Improving 10.5.8 Leopard

[Andropov]

It's been four years since Apple released the latest Mac OS X update for PowerPC Macs (August 5, 2009). We'll be soon four OS outdated too and I'm starting to feel like PowerPC era is finally reaching the end of the road. According to last year report from Chitika, Leopard still represents 13% of OS X web browsing. That makes us still an important mass of users today.

Apple showed Mavericks to the public a couple weeks ago. One of the features shown was AppNap. I wonder if a similar feature could be ported to Mac OS X 10.5.8 or if it's too deeply integrated inside the OS. The basics are, when an app is hidden behind another window, the SO automatically slows it down unless it's doing something for the user like playing music, downloading a file, rendering in the background...etc.
That is a energy saving feature for today computers, but for the old PowerPC Macs where the CPU is running at full speed much more frequently, reducing the use a background application is doing of the CPU would mean that more processor cycles are free for the active task.

And it'd also save energy when the processor isn't running at full speed, so it'd also run much more cooler, which is specially important in the latest G4s and all G5s that generate a lot of heat.


Other features we're missing are mostly iCloud related, like iCloud Keychain, documents in the cloud...etc. But that's a lot easier to fix. Actually, I might release a beta (free, of course) software to use some iCloud features in Mac OS X 10.5.8 through another iCloud-compatible Mac in the network (and in the future maybe without any other computer in the middle, but I can't say it for sure).

 

[Jessica Lares]

AppNap is just a coverup to hide performance issues in OS X Lion+ without having to rewrite the whole thing again.

And yes, I'm using the Mavericks developer preview just because it's 100 times more stable than Mountain Lion on my MacBook Pro.

I have no problem running Safari and using Photoshop at the same time. And if people do have issues like that on G4s and G5s, I REALLY suggest a new hard drive. It doesn't have to be a SSD, but a new 128GB+ drive will serve you more, versus a RAM upgrade. The drives are 7+ years old now, there is no excuse to still be using them, unless you have an issue where you're not willing to open up your drive because it's too hard to do so.

I have iCal hooked up to my iCloud calendars. Otherwise the web interface works fine. A little slow, but then it's heavy code.

But any PowerPC development is good. I'll share mine if you share yours.

 

[MysticCow]

I would try any of the free solutions first, especially using Onyx for the maintenance scripts.

http://lowendmac.com/2013/11-no-cost-tips-for-optimizing-mac-os-x-10-4-tiger-performance/

 

[eyoungren]

I have iCal hooked up to my iCloud calendars. Otherwise the web interface works fine. A little slow, but then it's heavy code

I have iCal hooked up to Google using Calgo Connect. AddressBook is also hooked up to Google using a script that fires every so many hours via Lingon. It's a buried framework that exists but Apple never connected directly to Google using AddressBook.

Since I use Entourage 2008 for Contacts and Calendars, sync services completes the loop. I have my iPhone 5 using Google instead of iCloud (except for backup) because it lets me make changes on any device in the loop. I cannot make changes to directly to iCloud with a PowerBook or PowerMac, except if I use apps I don't care to use and even then the changes don't usually reflect as iCloud seems to be it's own separate entity.

It was a painful process to set this up, but it works. I added in the Intel Mac at work yesterday just using the native connectivity to Google included in Contacts and Calendar and then turned on Sync Services for Office 2011.

OP. ApNap, eh? How's this? Pauser 1.2.

 

[rjcalifornia]

I use PostBox for emails. Don't care about iCal other than for looking at dates. Nothing more.

 

[Andropov]

I would try any of the free solutions first, especially using Onyx for the maintenance scripts.

http://lowendmac.com/2013/11-no-cost-tips-for-optimizing-mac-os-x-10-4-tiger-performance/

Well, I'm not a big fan of maintenance programs under OS X... mostly I've never seen one doing anything.

AppNap is just a coverup to hide performance issues in OS X Lion+ without having to rewrite the whole thing again.

And yes, I'm using the Mavericks developer preview just because it's 100 times more stable than Mountain Lion on my MacBook Pro.

I have no problem running Safari and using Photoshop at the same time. And if people do have issues like that on G4s and G5s, I REALLY suggest a new hard drive. It doesn't have to be a SSD, but a new 128GB+ drive will serve you more, versus a RAM upgrade. The drives are 7+ years old now, there is no excuse to still be using them, unless you have an issue where you're not willing to open up your drive because it's too hard to do so.

I have iCal hooked up to my iCloud calendars. Otherwise the web interface works fine. A little slow, but then it's heavy code.

But any PowerPC development is good. I'll share mine if you share yours.

