macOS Archive

Earlier this month, we reported that The Unofficial Apple Weblog's as well as Ars Technica's sources said that Apple was working on the next version of Mac OS X, dubbed Snow Leopard. The news was that the new release wouldn't focus on new features, but on performance. During yesterday's WWDC 2008 keynote, Steve Jobs confirmed this rumour, and now Apple has published a preview page.

Crunchgear has posted pics that they believe are a real ad for the upcoming 3G iPhone, revealing the much discussed video conferencing feature many have been anticipating. Recent patents filed by Apple corroborate this evidence. In addition to showcasing a Product (RED) version, the ads also suggest the release of iChat for Windows. It also appears that the new firmware will support UMTS/HSDPA, as expected.

Apple has updated its Leopard operating system by releasing Mac OS X 10.5.3. "The Mac OS X 10.5.3 Update is recommended for Mac OS X 10.5, 10.5.1, and 10.5.2 Leopard. It includes general operating system improvements that enhance the stability, compatibility, and security of your Mac."

Back in 2007 when Apple released Mac OS X 10.5 Leopard, a much-heard criticism was the lack of support for Java 6. Leopard shipped with an older version of Java, 1.5, even though 1.6 had been released by Sun almost a year prior. Sun had already released Java 1.6 for Linux and Windows, but did not do so for Mac OS X, since Apple insists on developing their own version of Java, according to Sun. Now, 6 months later, Mac Java programmers can rejoice.

"The next security and maintenance release for Apple's Leopard operating system could arrive sooner than later if the company maintains its current cadence, which has seen two successive pre-release builds land in the hands of developers in just five days. On the heels of the first external test build labeled Mac OS X 10.5.3 build 9D10 and released privately late last week, the Mac maker on Tuesday followed up with build 9D11, which adds nearly 20 more fixes and code corrections, bringing the new total expected with software's release to nearly 100."

"Apple issued the first Mac OS X 10.5.3 seed (9d10) to developers yesterday. The latest update to Apple's Mac OS X Leopard addresses dozens of outstanding issues. Fixes range from Dashboard, Parental Controls, iCal Synchronization, memory leaks and stability issues. All in all, 75 distinct bug fixes are listed in the accompanying seed notes."

"Back in 2004, shortly before the release of Mac OS X Tiger, Delicious Library 1.0 arrived as a slick looking inventory cataloging application designed to manage listings of books, videos, albums and other media. This year, Delicious Library 2.0, currently in beta and scheduled for a March release, will deliver a major update by taking full advantage of features in the new Mac OS X 10.5 Leopard. Here's an exclusive preview."

"Leopard started out with a generous share of first-version glitches, but almost all of them have now been resolved by the second of two automated updates, which brings Leopard up to version 10.5.2. Finally, Leopard is extravagantly overdressed for the jobs that it's designed to do, and its pervasive eye-candy starts out looking dazzling but soon becomes distracting. Fortunately, from the beginning, the OS started out with options that let you put it on a low-eye-sugar diet, and the latest update has even more."

Today, Apple has released the much anticipated Mac OS X 10.5.2. The hefty combo update weighs in at almost 350MB, but it can also be downloaded via Software Update. The updates includes general operating system improvements that enhance the stability, compatibility, and security of your Mac, as well as imrpoved Back to My Mac support, new view for Dock based folders, and much more.

"Apple has brought its unique brand of richness and simplicity to servers. OS X Leopard Server is the fifth generation of the software half of Apple's server platform. This time around, Apple took what is a unique and bold approach for a Unix server. Leopard Server continues the OS X Server tradition of delivering platform-independent file/print, e-mail, Web, and network edge services (such as stateful firewall, VPN, proxy, virus, and spam filtering). But it is as easy to set up and run as a desktop. Truly; the typical Mac user could get a Leopard Server going, because the default administrative interface is a match for a Mac's System Preferences."

The frequency at which Apple is seeding new pre-release builds of its second update to the Mac OS X 10.5 Leopard operating system is increasing rapidly, suggesting an official release may be imminent. Fresh on the heels of build 9C20, which was released as a private distribution earlier this week, the Cupertino-based Mac maker on Thursday issued its latest revision of the software update labeled Mac OS X 10.5.2 build 9C23.

One of the three authors of Sun's DTrace, Adam Leventhal, has discovered something very interesting using DTrace on Mac OS X. "As has been thoroughly recorded, Apple has included DTrace in Mac OS X. I've been using it as often as I have the opportunity, and it's a joy to be able to use the fruits of our labor on another operating system. But I hit a rather surprising case recently which led me to discover a serious problem with Apple's implementation." So, what is this problem? "Wow. So Apple is explicitly preventing DTrace from examining or recording data for processes which don't permit tracing. This is antithetical to the notion of systemic tracing, antithetical to the goals of DTrace, and antithetical to the spirit of open source. I'm sure this was inserted under pressure from ISVs, but that makes the pill no easier to swallow. To say that Apple has crippled DTrace on Mac OS X would be a bit alarmist, but they've certainly undermined its efficacy and, in doing do, unintentionally damaged some of its most basic functionality. To users of Mac OS X and of DTrace: Apple has done a service by porting DTrace, but let's convince them to go one step further and port it properly."

Noel Dellofano, who is part of the ZFS dev team at Apple, has a post on Mac OS Forge announcing a late Christmas gift: she is making available binaries and source code (plus instructions) of the ZFS filesystem for Mac OS X. "ZFS is a new kind of filesystem that provides simple administration, transactional semantics, end-to-end data integrity, and immense scalability. ZFS is not an incremental improvement to existing technology; it is a fundamentally new approach to data management. We've blown away 20 years of obsolete assumptions, eliminated complexity at the source, and created a storage system that's actually a pleasure to use."

"When Steve Jobs announced Apples transition to Intel's x86 processor line, a huge stir occurred among some Mac OS X users who depend on 'Classic' the OS9 environment in Mac OS X for their day to day Mac usage, as Mac OS X on Intel means no more 'Classic' and they were right. Rosetta allows PowerPC applications to run on x86 through JIT (Just In Time) architecture emulation, but its translation is not on a low enough level within OS X to allow 'Classic' to work on x86 and as such those among us who use OS9 applications have been left out in the cold. Until now that is: a project called 'Sheep Shaver' was created to allow BeOS on PowerPC emulate the PowerPC architecture to run another PowerPC operating system on top of BeOS. This application was ported to Mac OS X with the demise of Be Inc. and has since been ported to Mac OS X on Intel processors."