[option] + Goodness
[option] + all sorts of things have interesting results. Example: [option] + one of the volume keys will open sound preference. Play with this and other modifier keys discover more sensible secret fun.
Happy Snow Leopard day!
Snow Leopard ships today, and my Learn Snow Leopard book will soon be hitting the shelves of a bookstore near you. Also as an added bonus a redesign on this sight along with some tasty new content is on it's way.
AirPort/WiFi Fixed
Those little updates Apple throws at us between the larger "point" and security updates are sort of a mystery. They tend to provide rather sparse information about exactly what they are fixing, and more often then not I don't notice anything different. The latest Time Machine and AirPort Updates v1.0 however, actually seems to fix the issues I was having in this previous post.
Another interesting note about this… I filed an bug report with Apple for this and actually got a response from an Apple engineer. This, in my experience, isn't normal. Often it seems as if sending info to Apple is a bit like sending it to /dev/null. It's nice to actually get some some sort of acknowledgment from Apple. Between this, and actually fixing, at least to some degree, the horrors that Apple thrust upon us with Stacks as they first appeared in Leopard shows that someone there might actually be listening… sometimes anyway.
This on top of the fact that Safari 3.1 is a really, really nice update, makes Apple look all shiny. (Though the manner in which Apple thrust Safari 3.1 on unsuspecting Windows users, who have developed the habit of clicking through an obnoxiously large number of system popups without reading them, may present a small smudge).
Glitches in Spaces
I received an email from someone who purchased (or in some other way acquired) my book who seemed distressed that spaces was not working correctly. Specifically, she had Mail set in the Spaces preferences (in the System Preferences) to open in Space #2, and it didn't! After some back and forth emailing, we found that removing Mail from the "Application Assignments" section of the Preference and re-adding it seemed to fix the problem. Not sure what bugged this up in the first place (though I could offer guesses), however if you find yourself in a similar situation you may try this to see if it fixes your problem.
OS X 10.5.2 is here and it totally messes up my AirPort/WiFi!
First the good… 10.5.2 fixes almost all the initial interface issues, that most people had. The transparent menu bar never bugged me as much as others (I did select a background image with this a a consideration though), however now you can toggle that. Stacks seem to be mostly fixed (though you still can't traverse aliased folders in "List" view). Finally the Time machine Menubar Item is nice and should have been there all along. All good things.
Now the very ugly… I can no longer find my WiFi network at work, not at all! In my last post I noted that there were issues connecting to the Fortinet FortiWiFi 50B at work. This was annoying, but there were workarounds, in fact switching from WEP to WPA (as things should have been to begin with) seemed to solve the problem entirely. However, after applying the 10.5.2 update, things are now worse then ever. My MacBook Pro doesn't even see the WiFi network, making it impossible to connect no matter what security is used (even with none at all). Now there are many issues with this problem:
- There is clearly something unique going on with the FortiWifi unit, since I've never had these issues with numerous brands of WiFi routers all over the world. Attempting to contact Fortinet for an answer futile, as it seems there support, from my experience, represents the worst of the worst. (Why anyone would pay three to five times more for a WiFi router from a company that sucks this bad is beyond me. They have a reputation for excellent security, which is always welcome, of course making your network totally unreachable from with-in or with-out, while effective, isn't what I think anybody wants. Plus… and this is real fun, after pay way to much for the hardware, you have to keep paying them for software updates, support, and everything else. Oy!… there is more, I could go on for awhile panning Fortinet, especially as a Mac user, but I'll move on.)
- Apple has to share in the blame here though. First of all while there were issues with WEP connections to the FortiWiFi in 10.5.1, WPA worked fine, and there were workarounds for WEP as well. Plus, I've never had an issue connecting to the WiFi with *gasp* Windows, or even Linux. So clearly whatever suckiness Fortinet offers it seems that it's still within Apples abilities to make this work (and nothing frustrates me more then updates taking hugh leaps backwards. Experimental interface whims I can live with (though I'll be there to bitch about 'em), but breaking essential computing functions is just plain unforgivable… especially when everyone else seems to get it right). I mean seriously how am I suppose to convince the powers that be that we should all switch to Macs, when they come back (rightfully I might add) and say "WTF, they can't even connect to our WiFi network."
My hope is that there are just enough of people with this issue so that Apple will take notice and release a patch very quickly to correct this.
AirPort "Connection Timeout" issue
It seems there is a glitch in the AirPort connection dialog (or underling software) in Leopard that will occasionally prevent you from connecting to a wireless access point with a "Connection Timeout" message (usually involving WEP, which is yet another reason to upgrade to WPA). While frustrating, if you find yourself in this situation there is a solution: open up Safari and click your way through the the Network Diagnostics Utility (a button to launch this appears when you launch Safari and it can't connect to the internet). This will successfully allow you to connect to the wireless access point (provided something else isn't wrong anyway). As usual, I'd assume that there will be permanent fix for this soon, but at least for now there is a work around.