OSX Leopard

[Mark Smith]

If there are any Apple heads here ...

The new OSX Leopard is rather nice, mine arrived this morning (12 hours ahead of release date .. living in NZ is nice for getting stuff early :-)

Looks nice and pretty and some of the features are quite slick.

I think though that it needs LOTS of RAM, if I'd installed it when I only had 1GB in the Mac Mini I might have been frustrated, but hey the 4GB upgrade arrived at the same time.
(on that note .. interesting that Apple say the Mac Mini can only have 2GB, but here mine is reporting 4)

hehe .. just noticed Safari is spell checking this as I right, not seen that before, guess there are no more excuses for bad spelling in forums.

Mark

[nikoniko]

If I remember correctly, the 945 chipset in the Mini has a total address space of 4GB -- which includes not only the RAM but hardware as well. So if you stick 4GB RAM in it, you'll actually only have access 3.something GB of that since a large chunk of upper addressing is reserved for hardware devices. Still, 3.something GB is better than 2 or 1, especially with a lovely but hungry Leopard to feed.

[airship]

just noticed Safari is spell checking this as I right

Mark, no more excuses for bad spelling, maybe, but it still won't catch the use of the wrong word in the write place.

[Golan Klinger]

I've been running Leopard betas for quite some time now (I'm a developer) and I was pleased to see that Apple made some last minute tweaks before releasing the GM. The Dock for instance. It looked quite bad on the side of the screen and it is now tolerable. My boxed version of Leopard arrived yesterday (I guess someone jumped the gun) and I figure I'll install it this weekend.

[Mark Smith]

just noticed Safari is spell checking this as I right

Mark, no more excuses for bad spelling, maybe, but it still won't catch the use of the wrong word in the write place.

hehehe .. I was waiting for someone to notice that ... it wasn't deliberate either :-)

[Golan Klinger]

First report: No more rounded corners! That's not good. I'll have to install Displaperture.

[Blacklord]

From today's SMH :

"Spotty Leopard makes Mac users catty"

Apple often boasts its products "just work", but that couldn't be further from the truth for many Mac users who tried to install Mac OS X Leopard over the weekend.

Soon after the long-awaited $158 operating system upgrade went on sale on Friday, Apple's online technical support forum was hit with a deluge of complaints from buyers who said it crashed their computer.

Others, who had more success at installing the upgrade, have already broke free from the Mac platform, releasing a hack allowing Leopard to be installed on regular PCs sold by other manufacturers.

Others, who had more success at installing the upgrade, have already broke free from the Mac platform, releasing a hack allowing Leopard to be installed on regular PCs sold by other manufacturers.

Those whose computers were crashed by Leopard reported that, when rebooting their Mac towards the end of the installation process, their computer locked up and they were greeted with a blue error screen. It has already been compared to the infamous "blue screen of death" error that was common with earlier versions of Microsoft Windows.

The problem renders affected Macs virtually inoperable.

Apple has responded to the issue with a document on its website, blaming the issue on third-party "enhancement" software that it said did not work with Leopard.

Apple suggested two possible solutions, however, for some they did not fix the issue. Others have reported experiencing the error despite having no third-party Mac OS X enhancement software installed on their computer before upgrading to Leopard.

Unsanity, which makes software allowing users to more fully customise Mac OS X, said customers should install the latest version of its Application Enhancer software before upgrading to Leopard. Some reports suggested compatibility problems with Unsanity's software caused many of the blue screen errors.

When contacted about the issue this morning, a local Apple Australia spokesman did not even acknowledge the existence of the support document on Apple's website, saying only that customers with issues should contact Apple on 133 622.

However, Apple's telephone hotline appears to be struggling to keep up with calls.

Dana Gardner, a software analyst, reported on his blog that his less-than-ayear-old Mac Mini was now completely unusable.

"I can not reach tech support at all, even if I were willing to wait on hold for an hour," he wrote.

Australians writing on Apple's online support forum have also reported significant delays when trying to obtain help from the company's telephone hotline.

The issue, along with various other Leopard bugs, came after the launch of the upgrade was delayed for several months so Apple could concentrate on rolling out the iPhone.

It also follows Apple's recent controversial software patch for the iPhone, which stretched the loyalties of Apple fanatics everywhere by completely disabling iPhones that were hacked to work on mobile networks other than AT&T.

Meanwhile, hackers have already found a way to make Leopard run on a regular, non-Mac PC. The hack involves creating a patched Leopard installation DVD, instructions for which have been published on the dailyApps website.

"Please note this has not been extensively tested, so most of your hardware like sound, network may not work," the developers of the hack warned.

Apple says Leopard has over 300 new features, including "Time Machine" (automatic data backups), "Boot Camp" (run Microsoft Windows on a Mac) and "Spaces" (grouping open applications into multiple desktops). It is the sixth major Mac OS X upgrade since the operating system debuted in 2001.

[Golan Klinger]

Read that Apple link very carefully. The problem is caused entire by a 3rd party piece of software (read hack) that does things with the system that Apple goes to great lengths to tell developers NOT TO DO. One can hardly fault Apple for this. It's also worth noting that the people running APE are the 'power users' (not powerful enough to know to disable it before upgrading the OS mind you) and they're also the people that make the most noise when something goes wrong. The percentage of Mac users experiencing this problem is tiny. The amount of publicity being generated by chicken littles and/or Windows Vista users, however, is huge. Food for thought.

I have now installed Leopard on 11 Macs, all without incident and have yet to receive one support call or email about a problem with the upgrade. I have received quite a few "this is cool!" type messages though.

[Guest]

Golan

Every article I've read about this today has indicated there are a lot of people having the Blue Screen of MacDeath without any of the offending third party software installed.  There are also a lot of reports of the "fix" not fixing anything.

[Mark Smith]

I suppose it depends on how butchered some peoples machines are .. mine is only lightly molested and I had no issues at installing and running, I've found one bit of 3rd party software that stopped working (a fan speed control), but everything else carried on working after the upgrade.

As mentioned above, if something works most people keep quiet, if it breaks thats when they make noise .. and the press is only looking for noisy people.

Mark

[Douglas]

I also have installed Leopard on one of my Macs.  So far it seems to run just fine, but I haven't really seen anything that was sooooo cool that I feel I HAD to upgrade from 10.4.  Oh well, maybe something in the future will come out for Leopard that will make the upgrade worth it!

Funny how I used a damn Commodore 64 for over 10 YEARS and never had to upgrade its operating system...

Oh well....

Douglas