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Mac OS X 10.5.3 To Fix Over 200 Bugs, Coming Soon
An anonymous reader writes "MacScoop reports that 'Apple has seeded several builds of its Mac OS X Leopard 10.5.3 update to developers during the past few weeks and just seeded yet another one numbered "9D34" earlier today.' The update fixes over two hundred bugs, weighs almost half a gigabyte and should be available soon."
It's more like a *nix version increase than an MS service pack... sort of. Apple uses a lot of open source BSD stuff... so when they update all that stuff it has whatever the open source crowd has done, plus whatever Apple decides to do with it. I recall some new features in the 10.4 succession... so I guess 10.5.3 might contain some new features but I wouldn't hope for anything earth shattering (like ZFS). I truly wish they would fix the Bluetooth audio headphone thing but I suppose it isn't priority.
People still have dial up? I expect that Apple would ship disks on request but I wouldn't expect them for free. I've never had Apple refuse a reasonable service request but I've never asked for that. Also I'll bet you can download a PPC or X86 (or a version for a specific sort of Mac like my cube) which is substantially smaller. That universal binary thing is really, really nice (my 8 core mac pro can boot from the same hard drive as my Quad PPC G5 and my PPC G4 Cube) but it makes things twice as large.
I would say that sane Mac users will ignore this news and wait until the software update app on their Mac alerts them. Really smart users will postpone that for while to see if there are a rash of catastrophes caused by the update⦠even if there is a bug fix or update they are interested in.
Nothing in the world is more dangerous than sincere ignorance and conscientious stupidity.
i dunno how stable time machine is supposed to be, but it certainly isnt on the imacs we got at school for our art lab. of course, the fact that art students are the ones who keep managing to mess things up with it might have a great deal more to say about the problem...
I recently upgraded my MacBook to 10.5, and have been regretting it. I only use some of the new features (don't really care about Time Machine, one of the biggies), and a lot of stuff that used to Just Work (wireless networking) has become problematic.
The biggest problem I had, oddly, was with downloading software updates - the downloads would mysteriously stop after a few seconds or minutes (and not due to loss of network connectivity - a Windows box on the same network was able to download stuff rock solid, at the same time), and would never resume. Had to do some kind of Mac voodoo (Restore Permissions, or something like that) to fix it. So I'm a little concerned about even being ABLE to download a 500 MB software update, due to bugs in the software...
JRjr
The biggest improvement with 10.5 is that Spotlight now actually works. In 10.4 it was so slow that I could generally find files faster without it. With 10.5 it is fast enough to be useful.
I keep my dock on the left side, attached to the top-left corner, and the 10.5 dock is about as nice as the 10.4 one, just different. Most of the visual 'improvements' make things worse. The transparent menu bar is hideous with most background colours. The larger drop shadows are okay, but they don't really make up for the fact that the new style gives less of a visual clue as to which window is raised (I've typed things in the wrong window a lot more often since upgrading). There are lots of little regressions, particularly in the text system (CoreText is definitely not ready for prime time) and especially with Rosetta.
The new Preview is very nice - I now use it exclusively, where I used to use 3 different apps for PDFs, and Quick Look and Coverflow are both nice for browsing the filesystem, although I don't use them very often. Support for ODF in TextEdit is definitely useful for small docs, since OO.o takes forever to launch.
I do, however, find I am using fewer and fewer Mac-only apps, so I am not sure if my next computer will be a Mac.
I am TheRaven on Soylent News
If I already have a Terminal window in space 2 and want to create another one, this fact doesn't help because Spaces keeps track of the space the front-most window of an application is in. So even if there is a Terminal window in space 2 but a Terminal window in space 1 is more "front-most" than the one in space 2, then when I Command-Tab to switch to Terminal, I'll be brought back to space 1. Again, this isn't what I wanted.
The current behavior of Spaces whereby it auto-switches spaces or changes what the front-most app is (presumably to be "helpful"), IMHO, makes Spaces broken and unusable. Spaces should never automatically switch spaces nor change the front-most app no matter what (or at least have a Preference to make this the case).
I've been an Apple fan-boy since my Apple ][plus, but Leopard is the first version of OS X that I thought wasn't very compelling (and kind of broken) on release.
If you reply, do so only to what I explicitly wrote. If I didn't write it, don't assume or infer it.
I don't know if this will be helpful, but I found I liked the Leopard dock better after running:
defaults write com.apple.dock no-glass -boolean YES; killall Dock
It gets rid of the 3D look and gives the same look that the dock takes when you move it to the side of the screen.
It is "developer seed" and "combo". It means, it is not end user version and in mac land, combo means "zero patch, all files updated since 10.5.0 with all language resources".
:)
Vista/XP does very aggressive patching on windows update. If a Mac general end user who kept his/her system up to date with software update sees 10.5.3 , it will be almost 5x smaller (or even less) than the 500 mb you see.
Also, "Developer Seeds" may have symbols, debug stuff implemented on them, they are intended for developers and never cleaned up like end user shipments. It is never a "lets download, copy the what's new and leak to some site" kind of file release
I don't want to get in too much details but the Apple's userbase are known to change icons, remove/add languages thanks to unique HFS+ filesystem. On Mac land, you can only trust to binaries to patch. It is another reason why Apple or any Mac software vendor can't ship pure patches except binary patchers. For example, people keep changing safari.app icon, it is trivial on OS X since only the resource portion is changed or they remove languages (not good on Leopard btw) from their applications.