Some more Leopard news. “When it comes to Apple’s new operating system, Leopard, users are likely to notice the flashy graphics and animations, the tight integration of applications, and the speed with which it churns through data. What they don’t see are a large number of the under-the-hood changes that Apple built in so that its own developers – and those who come up with third-party apps – use all of that underlying software goodness.” Additionally, there’s another thorough Leopard review, and another one. There is also a problem with Skype not liking Leopard’s firewall, and Leopard not liking massive data copies.
i’m surprised he even got samba to work. What used to work perfectly in tiger seems to be completely broken in leopard for me. I tried sharing a dir with samba from my mac, but i can’t access it from windows. I shared a dir in windows and tried to mount it on my mac and that doesn’t seem to work either. I hope apple fixes it soon.
Samba is working great with leopard here. Actually just used my Macbook and leopard this weekend to verify a friend server setup as his Windows laptop just acted weird. 1 server with smb server and shares + 3 windows client with their shares too. Finder showed them all in the sidebar and was stable throughout the weekend of testing and playing around.
My friend seriously considered shifting to Mac as has windows drove him nuts with the smb shares
I’ve had no issues whatsoever with SMB sharing here, whether client or server.
Works far better than in Tiger for me.
I’m still using Tiger for now. While Leopard’s new features sound both cool and useful, I’ve decided I’m going to wait a few more months before upgrading.
The Aelon.net review mentioned a bug where Spaces just decides (for reasons unknown) to take you to another space, even if you’re in the middle of doing something, so you have to figure out what space you just got dropped in so you can navigate back to the space you were in before you were interrupted. Crimony, that’s annoying just thinking about it.
Then there is the new Dock. The 3D look doesn’t turn me off as much as it does some people, but now apparently having a folder in the Dock is much less of an advantage in Leopard than it was in Tiger. For one thing, all the folder icons in the Dock look alike, so looking at the icon isn’t enough to identify it anymore; you have to do something with the mouse to get the folder to reveal what it is. For another thing, my understanding is that you can’t navigate into a subfolder from the Dock; if a folder in the Dock has a subfolder, you have to click on the subfolder, which then opens in Finder, which then grants you access to the subfolder’s contents. In short, the Leopard dock is actually slightly less capable than the Tiger dock.
And these aren’t the only defects in Leopard.
So until (1) Apple fixes its bugs and (2) I find something I can use instead of the Dock, Tiger is good enough for now.
Spaces is cool, but I’ve turned it off already. It’s no good for separating workflows. I tried having programming stuff in one space and goofing off stuff in another. In so doing I had at least one Finder window and one Safari window in each space (browsing OSNews in the fun space, API references in the work space for example). When clicking on the Safari or Finder icon in the Dock, it would often take me to the Safari or Finder window in the other space.
I can understand taking me to the other space if the only Safari window was in the other space, but if there’s a Safari window in the space I’m already in, I’d expect to have that window be given the focus.
It could be worked around by only using Expose for window switching, but it’s a bit annoying to have Spaces + Dock be so un-useful. Of course If I’m missing something please let me know
I wouldn’t mind getting it working (what to me is) “right”.
Leopard is better, but it’s still buggy. Another 5 weeks and we should have the first system update to fix a variety of things.
The firewall controls are a mess but then, so is the firewall.
There seems to be a daemon for everything now and the system can be much more responsive but is also incredibly sluggish at times.
Third party software doesn’t work so well, although my Java-based software seems quite unaffected.
It’s definitely a .0 release.
In Leopard, Java 1.5 has some real bad issues. I’ll wait until there is Java 1.6 on Leopard, that is, in case that is ever going to happen.
It is really annoying that Apple doesn’t clarify the situation in the Apple Dev forums and instead is deleting threads which are bringing that topic up… gives me the bad feeling that they are going to abandon Java.
Most annoying java bug so far: System.out.println() just doesn’t output to system log immediately. It sometimes takes 30 to 120 seconds. I really hope they fix this.
It’s not just Java, many things are sluggish. Visual things seem to have been given the performance edge, though.
I just read about the Finder bug when moving things to another volume and how it obliterates your old data regardless of whether or not the destination disappears. Apple, come on, how could you not know about this one (at least back to Panther) and why isn’t it fixed? That shouldn’t be more than a few lines of code!
I guess (being a new iMac owner) I’ll use Terminal and mv for such tasks, as hopefully Apple didn’t muck that one up.
That just gives you the excuse to see how well Time Machine really works!
You’ve brought up an excellent point: has anyone tested to see if Time Machine suffers from the same sort of bug, where things that fail on the external/remote device are brought to the attention of the user, and the backup isn’t considered done/a success until it all gets over there? That’d be yet another whopper, if it doesn’t.
All right, who wants to test that theory on their data?
you can also hold down option while copying.. safe too.. but yeh, fortunately i’ve not suffered from this, but it is definitely a big deal.
um .. no. the bug affects your data if you move your file to another volume/partition. in this case, the finder would normally just copy the file, it moves the file if you press option. so the default is safe, option is unsafe. copying on the the same volume just changes the address of the file, there is no danger of losing any data. same thing for time machine – it doesn’t move your data, but copies your data to another volume.
For as long as I know, mv was never safe to use on big file nested directory hierarchy. If the command failed in the middle, because of a permission problem or any failure whatsoever, you are left with two semi-hierarchy. There must be a reason for this, and I do not have time to look as the source code.
But I witnessed this behavior in any unix I could put my hand on.
Now, if moving in the finder involves the same codebase, here you go.
Which means than copy/delete is what you want.
two semi-hierarchys can be recovered or resumed.
but having one of them go poof on a error, thats something else.
and i would suspect that finder use its own internal code for the job…
Thanks for providing the link about the TimeMachine issues.
Those that are relying on time machine may be in for a world of surprise and hurt. My feeling from supporting mac users is that they are not as often avid readers of sites such as this one, so they may miss the knowledge base article on Apple’s site.
I never move to any operating system upon release. A good 4-6 months is the absolute minimum if you want to have some semblance of stability.
Someone else in my office tried Leopard and had problems with his VMware images and time machine. Also, the lack of JDK 1.6 has me seriously concerned about Apple’s commitment to the Java platform. If this is a sign of the future, my next laptop probably won’t be Mac. I’m very impressed with how far Ubuntu has come lately.