Although the hard drive is a good thing to change in the newest PPC Macs, some of them are stuck with old ATA/66 drives. Another famous bottleneck is the 100Mhz bus or even the 133Mhz one in G4 Macs. That's one of the reasons I think AppNap would be great.

OP. ApNap, eh? How's this? Pauser 1.2.

That's quite near from what I was talking about. The only thing that's left is a way to do that automatically when an App isn't being used, but I don't know how Apple managed to distinguish between an unused app and a background (but doing something relevant) app...

 

[MysticCow]

Well, I'm not a big fan of maintenance programs under OS X... mostly I've never seen one doing anything.



Although the hard drive is a good thing to change in the newest PPC Macs, some of them are stuck with old ATA/66 drives. Another famous bottleneck is the 100Mhz bus or even the 133Mhz one in G4 Macs. That's one of the reasons I think AppNap would be great.

The maintenance scripts are needed and do result in some gains, along with cleaning up the hard drive of unneeded crap.

As for the hard drive bottleneck, I'd be more worried about Inactive Memory then AppNap.

 

[B-G]

While visiting this page about Mavericks advanced technologies, I noticed that a couple of features can be enabled in Leopard through third party software. Then I read how Jessica tweaked the finder to get something similar to tags. Also there is this thread about an alternative to Launchpad.
At this point I was thinking about opening a thread about how to get some of the features of 10.6, 10.7, 10.8 and 10.9 in Tiger and Leopard, but we might as well start here.
I will list only software I have direct experience with.


App Nap --> App Tamer
It's basically what the original poster was looking for. Shareware ($14.95). I was lucky and I got it for free (through MacUpdate) when I upgraded to Parallels 8 on my Macbook Pro. Although I don't use it much (I tend to close all the applications I'm not currently using) I can say that it seems to work as advertised and it's fairly stable. Leopard only.

Safari Power Saver --> ClickToPlugin
And this must be the 1000th time I post about this awesome, awesome, awesome extension. It blocks plugins, substitutes flash videos with html5 (see this post to enable this feature even if flash is not installed) and more (just give me a minute). Leopard only.

Airplay mirroring --> AirFlick and ... ClickToPlugin (1001!)
Well, not exactly Airplay mirroring, but at least Airflick allows opening videos, photos and PDFs on an Apple TV. ClickToPlugin can do the same for online videos, and it's compatible with AirServer and XBMC too. Leopard only.


Please share your tips and tricks.

 

[Intell]

AddressBook is also hooked up to Google using a script that fires every so many hours via Lingon. It's a buried framework that exists but Apple never connected directly to Google using AddressBook.

In Leopard you can access the Google contact sync via Address Book. But only on systems that have had an iOS device/iPod synce to them. There was a way to trick the system to show the Google sync option within Address Book. In Snow Leopard, Apple removed the iOS/iPod requirement.

 

[eyoungren]

In Leopard you can access the Google contact sync via Address Book. But only on systems that have had an iOS device/iPod synce to them. There was a way to trick the system to show the Google sync option within Address Book. In Snow Leopard, Apple removed the iOS/iPod requirement.

Interesting!

I was syncing with a 3GS a year or so ago, but I wasn't using Google then and that iPhone was not my main phone. Now that I have my iPhone 5, I cannot sync to my PowerBook of course so I wouldn't have discovered this. I had to so some searching around.

Here's where the "app" to do this resides:
/System/Library/PrivateFrameworks/GoogleContactSync.framework/Versions/A/Resources/gconsync

And this command makes it work to sync up:

--sync com.google.ContactSync

So, in Lingon, I have this running every 4 hours (I mentioned 12 earlier, but apparently I set it to 4)

/System/Library/PrivateFrameworks/GoogleContactSync.framework/Versions/A/Resources/gconsync --sync com.google.ContactSync

In Address Book, I do have it connected to Google, but apparently Address Book does not force a sync (except initially I think) which is why I have this running in Lingon every 4 hours.

 

[Andropov]

While visiting this page about Mavericks advanced technologies, I noticed that a couple of features can be enabled in Leopard through third party software. Then I read how Jessica tweaked the finder to get something similar to tags. Also there is this thread about an alternative to Launchpad.
At this point I was thinking about opening a thread about how to get some of the features of 10.6, 10.7, 10.8 and 10.9 in Tiger and Leopard, but we might as well start here.
I will list only software I have direct experience with.


App Nap --> App Tamer
It's basically what the original poster was looking for. Shareware ($14.95). I was lucky and I got it for free (through MacUpdate) when I upgraded to Parallels 8 on my Macbook Pro. Although I don't use it much (I tend to close all the applications I'm not currently using) I can say that it seems to work as advertised and it's fairly stable. Leopard only.

