabled.

Re:Without reading the reversion list

[singularity]

Wow, that took some research to figure out what in the world you were talking about.

You do not want "two-way copying of MP3 (non-AAC, really) songs in iTunes", you are talking about bidirectional iPod syncing in iTunes. That is to say if there is a song on an iPod that is not in the iTunes Library, iTunes would copy the song from the iPod onto the computer.

That got yanked a while ago, and it's an irritating functionality loss.

Huh? I still have my (still functional) 2nd. Generation iPod. I have been syncing iPods with iTunes for a long time and I can assure you that "feature" was never in iTunes.

Apple has to walk a fine line with the recording industry, and cannot do anything too blatant to piss off the record labels.

Having my friend walk over with his 160GB iPod and give me his entire music collection, facilitated by Apple themselves? Yeah, I can see some issues with that.

There are plenty of very capable third-party programs out there that do exactly what you are talking about (Senuti being the big one on the Mac right now). They do what you are talking about, and Apple does not get into trouble for it. I do not see the issue here.

And please stop saying it was functionality that was dropped from iTunes. It was never there.

Re:Without reading the reversion list

[shawnce]

You can however sync purchased songs in both directions since if music is purchased Apple knows what account it is associated with and will let you sync in both directions with authorized iTunes libraries (under the same account).

http://www.apple.com/support/ipod/tutorials/beyondthebasics.html

Copy your purchases to another computer
1. Connect your iPod to your computer and open iTunes.
2. Choose File > "Transfer Purchases from iPod".
3. If you need to authorize your computer to play these purchases, select Store > "Authorize Computer".

http://www.apple.com/itunes/sync/ipod.html

Sync both ways.
When you sync your iPod with iTunes, you do exactly that: Keep your iPod and your computer synchronized. That means anything you've purchased from the iTunes Store (even on the go from your iPod touch), your ratings, on-the-go playlists, and even bookmarks from podcasts and audiobooks all sync back to your Mac or PC.[1]

1. Music and media not purchased from the iTunes Store sync only one way, from your computer to your iPod. To transfer non-purchased music from computer to computer, read this tutorial.

Re:Any New drivers in it for hardware that is not

[Christopher Rogers]

Once you install 10.5.2 another update becomes available that updates various video drivers. Some animations seem "snappier" now, particularly Expose and Spaces.

Re:right direction

[Spheniscus]

You can navigate to the parent folder at lest four different ways:

1. Command-click (or right click) on the folder name in the title of the window.
2. Press command-up (or select Go/Enclosing Folder from the menu)
3. Turn on the Path Bar (view / show path bar)
4. Customize the toolbar and add the path button to the toolbar

Re:How about fixing Finder?

[amake]

* Restore the ability to have folders remember their views.

You can still make them remember views by clicking the checkbox in the View Options (Command-J) window. I agree that this is annoying.

* Run each Finder window in a separate process, so it doesn't lock everything up when one window gets busy. Particularly when hitting network shares.

You mean break the entire application model that Mac OS has used since forever, which is that each window is not its own process? How about just making the Finder more multithreaded, which they've been doing fairly well. I haven't had the Finder in Leopard hang on me relating to network shares.

* Move the "FTP" support from Finder to Safari, so we don't have the overhead and security issues of file-system-like operations when accessing remote high-latency servers.

You could just not use FTP in the Finder. There are plenty of good, free FTP clients out there, like Cyberduck.

* Bring back the Shelf from NeXTSTeP.

What? Have you ever actually used the Shelf from NeXTSTEP? I haven't, but I've never heard anyone who had anything good to say about it. I think we've moved well beyond the need for such a feature, what with Expose and all. What specific problem would you like the Shelf to solve?

* Add "Cut" as well as "Copy". There's a "Cut" option in the edit menu but it's always greyed out. If there's some obscure option key that will enable this, well...

You can't Cut files or folders because what you're expecting to happen (based probably on similar functionality in Windows or other systems) is fundamentally different from what Cut actually is. Cut (for text, the original and default context for this feature) erases the selection entirely and puts a copy in the pasteboard. The copy in the pasteboard is lost as soon as you copy or cut something else. "Cut for text" is also undoable. "Cut for files," on the other hand, does not erase the selection until you paste. It does not delete the selection in the pasteboard if you copy something else. It is sometimes undoable, but is rarely guaranteed to be so. It's also not obvious what happens if you Cut, then modify the selection, and then paste (which version is pasted, the old or the new?)In other words, you don't want Cut; you want a copy of the Windows feature that is inappropriately named Cut. Well, it's not there, and probably shouldn't be (since it hasn't been implemented "correctly" in any system I've seen). I know, I know, who cares about nit-picky crap like this? Well, Steve cares.

Re:AEBS backups

[jchillerup]

1a) Wait. 1b) When your drive is full, watch the fireworks. TMShowUnsupportedNetworkVolumes does NOT work correctly and is NOT supported (hence the "Unsupported"...)

Re:AEBS backups

[NMerriam]

I suspect this is not fixed, but I don't know. Anyone?

It's not broken, so don't ever expect it to be "fixed". When designing the backup system, they chose to use fewer real-time computing resources so that it was essentially invisible to the users (and thus wouldn't get turned off by everyone for "slowing down the computer") and make restoration trivially simple and fast, at the expense of disk space. You can disagree with their choices, but they're the same tradeoffs every backup system designer has to make.

I use rdiff-backup for some of my data where frequent small updates of large files are an issue, but I'm under no illusions that running a CPU at 100% for 30 minutes for every backup would be acceptable out-of-the-box behavior for most consumers. It especially wouldn't be acceptable to spend days or weeks calculating deltas when restoring a hard drive full of files that have been modified over the course of months or years.

It's a lot easier and cheaper to add disk space than processing power, as much as I'd love to see deltas offered I think I would have made the same choices Apple did if I were in charge of designing TM.