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 A couple of the new features simply restore Tiger (10.4) capabilities that Leopard (10.5) had inexplicably withdrawn.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

AEBS backups

[sam.thorogood]

You can't back up to drives plugged into an Airport Extreme, though, even though the much-toted Time Capsule will apparently be able to (In their defence, this could come with an update before the Time Capsule actually ships).

Re:AEBS backups

[nsayer]

The reason that it's "unauthorized" is because beta testers discovered problems with data corruption.

It'd suck to need to restore from your backups only to discover that they were pooched.

Re:AEBS backups

[Just Some Guy]

Will Time Machine do differential backups now?

Well, it has been for the last two months and I doubt they disabled it.

Just compare how long Vista has been out with how long Leoptard has been out, and it becomes even more apparent which company released a functioning product, and which one required a desperate emergency update.

You're 100% correct. Leopard is down to the point that they're fixing cosmetic issues that customers complained about, while Vista still isn't sure if you can listen to an MP3 while downloading from a local fileserver. That desperate emergency update, aka SP1, is about a year long in coming. It must irk MS to no end that Leopard just needs the final spit and polish while Vista languishes.

Typed on Linux. I don't really care one way or the other, but there's no way you can say that Leopard is as troubled as Vista.

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.

Re:AEBS backups

[jellomizer]

I am not sure if you are either a New Mac User who has gotten your first Mac Within 2 years or you just tend to forget quickly...
Every New Major version of OS X comes with a bunch glitches which they slowly but shirley fix in time. It happened in 10.1, 10.2, 10.3, 10.4 and 10.5 there are new features that pop in that people don't quite like that get adjusted, there is some odd combination that doesn't seem to work just right. and by 10.x.4 or so. things run so smoothly that you begin to forget the pain you once had, and By the time of the next version you are on 10,.x.10 or so. Where everything is rock solid. Then you get a New version 10.x+1 and it is full of these little glitches again, normally annoying but rarely a huge show stopper.
You are under the impression that Any Software Company with deep pockets can produce a bug free system, which is wrong. I could write a complex program and debug it and check it for a huge amount of time much longer then miss a simple bug. For example I was making a type ahead dropdown box in HTML/Javascript for an intranet app. I have tested and tested it it was perfect. Then when it went to testing it came right back saying the drop down box disappeared when ever someone scrolled down. What happened when I was testing it I always used the mouse scroll wheel to scroll down the list while other people just clicked the scroll bar to drag it down and caused a lost focus on my control, causing the menu box to go away. The fix was easy but the issue was I never though of testing it that way because I do things a particular way consistently. So does Apple, and the Beta Testers... So they could have worked out all the issues they have found then on Day one of the release someone just did that one thing they never expected.

Troll thread

[Anonymous Coward]

All trolls please post here please so its easier to mod us all down.

Re:Troll thread

[SuperRenaissanceMan]

Jets suck, Yankees suck, Knicks suck... Krypton sucks... Apple sucks...

Does it bring back the "Windows Shade"?

[starglider29a]

I still double click my title bar expecting the window to vanish, leaving the title bar there, beneath my mouse, so I can say 'thanks' click click. And be back to where I was.

We were so amazed when Windows 3.0 taught us to "minimize" and still have ***another application running*** (back when DOS was neato) that we didn't ask "ok, so, why do I have to reach to the very farthest point on the screen to get my window back?"

Yes, Exposé might be a cool way around that, and some Vista maven may say 'aeroglass', but click-click... click-click is about as simple as it can possibly get. And no motion sickness!

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.

The best way to describe this update

[jht]

This is like SP1 in Windows land. Basically, 10.5 is the GM, 10.5.1 is where they fix other things that emerged in the several weeks between GM and public availability (along with a couple of critical bugs that turn up in the first few days of wider public release), and then 10.5.2 is the first release based on public feedback and issues. That's also part of why this version enables you to turn off the menubar translucency (and makes the menus themselves more opaque) - users hated it so Apple tweaked things for them.

Windows is freakin' huge - hence the year to Vista SP1 - but Microsoft's releases also go much wider, have more hardware to test with, and have more public pre-release cycles as well. So it takes them a year to do a service pack, where Apple only takes about 3-4 months.

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

Bah

[adamruck]

I administer an apple x server at work, and I haven't been impressed.

I'm running ubuntu on a PC, so I can't use the server admin, or workgroup manager tools. Also, apple doesn't come with a standard VNC server, instead it uses VNC with some proprietary shit built in, so I had to install vine server to get a remote desktop. Of course, vine server sucks as well, because I can't get it to start on boot, without logging into the server with either the native server admin tools, or locally with a KVM. Oh wait, the X Serve doesn't play nice with a standard KVM. I have an extra mouse and keyboard setting in my rack just for the X Serve.

Once you manage to get in the damn thing, if you have any sort of complicated setup at all, you simply CAN'T DO it using the server admin tool. I've usually had to bust into the config files just like any other Unix system. Take a look at the SQL section of the Server Admin tool, its a fucking joke. Also, even if you do start to do some things by hand, shit still doesn't work right.

See one of my bug reports here.

http://macosx.com/forums/mac-os-x-server/298314-samba-shares-hfs-extended-attributes.html

The mailing list / blog / colander stuff is also less than impressive. Why the FUCK should I have to wait 15 minutes for my changes to take affect. It this 1982 or some shit? Some changes seem to take much longer than that as well. I waited a whole day for one of my groups to show up. Why is it that the "recent changes" section of each group shows group emails, even if I turn the mailing list feature off?

Oh yeah, last but not least, the server crashes. It responds to pings, still responds to local terminal input, but anything that requires authentication is dead in the water. So that leaves mail, netbios, ssh, server admin, work group manager, etc etc all dead. I think the LDAP server is crapping out, but I haven't been able to prove it yet. I've had to hard boot the server half a dozen times in the last two weeks.

My last rant. WHAT THE FUCK IS WITH THE QUICK TIME UPDATES, AND THE REQUIRED RESTARTS. Jesus christ, it's like I'm working with windows NT.

Re:Bah

[chrome]

*pat* *pat*

If its any consolation there are probably at least another 5 or 6 people who run OS X Server. And I'm sure they hate it just as much ...

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:Menubar! how to make it not completely obnoxiou

[chromatic]

Mac OS X will never be ready for the desktop while it requires users to use the command-line to... oh, too easy?

Re:Without reading the reversion list

[lurch_mojoff]

True, true, true, but at the end of the day there is reality. And in reality the recording industry are like wizards - they are too powerful for their own good and very easy to anger. Look at the situation Apple are in with non-DRM'd songs on iTunes. Except for EMI, the rest of the big 4 would nearly rather put their stuff on the Pirate Bay, than allow Apple to sell it and the only reason is that they don't quite like Apple having ~75% of the online distribution market (something Apple had achieved through products and services better than everyone else's; i.e. they rightfully have that big market share). Imagine if Apple refused to cave in at RIAA's demand to disallow syncing back from an iPod - then Apple might as well close the iTunes store. This does not excuse Apple, but at least they are not doing it just to spite you or to create lock- in.