Safari Power Saver --> ClickToPlugin
And this must be the 1000th time I post about this awesome, awesome, awesome extension. It blocks plugins, substitutes flash videos with html5 (see this post to enable this feature even if flash is not installed) and more (just give me a minute). Leopard only.

Airplay mirroring --> AirFlick and ... ClickToPlugin (1001!)
Well, not exactly Airplay mirroring, but at least Airflick allows opening videos, photos and PDFs on an Apple TV. ClickToPlugin can do the same for online videos, and it's compatible with AirServer and XBMC too. Leopard only.


Please share your tips and tricks.

Yeah! Thank you for the App Tamer link (as well as all the other info, of course). I'll try it soon in my Cube and in the G5 (if I successfully repair the PSU).

About my little project for sync OS X 10.5.8 to iCloud through another Mac, I've almost finished my little AppleScript applet. It works OK, but I'm searching for a way to sync it whenever a change it's made. By now, it just syncs all the data everyday at 3AM in the morning, except documents that are synced also when created. I also though in using rsync, but I'd like to use as less third-party apps as possible.

I haven't found a way to directly extract the data from iCloud servers, although it CAN be done, there are Windows apps to do it (sadly, none for OS X, even less for 10.5.8 PPC), but I haven't got enough developer skills (well, actually I don't really have any developer skills).

For AirDrop-like features I used DropCopy Too bad the new versions require OS X 10.6 (and Intel, obviously). But the old version is still available and it works pretty well.

 

[MrPilot]

It's been four years since Apple released the latest Mac OS X update for PowerPC Macs (August 5, 2009). We'll be soon four OS outdated too and I'm starting to feel like PowerPC era is finally reaching the end of the road. According to last year report from Chitika, Leopard still represents 13% of OS X web browsing. That makes us still an important mass of users today.

Apple showed Mavericks to the public a couple weeks ago. One of the features shown was AppNap. I wonder if a similar feature could be ported to Mac OS X 10.5.8 or if it's too deeply integrated inside the OS. The basics are, when an app is hidden behind another window, the SO automatically slows it down unless it's doing something for the user like playing music, downloading a file, rendering in the background...etc.
That is a energy saving feature for today computers, but for the old PowerPC Macs where the CPU is running at full speed much more frequently, reducing the use a background application is doing of the CPU would mean that more processor cycles are free for the active task.

And it'd also save energy when the processor isn't running at full speed, so it'd also run much more cooler, which is specially important in the latest G4s and all G5s that generate a lot of heat.


Other features we're missing are mostly iCloud related, like iCloud Keychain, documents in the cloud...etc. But that's a lot easier to fix. Actually, I might release a beta (free, of course) software to use some iCloud features in Mac OS X 10.5.8 through another iCloud-compatible Mac in the network (and in the future maybe without any other computer in the middle, but I can't say it for sure).

Heck GPU accelerated video playback would be a lot more useful than appnap... though good luck with your endeavors!

 

[B-G]

Yeah! Thank you for the App Tamer link (as well as all the other info, of course). I'll try it soon in my Cube and in the G5 (if I successfully repair the PSU).

About my little project for sync OS X 10.5.8 to iCloud through another Mac, I've almost finished my little AppleScript applet. It works OK, but I'm searching for a way to sync it whenever a change it's made. By now, it just syncs all the data everyday at 3AM in the morning, except documents that are synced also when created. I also though in using rsync, but I'd like to use as less third-party apps as possible.

I haven't found a way to directly extract the data from iCloud servers, although it CAN be done, there are Windows apps to do it (sadly, none for OS X, even less for 10.5.8 PPC), but I haven't got enough developer skills (well, actually I don't really have any developer skills).

For AirDrop-like features I used DropCopy Too bad the new versions require OS X 10.6 (and Intel, obviously). But the old version is still available and it works pretty well.

I wish you good luck with your project. And thanks for the link to DropCopy, it will be very useful to me.

 

[Andropov]

Heck GPU accelerated video playback would be a lot more useful than appnap

Sure. Don't even need GPU acceleration, since we all have AltiVec. GPU acceleration needs specific libraries that not all the GPUs have, so although it would be faster, not all the PowerPC Macs would handle it. But yeah, I agree video playback is one of the biggest drawbacks of most PowerPC systems. Anyway, I doubt designing software that takes advantage of GPU and/or AltiVec in PowerPC Macs is an easy task, although it might be possible with crowdfunding.

CorePlayer did it really well. I'll never understand why they killed it without even giving people who REALLY want to buy it the option to pay for it even when all development had been stopped.

