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."

Comments

Re:Service pack 3?

[bhima]

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.

Re:Service pack 3?

[TheRaven64]

I thought Time Machine was great when I saw the demos, but it is completely incompatible with File Vault, which means you have to choose between security and safety for your data. You can kind-of use it with File Vault, but it will only run backups when you log out (which is something I only ever do to reboot for software updates), and so is completely useless.

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.

What's wrong with Spaces

[pauljlucas]

Suppose I have Terminal windows in space 1 and Safari in space 2. I'm currently browsing in space 2 and I now want another Terminal window here in space 2. I Command-Tab to switch to Terminal. I'm immediately brought back to space 1 which isn't what I wanted. I'm forced to create the new Terminal window in space 1 and move it to space 2. Note that if instead I immediately switch back to space 2, Terminal will no longer be the front-most app.

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.