News, Reviews and more from Australia's Macintosh Authority
News, Reviews and more from Australia's Macintosh Authority
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Eight months into the Leopard era, Apple unleashed the third update to Leopard, with today's release of OS X 10.5.3. By way of comparison, the 10.3.3 and 10.4.3 updates both came within five months of the release dates for Panther and Tiger, respectively.
As with most of Apple’s recent OS X updates, the 10.5.3 version just screams for a broadband connection, weighing in at more than 400MB, depending on which Mac you have and which version your machine deems you to require. So what do you get in exchange for your download time investment? Apple details many — but not all — of the changes in this Knowledge Base document. I won’t bother repeating everything listed there, but here are a few of the more important highlights:
There are fixes in other programs as well, covering programs such as iCal, iChat, Parental Controls, Voice Over, and the Finder, all of which are detailed in the linked Knowledge Base document.
But what else has changed in OS X 10.5 that Apple hasn’t told us about? I’ve been digging through the new release, looking for any areas that have received updates beyond what’s been disclosed. The only substantive visible change I found is in iCal, where there’s a new setting in the General section of the calendar app’s preferences for controlling how scrolling works in Week View mode. You can now choose between scrolling by weeks (the way OS X 10.5.2 worked) or by days.
It would’ve been nice if Apple gave us a hidden key override to toggle the settings in real time while scrolling (i.e. holding Option would scroll by weeks if you had the pref set to days), but if the update offers that, I can’t find it.
Beyond that visible change, there are many behind-the-scenes changes in 10.5.3, including both major and minor alterations. Here’s what I’ve discovered — and this is by no means a comprehensive list, so feel free to add your own observations in the comments section below as you use this latest update.
Whew. That’s a heck of a lot of stuff to update, and it’s nowhere near complete — these are only the things that seemed worthy of highlighting, out of more than 35,000 changed files in this update.
As an aside, if you’re curious as to how you can see what’s been installed by the 10.5.3 update yourself, the key is reading the “bom” file that’s created when you run the installer. You’ll have to use Terminal to read the file, but here’s how you can dump its contents to a text file in one command. Open Terminal and type the following, then press Return:
lsbom /Library/Receipts/boms/com.apple.pkg.update.os.10.5.3.bom > ~/Desktop/1053changes.txtYou can then open the 1053changes.txt file (which will be on your Desktop) in any text editor, and see each and every file that was modified by the installer. Keep in mind that just because a given file was changed, that doesn’t mean you’ll see new features in that program — the changes could have been behind-the-scene bug fixes, or minor changes in language that only appear on certain screens. Still, scanning this file gives you a good sense of the breadth of this update.
In my limited time with 10.5.3, I haven’t found any new bugs that this update has introduced. That doesn’t mean Apple has fixed all the bugs in Leopard, of course — I’m still waiting for the ability to view more than three columns in Spotlight’s search results, as but one example. But Apple’s focus on continual improvements in OS X 10.5 is good news for all of us consumers.
This morning Apple very quietly and discreetly announced that it was discontinuing the Xserve RAID, and that units currently in the channel are the last that will be sold. It made this announcement so quietly, in fact, that as I write this at 2pm there has still not been a press release. In its place Apple will be selling RAID systems manufactured by enterprise vendor Promise via its online Store, and Promise's RAID systems have already been certified for use with Apple's Xsan distributed storage product.
Matthew JC. Powell | Feb 20, 2008
When consumers think about which operating system to choose the last thing they worry about is what the screen savers looks like. But as a proud Mac user you should give it some thought -- and when you discover the enormous range of options you've got for setting your screen saver, you'll thank your lucky stars that you decided to buy a Mac. Your Screen Saver settings are buried in System Preferences (Apple Menu > System Preferences) under the Desktop & Screen Saver pane. If you're on Leopard, the default Screen Saver is set to Flurry, and if you're running Tiger it's probably set to Computer Name.
Danny Gorog | Mar 4, 2008
One of the attractions of using a Macintosh instead of that other operating system is not having to futz around with command lines and arcane code you barely understand but have been assured by some guru or other will be “alright as long as you type exactly this string of gibberish”. Imagine my surprise when Apple’s Time Machine code turned up on my desktop and refused to do a backup to anything except an attached drive. At first glance I thought I’d stepped into a real time machine and been transported back to the days when Apple did networks its own way.
Ian Yates | Mar 17, 2008
Yet again this morning the blogosphere is alight with the news that a Mac has been hacked. Those safe-as-houses, indestructible, impregnable, unsinkable Macs have been shown yet again to be riddled with holes so big and so obvious a child could drive a truck through them. Yet again the long-suffering Windows apologists take heart, poke their tongues and say "nyeah" while they download today's patches for their systems. The cause of this derision? A hacking contest in Canada.
Matthew JC. Powell | Mar 28, 2008