 

[wobegong]

features we're missing are mostly iCloud related, like iCloud Keychain, documents in the cloud...etc. But that's a lot easier to fix. Actually, I might release a beta (free, of course) software to use some iCloud features in Mac OS X 10.5.8 through another iCloud-compatible Mac in the network (and in the future maybe without any other computer in the middle, but I can't say it for sure).

Fruux already does it for free, I'm syncing an iPhone 5, android phone, intel mac, my Powermac and my Linux intel desktop with it for Contacts and Calendar, i dont use / need iCloud at all even on the Intel boxes.
Dropbox sorts my docs/files and 1Password my keychain equivalent.

 

[Nameci]

I end up uninstalling useless apps and what remains are all essential apps. I wish Leopard on my would be more lightweight. There are only two third party apps that's running in the background, scroll reverser and glimmerblocker. I am so used to the "natural" mouse movement on Lion and Mountain Lion, that I really like it. It will probably be the last on the background 3rd party app that I will uninstall if worse comes to worst.

I have spotlight on still but i excluded everything to be indexed except Applications folder. It is my app launcher. Whenever I am tired of point and click to launch my apps. Disabled my widgets as well. Turned off "Universal Access", removed uneeded services on the network preference pane. Removed all unneeded plugins, basically clean up all the trash that I have accumulated over time.

I like my OS to be lean.

 

[MrPilot]

Sure. Don't even need GPU acceleration, since we all have AltiVec. GPU acceleration needs specific libraries that not all the GPUs have, so although it would be faster, not all the PowerPC Macs would handle it. But yeah, I agree video playback is one of the biggest drawbacks of most PowerPC systems. Anyway, I doubt designing software that takes advantage of GPU and/or AltiVec in PowerPC Macs is an easy task, although it might be possible with crowdfunding.

CorePlayer did it really well. I'll never understand why they killed it without even giving people who REALLY want to buy it the option to pay for it even when all development had been stopped.

I do believe you know your stuff But I think though that the ATI Radeon 9700 128MB VRAM has more capacity than the AltiVec. Or at least combine GPU + AV + CPU for smooth 1080p on G4s. +1 on the coreplayer comment.

Only 5-10 people are doing the impossible and making sure we can all still surf the web more securely and faster with a high degree on compatibility. (flash 11.5 hack, youview, mactube, TFF, AuroraFox,Webkit) That dependancy on such few guys is another drawback to consider... what happens if they (for any reason) stop their ppc work?

 

[Andropov]

I do believe you know your stuff But I think though that the ATI Radeon 9700 128MB VRAM has more capacity than the AltiVec. Or at least combine GPU + AV + CPU for smooth 1080p on G4s. +1 on the coreplayer comment.

Only 5-10 people are doing the impossible and making sure we can all still surf the web more securely and faster with a high degree on compatibility. (flash 11.5 hack, youview, mactube, TFF, AuroraFox,Webkit) That dependancy on such few guys is another drawback to consider... what happens if they (for any reason) stop their ppc work?

Of course a Radeon 9700 (or most 9xxx series for that matter) is faster than the AltiVec module for accelerating videos, but how many PPC users are using those video cards? All PowerMac users can upgrade their video card, but what about iMacs and Mac Minis? The first leopard compatible iMac uses a GeForce 4MX which doesn't even support Core Animation, for example. I don't know if GPU acceleration would be supported in the low end graphics cards. Anyway, I doubt any developer is going to start such a big project just for the sake of it.

For those guys that are still developing software for PowerPC, there's usually a "Donate" button in their pages we should all use.

 

[MysticCow]

Of course a Radeon 9700 (or most 9xxx series for that matter) is faster than the AltiVec module for accelerating videos, but how many PPC users are using those video cards? All PowerMac users can upgrade their video card, but what about iMacs and Mac Minis? The first leopard compatible iMac uses a GeForce 4MX which doesn't even support Core Animation, for example. I don't know if GPU acceleration would be supported in the low end graphics cards. Anyway, I doubt any developer is going to start such a big project just for the sake of it.

For those guys that are still developing software for PowerPC, there's usually a "Donate" button in their pages we should all use.

Therein lies the big issue of why video playback needs to be processor + graphics card on PowerPC. I just wish I knew how to make it happen.

 

[Intell]

The first leopard compatible iMac uses a GeForce 4MX which doesn't even support Core Animation, for example.

The GeForce 4MX, like all Leopard compatible GPUs (the ATI Rage 128 isn't Leopard compatible) supports CoreAnimation. It's CoreImage that it doesn't support.