So I had to wait an extra day for some reason, but last night I got my Take Two upgrade for my Apple TV up and running. I rented an HD movie (The Simpsons, for those who’re curious) and it looked and sounded great. The 5.1 Dolby Surround was flawless and the video looked just amazing, far better than what I get with Comcast HD.
The update itself took just 7 minutes from start to finish. My Apple TV itself now works great. But then I ran into a problem that took me hours to fix.
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That awful translucent menu bar in Leopard is now optional. Leaked screenshots of 10.5.2 show the option to turn on/off that menu bar “feature,” which, along with Stacks’ erratic behavior, annoyed me more than anything else in Leopard.
Speaking of Stacks, Apple made it so that the feature works like pre-Leopard folder-in-the-dock worked: list view has returned. Sounds like 10.5.2 is finally what 10.5.0 should have been.
I love Leopard: I’ve disabled Dashboard, I don’t use Stacks, I reverted my menu bar back to “normal,” I’ve altered the dock (using this application) and don’t backup. Oh, and I had to reinstall it one week after launch because of some weird window drawing/jumping problem.
But it’s smooth sailing now.
LEOPARD 10.5.2 UPDATE ADDS DVD SHARING, BETTER STACKS, TRANSLUCENT MENU BAR AND REMOTE BACKUP! [BabyGotMac via MacRumors]
It’s Friday and the news is sloooooow.
I’ve never liked the idea of Time Machine – I back up the things that are important to me on my own schedule, and I know where it all is and how it works. Time Machine strikes me as a black box that utilizes my CPU and hard drive in a mysterious and inefficient way. Furthermore, laptops are basically left out of the party. Time Capsule is a great solution and while I still won’t be updating to Leopard, I have to hand it to Apple that an integrated 1TB hard drive in an Airport hub is a fantastic idea. Of course, they could have just made it easy for you to homebrew something like this in the first place, but why not make a few extra bucks with their own version?
The hub is a natural place for low-intensity, high-volume data storage: it’s out of the way, it’s connected, and it’s not going to be used for anything else. There’s no chance of losing it, after all it’s attached to the wall. I’ve always had a fear of partitions (due to an early trauma) so a dedicated backup server is a good solution for me, and also for the people who don’t want cables and mixed external HDs laying around the place. Not to mention those who are simply responsible and prescient enough to back up their important things regularly and as such find Time Machine superfluous and wasteful. As for the price, well you know the line: if you can afford an Apple computer, you can afford a $500 network hub to back up all your bad photos and amateur Buffy novelization drafts.
A prelude of things to come next week at MacWorld?
Apple speed bumped the Mac Pro and Xserve today; both now use Intel’s recently-released Penryn processor. The revised Mac Pro, what every little Mac Head wish he had the money for, has:
- two 2.8 GHz Quad-Core Intel Xeon processors with dual-independent 1600 MHz front side buses;
- 2GB of 800 MHz DDR2 ECC fully-buffered DIMM memory, expandable up to 32GB;
- ATI Radeon HD 2600 XT with 256MB of GDDR3 memory;
- 320GB Serial ATA 3Gb/s hard drive running at 7200 rpm;
- 16x SuperDrive(TM) with double-layer support (DVD+/-R DL/DVD+/-RW/CD-RW);
- two PCI Express 2.0 slots and two PCI Express slots;
- Bluetooth 2.0+EDR; and
- ships with Apple Keyboard and Mighty Mouse.
That’ll set you back $2,799.
As for the $2,999 Xserve…
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Here’s Apple’s latest “Get a Mac” ad, which comes only a few weeks after its Christmas-themed one. This one uses sports to parlay the fact that the Wall Street Journal called Leopard “better” and “faster” than Vista.
I wonder if next week’s MacWorld will give unto us yet another one of these ads?
Get a Mac [Apple via Mac Rumors
Apple has begun distributing to developers a massive 362MB update for Leopard. OS X 10.5.2 build 9C7 includes over 70 fixes for problems related to the OS. According to Apple insider, developers have been told to, “focus their testing efforts on an expansive list of components running some 37 items long. Among them were Data Detectors, the Mac OS X Dock, the Finder, grammar checking, iCal, iChat, Mail, Parental Controls, Quick Look, Rosetta, Safari, Time Machine, and Leopard’s 802.11 AirPort implementation.”
Build 9C7 resolves many printing problems such as modular printing and AirPort shared printing. It also fixes a number of issues related to iMail. There is no definite date as to when this update will be released, but speculation points toward sometime around Macworld in Jan.
Mac OS X 10.5.2 to deliver sprawling list of fixes for Leopard [Apple Insider]
The year 2007 will soon draw to a close, meaning we’ll be seeing plenty of year-end retrospectives on every Web site in Creation. I don’t expect many of them to be worth the time of day, yet this one—the year’s top tech disappointments, as ranked by PC World —is more or less on point. I’m sure you’re familiar with all of them, not least of which because we’ve complained about many of them here.
The year’s biggest flops include “Me, Too” social networks, WiMax and its troubled roll-out, Leopard (it shipped with several bugs), the Facebook Beacon fiasco, and a certain Microsoft operating system that was nearly universally panned. Hint: its name rhymes with Christa…
I’m not gonna steal PC World’s thunder, so head on over there if you’re into lists designed to draw traffic.
The 15 Biggest Tech Disappointments of 2007 [PC World]
Skype 2.7 Beta for Mac OS X was released a few days ago and, in case you missed it, the popular VOIP service now plays nicely with Leopard and offers 640×480 video if your camera can handle it.
"Leopard compatible – if you have the latest Mac OS X 10.5 then you can use Skype with confidence.
