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).
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.
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.
Poking around the stuff installed by the latest Leopard 10.5.1 update, I noticed something exciting I hadn’t seen before: pkgutil. This command line tool apparently allows you to finally manage installed packages using a package database (a SQLite database located in /Library/Receipts/db/). At the moment this tool is far from perfect, I’ve noticed some strange data here (inaccurate install paths), plus it seems that the package must be designed to write data to the database, so it currently doesn’t track all packages. One important thing to note: it appears that this tool could be potentially damaging to your system. According to the man page, will allow to remove the files installed by any package without any dependancy checking, so you could really screw yourself with this. (I actually haven’t tried to remove anything myself, so I’m trusting the docs here). Still the existence of this tool is an extremely hopeful sign of real package management on OS X. Check it out with man pkgutil, but use caution.
It seems for whatever reason you can open the Script Editor from the Finder with the [cmd]+[shift]+[8] keyboard shortcut. Not sure why this key binding is there, I haven’t found any documentation about it, but it seems too specific to be an accident.
11/14/2007: Turns out this is mapped… from the Services menu… should have looked there I guess. This was pointed out to me from Rob Griffiths of macosxhints.
Well, I’ve installed the GM of Leopard, and it looks a lot like the last pre release build, however there are a number of differences…
- There is a new look for the dock when it is positioned on either side.
- The Front Row icon changed from what appeared to be the round Apple Remote button to a big red fluffy chair.
- I immediately noticed that the hard drive you select for Time Machine backups gets it own special drive icon.
- Lot’s of new default bookmarks on Safari’s Bookmark Bar.
- Apple stuck some PDF’s in the Documents and Downloads folders which are on the dock to explain what stacks are.
…and that’s all I can see at first glance. I haven’t really been doing to much digging since I’ve had a fairly busy weekend, plus when I install new release versions of OS’s I tend to wipe out the the old and start from scratch, which may or may not really do much, but after a few days of getting my system back up to normal I feel better about it (a bit of OCD on my part perhaps).
Now that’s the product is out I guess it’s safe to say, I think the Stacks feature blows. In Tiger when I put a folder on the dock I could navigate through subdirectories from the Dock, but Stacks replaces that most useful ability with some questionable eye-candy. Too bad… kind of a big ugly mark across an otherwise wonderful upgrade.
from Amazon, or check out the