Apple has released the latest update to its Leopard operating system, Mac OS X 10.5.5, with tons and tons of fixes. As always, the release is a recommended update fr all Leopard users, so fire up Software Update, and let’s hope it doesn’t cause any troubles. Read one for a quick rundown of the most important changes.
The update of course includes all recent security fixes, while also including other general updates and fixes to the system. Most of them are focussed on Address Book, iCal, Mail.app, the fledgling MobileMe service, and Time Machine.
As Ars summarises:
In addition to the performance and reliability improvements, though, this update includes numerous security fixes. Several fixes are included for dealing with images in TIFF, JPEG, PNG, and PICT formats. Several components are updated to further protect against DNS cache poisoning, including BIND, mDNSresponder, and libresolv. Other security fixes are detailed in Apple’s KB article. A separate update for Mac OS X 10.4.11 includes these security fixes for that OS version.
Get it while it’s hot, and be sure to report success or epic fail in the comments.
Nice to finally have that iMap performance problem dealt with. It was getting on my nerves, particularly when interfacing to Gmail. This update claims to fix it and the results so far seem to bare that out. Now, if Apple will just fix the Finder’s performance issues on shared folders–particularly on large shares over a wireless connection–I’ll be happy. That said, every os does have its little quirks and annoyances, I guess.
iMap for Apple instead of IMAP? 😀
Finder has been revised to version 10.5.6, so maybe it’s better but I haven’t noticed anything different in its behaviour.
In fact, this update seems more application-oriented than others and I don’t use many of the Apple applications, but any stability improvements are appreciated. I need to run a couple of tests but hopefully, the performance has been improved again.
So far I’ve heard good things about the update the graphics drivers in the system. Its about freaking time. The Nvidia card in my SR MBP has major issues for a failry decent mobile card.
I’ve had the same graphics (rendering) issue on my powerbook since the beginning with leopard. When I turn off the 3d dock, the dock doesn’t render properly on the right end around the edges and if I use the grid view stack, the edges don’t render properly. By chance, has anyone else with a powerbook 17″ with nvidia graphics seen a similar issue?
— forgot to mention, the problem still exists with 10.5.5.
Edited 2008-09-16 03:14 UTC
I updated my system few hours ago and everything seems to work fine. Finally they have squashed the long-standing bug with attachment icon being moved onto Mail.app dock icon. This was making me mad.
I hope they also have done something to stability issues with Bluetooth A2DP connections to stereo headsets. Although I haven’t got time to check that out thoroughly enough yet.
No go with a2dp, still the same problems as before. If there was a way to turn off the damned powersave for Bluetooth that would fix the problem, as the connection drops if powersave is triggered and you try to send an event to the device at that exact moment.
A temporary workaround is to keep an audio channel open constantly. Use any audio player program to open an internet radio station and put it on mute. Since audio channels aren’t released even when muted this effectively forces OS X to not drop the bt connection under any circumstances until you stop playing that stream. It’s not an optimal workaround by any means but if you absolutely need to use an a2dp headset it’s one way to work around Apple’s half-assed a2dp support.
…but I updated. All still seems well to me. I never use Mail.app anymore. I use GyazMail and when the author of SweetMail builds is Intel version (he popped onto MacUpdate.com to say he would do that over the next 3 months (back in August)) I might switch back to that from the old days.
Mail has had ongoing issues since the advent of OS X. It drives me completely insane.
I actually like Mail.app but to each their own. I use it because it has better keyboard support than Gyazmail and it seems to thread better for me, and I can expand/collapse threads with the left/right arrow which I cannot do in Gyazmail. Other than the iMap issue with Gmail I really hadn’t had any issues with it. It would be nice if it supported encryption/signing, but that’s just me coming from a UNIX background.
Oh no doubt it has many more features! I think they need to simply spend more time on ironing out any glitches and pass on adding new features for awhile. And indeed, they have had fixes for Mail frequently in updates. GyazMail does not offer a lot of flexibility, but it is pretty rock solid.
mail.app does support encryption and signing.
Sorry, I meant encryption/signing out of the box. Currently there are plugins to do this, but they are hacks around some of Mail.app’s internals and I’ve personally had mixed results. If there is out of the box encryption/signing then it’s sure hidden itself well.
No, S/MIME support has been supported for several major releases now. It is enabled as soon as you add a mail certificate is added to Keychain that uses the email address of one of the accounts defined in Mail.app.
I use the Mac version of GPG and while there is not yet an installaion binary for it the Beta works very well. Nice thing about it is that you can use it on about any OS out there so it is easy to transfer your keyring.
Whew! I got really nervous when it restarted the computer a 2nd time, since that looked kind of like a problem I had recently when my hard drive was corrupted… Luckily it seems it was by design
. No problems so far…
Yeah that surprised me too.
I too was a bit concerned when it restarted half way through the first restart…
Any idea why on earth it would need to do that?
It usually means a firmware update was involved.
I’m not sure if there are now other cases with 10.5. But historically, double restarts were done when libSystem was updated. But double restarts seem to be a lot more common on the 10.5 updates, so perhaps this policy applies to other essential libraries.
Edited 2008-09-19 20:25 UTC
I hear reports that Diablo 2 is finally fixed again (the graphics and crashing)..
If that’s true, finally
i have to install the game again and check!