macOS Archive

"The advent of Vista and Mac OS X, along with the ascension of Linux, add new dimensions to a long-time controversy. Now more than ever before, the Mac OS is the most cost effective operating system of all."

OS X's commercial credentials recently got a major boost from the Open Group. Thanks to the efforts of Apple's OS boss Kevin Van Vechten and his team, Leopard has cleared all of the hurdles required to attain UNIX 03 certification. Only Sun, IBM & HP are certified so OS X turns the Big Three to Big Four.

A soap opera is playing out on the mailing lists of several security newsgroups this morning, complete with people hiding behind pseudonyms, people "outing" one another and rumors of death threats against the major players. At stake? A possible worm for Apple's Mac OS X operating system.

"The MacPorts team is pleased to announce the release of MacPorts v1.5. A major achievement in this release is the completion of code and documentation changes to reflect the transition in project name from DarwinPorts to MacPorts. This results in a slightly modified installation layout. In addition to that, there are a sizable number of bug fixes and feature enhancements. Please see the release notes for more details. Mac OS X v10.3 and 10.4 downloads are available."

"The current beta build of Mac OS X 10.5 Leopard, released to developers at WWDC ‚'07, is not as polished as what people have come to expect of Apple's design team - users are still left with at best several disagreeable changes, and at worst a hideous hodgepodge of HIG contradictions. I have broken down 5 onscreen blunders that detract from the user experience and make Leopard the ugliest and most uncharacteristically 'Apple' OS to date." Thanks to MacWereld for pointing this article out.

"Filesystem in Userspace has long been one of my favorite features on Linux systems. Using FUSE modules, you can mount all sorts of innovative resources - Gmail, your Flickr photos, a remote SSH server - directly into your local machine's filesystem and use their contents exactly as if they were normal files. Now you can do the same thing on Mac OS X, courtesy of MacFUSE."

Another turn in the Apple-ZFS saga. Apple has made available a developer preview of ZFS for Mac OS X with read/write capability. The preview is available to all ADC members. From the readme file: "ZFS is a new filesystem from Sun Microsystems which has been ported by Apple to Mac OS X. The initial (10.5.0) release of Leopard will restrict ZFS to read-only, so no ZFS pools or filesystems can be modified or created. This Developer Preview will enable full read/write capability, which includes the creation/destruction of ZFS pools and filesystems." Update: Will it ever end? The release has been pulled from ADC by Apple.

"One of the salient points repeated at the WWDC keynote was Leopard's support for '64 bits top to bottom'. However, a close peek at the slide shown this year showed a subtle difference to last year's - the word 'Carbon' was missing. Of course a storm of confusion soon ensued, with the usual wailing and gnashing of teeth from some quarters and polite shrugging from others. Apple stock fell and rose again, some developers professed bliss while others threatened to leave the platform, non-developers wrote learned analyses about obscure technical points, not to speak of reports of raining frogs or even an unconfirmed Elvis sighting in a Moscone restroom. Allow me to try to explain all (well, Elvis excepted)."

Apple on Wednesday afternoon released Mac OS X 10.4.10, a free maintenance update recommended for all PowerPC and Intel-based Mac computers running versions of Mac OS X 10.4 Tiger. The update includes general operating system fixes, as well as specific enhancements to RAW camera support and third-party application support. Additionally, Apple said the update bundles security improvements and fixes for mounting and unmounting external USB devices.

Carbon will not be 64bit in Leopard. "At last year's keynote, Apple had claimed that both Carbon and Cocoa would be 64-bit, adding to the 64-bit fundamentals that Tiger had laid. However, according to the latest on Apple's website, Leopard's 64-bit frameworks will include the POSIX and math libraries found in Tiger, Cocoa, Quartz, OpenGL, and X11 GUI framework. In addition, Apple confirms that Carbon will not be 64-bit on the Carbon Developer mailing list." In addition, the readme file included with Leopard's developer preview says G3 support will be dropped from Leopard.

An Apple official on Monday said Sun's open-source file system would not be in the next version of the Mac operating system, contradicting statements made last week by Sun's chief executive. During an interview with InformationWeek, Brian Croll, senior director of product marketing for the Mac OS, said, "ZFS is not happening," when asked whether Sun's Zettabyte File System would be in Leopard. Instead, Leopard would use Apple's current hierarchical file system, called HFS+. The Apple file system was first introduced in 1998 in Mac OS 8.0.

As you have surely noticed by now, Apple's CEO Steve Jobs held his keynote speech yesterday at Apple's Worldwide Developers Conference in San Francisco. So far, the responses have been mixed; I have seen a lot of excitement, but also a lot of disappointment. Personally, I am not really sure where I stand.

The first alpha release of the native version of OpenOffice.org for Mac OS X (no X11 needed) has been released. "This is an alpha test version so that developers and users can find out what works and not, and make comments on how to improve it. There are a number of things that do not work in this version."

Apple on May 24 released patches for 17 vulnerabilities spanning a host of technologies and a slew of potential unpleasantness: from system takeover to denial of service to password snatching. The patches can be downloaded automatically by enabling Software Update or they can be downloaded at Apple's download site.