Better video resolution – your video conversations are now set at a whopping 640 x 480 pixels by default with up to 25 frames per second. If your webcam can handle this resolution you’ll soon be appearing in an improved and bigger format on friends screens."
Download Skype Beta for Mac OS X [Skype]
I know I’ve bitched and moaned about Leopard in the last few weeks, but I just can’t handle it anymore. I’m going to search for my Tiger disc and reinstall it over the weekend. Leopard has too many kinks and it’s not worth the headache. It pisses me off that Apple has screwed up so badly. I’d rather go back to XP then use this shit anymore. Sounds crazy doesn’t it? Considering the fact that I’ve been worshipping OS X like it was some higher entity or something. Like I said, Tiger is great and I’ll be going back to it if I can find the install disc or I’ll be scouring the torrent sites for it. Do you have beef with Leopard? I’m sure you do. Here’s why I want it to die. A slow and painful death. Umm. No. I’d rather push it in front of a train if it were a physical being. I guess I could smash the DVD.
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Well, I wouldn’t presume to say, but this fellow at PC Magazine seems to be less shy about it, and he has a bone to pick with Cupertino’s latest opus. He’s concerned about the stability issues, unnecessary and distracting visual elements, questionable “fixes,” and my personal least favorite thing about Leopard, Time Machine. Don’t get me wrong, I love my Mac, but I fully agree with his points on this shady little update. The one thing I don’t agree with, however, is his penchant for rhetorical questions. Does he really think that adding a question at the end of a paragraph makes it more forceful?
Leopard is the New Vista, and It’s Pissing Me Off [Yahoo! News]
We all knew it was coming. The announcement that Apple would stop supporting the Boot Camp beta some time after Leopard came out was not well received, but once people figured out it didn’t mean their partition was going to self-destruct, they seemed okay with it. Well, the time has come. December 31st will the last day of support for the long-running beta, after which time the partition helper app “Assistant” will cease to work (kind of suspicious) but your XP or Vista install will remain bootable. Yes, it’s all very sad, but the problems of one obsolete little OS don’t amount to a hill of beans in this crazy world. Besides, we’ll always have Parallels.
Apple: Boot Camp beta expires Dec. 31 [InfoWorld]
If your Intel-based Apple portable is having keyboard problems after the Leopard upgrade, you’re not alone. In fact, you’re alongside legions of other users. The bug comes and goes intermittently, causing the keyboard to freeze for a random amount of time. Usually a restart will solve it, but often an extra and PITA step of a PRAM reset is needed.
The latest software update doesn’t fix the problem, however Apple should likely have a patch out soon. Problems like this tend to be easy to fix, though Apple’s been known to put its hands over its ears and say, “Blah blah blah can’t hear you blah blah,” so we’ll see what happens.
MacBook, MacBook Pro owners suffer keyboard freezing with Leopard [Apple Insider (no, you brought 'er!)]
Just when you thought it was safe to hit up that sharapova_hott_champ.jpg some random dude sent you, a once-forgotten security hole from the depths of 2006 comes to claim your kernel.
A nearly 2-year-old bug in Mail allowed malicious types to include executable code in the resource fork of a file, without changing its MIME type. In other words, it says quacks like a .jpg but walks like a worm. Or slithers. In any case, the bug was fixed in a patch but has since re-emerged in Leopard; think about it as a 301st feature, a bonus added to the already overflowing cup that is OS 10.5. Our friends at Heise Security have demonstrated the bug and those vultures at the Register seized upon it like, well, you know, like vultures. In any case, until further notice, be aware of suspicious MIME types, and always check your hashes.
Leopard security bug puts Mail users at risk [El Register]
Looks like Apple might be mulling over the inclusion of Boot Camp in Leopard according to a statement released to investors last week.
may deter developers from creating software applications for Mac OS X if such applications are already available for the Windows platform.
Duh.
Apple Warns ‘Boot Camp’ Could Lead To Fewer Mac Apps [Info Week]
So last week I did a clean install of Leopard onto my 2GHz Core Duo MacBook and every time I go to watch a video on YouTube or whatever, the fan immediately fires up. I can’t figure it out. I don’t know why it’s running so hot. Has anyone else experience this? I’m not even watching videos right now and the fan is buzzing like crazy.
I don’t know what any of this means, but I’m sure some of you with Leopard have run into the firewall issues so maybe you might make some sense out of this.
Thanks for the tip, windexh8er!
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I’ve held off on upgrading my MacBook to Leopard because I know things are bound to go wrong the first time through. I’m in no rush and I certainly don’t want to get a headache over this when I don’t really need to. But Apple has called upon its developer community to QA its first maintenance release; OS X 10.5.1 build 9B13, which is 267MB. The bugs being addressed include issues with firewalls, spotlight indexing, iCal syncing, keychain login and text drawing corruption as well as fixes for the wide variety of issues related to the e-mail client. Apple has asked developers to pay attention to Time Machine, Mail, iCal, Back To My Mac, Bonjour, AirPort, Finder, networking and gaming graphics. Build 9B13 is expected to be released in a few weeks.
First builds of Mac OS X 10.5.1 pack over two dozen fixes [Apple Insider]
Iomega’s newest MiniMax and UltraMax hard drives were designed with Leopard in mind. Both drives come preformated with HFS+, the file system used by Leopard (and previous version of OS X). So if you ever wanted to use the Time Machine system backup feature, literally all you’d have to do is plug the drive in and click “use drive for Time Machine,” no converting from Windows-friendly FAT32 or NTFS file systems required.
Both drives should be available today barring a FedEx strike or something, with the MiniMax starting at $180 for 500GB and the UltraMax at $190 for 500GB.
UltraMax [Iomega via Electronista]
