OS X 10.4.1 Now Available

[jasonvaughan]

Longhorn - A nautral prey for Apple's big cats

Longhorn is the name of the next version of Windoze. I must say that although it is named after a US mountain, in rather conjours up images of an old bovine creature stumbling through the dessert.

Such a a creature would also, one assumes, be riddled with bugs.

What is more, such animals are the regular prey for species high up the foodchain, such as big cats.

Longhorn has not even arrived but the Tiger is already salivating at the prospect of having it for breakfast.

 

[Sox]

Unfortunately, longhorn cattle are indigenous to neither the Serengeti, nor the Russian Taiga, nor the jungles of India, the three natural habitats for the world's tiger population. The only way a longhorn would come into contact with a tiger, and subsequently be torn to ribbons and devoured, is if the summer cattle drive goes past Mike Tyson's house.

 

[mac15]

Hopefully my Airport connection doesn't all of sudden just drop out like it has been doing I know they say they've fixed it but nobody ever seems to dig through the updates and test them out properly.

 

[zac4mac]

Came by here this morning to see what was up with the new DVD Player. Found it in Software Update this morning. So far no real problems with Tiger:

*Startup is twice+ as fast as Panther
*All grafix/eye candy working fine
*iTunes is fine
*Connecting to other Macs on home network FINALLY works right
*Movies running and minimized to dock no longer stuck in dock
*DOOM3 seems faster, no previous benchmarks to be sure, but bumped my settings up while keeping good frame-rates
*Improved AirPort reception<edit: add>

This is on my G5, maybe I'll play with my old G3 iBook tonite and see how it's faring. Loaded Tiger on it first and it was stable but missing the ripple effect. It has little eye-candy due to its age, at least it's got a 32MB vidcard instead of 8MB like its predecessor.

 

[bbyrdhouse]

I don't know about y'all, but one thing positive I have noticed is that my Powerbook "wakes up" alot faster than it used to.

 

[mkrishnan]

I don't know about y'all, but one thing positive I have noticed is that my Powerbook "wakes up" alot faster than it used to.

Was it slow before? Do you mean the part after the screen comes on and it's trying to acquire an airport signal, or something else? I guess that part could be faster....

 

[Riot_Mac]

Hopefully my Airport connection doesn't all of sudden just drop out like it has been doing I know they say they've fixed it but nobody ever seems to dig through the updates and test them out properly.

my airport express signal dropped so low i couldnt connect to it for the first time ever. It was weird. I reset my airport express and restarted my computer and everything was fine. I checked my girlfriends imac who is still running panther and she had full signal strength. not sure why that happend to my computer, dont know if it had something to do with 10.4.1 or what

 

[robshakir]

Thanks for the info but what good is it for a powermac user
Also the fact Cisco doesn't make the various releases of their client publicly available is dumb beyond belief... It's always the same pbm, having to look on the net for Windows or Linux or Mac client...

Hi there,

I'm not sure if anyone else here is subscribed to the Cisco-NSP list, but Robert Crowe (Cisco employee) posted this to the list yesterday:

The release that was posted to CCO is for single processors only.
Conservatively we are saying 2 months for the next release.


- RC

Sounds like you're in for a bit of a wait for the upgrade, which doesn't necessarily seem to be that much of a bad thing.

Rob

 

[robshakir]

I don't know about y'all, but one thing positive I have noticed is that my Powerbook "wakes up" alot faster than it used to.

Is there still a delay with the PowerBooks going to sleep? I heard that there was an approx. 30 second delay with 10.4.0, which sounded annoying.

Also, on waking from sleep, does it automagically reconnect to the wireless network it was attached to before sleep?

Cheers,
Rob

 

[dorr]

RAM not recognized in 10.4.0?

I noticed that 10.4.0 only recognized 1 GB of my 1.5 GB's of RAM. I'm hoping that the update will fix this. Has anyone had a similar experience and does 10.4.1 fix it?

My experience in upgrading to Tiger was a bit worrisome. Over the years, I had upgraded to every new version of OS X (as opposed to "clean installs" or "archive and installs") and I think that with Tiger, my system finally reached a limit. I started having issues on a variety of fronts including:

Disk Utility: Could not use disk utility to create new disk images- the app would just close
Mail: Would not indicate that it was trying to access my mail accounts
Installer: Would not recognize my hard drive so that I could install software from CD's or DVD's
BOMA and Stuffit Expander: Neither would allow me to unzip or expand files
Airport: Erratic behavior- wouldn't always allow me to connect to my Airport Express
Bluetooth: The icon disappeared from the menu bar until I deselected the option to show it and then reselected it.
iWorkNeither Pages nor Keynote would launch. They didn't open and crash, they just wouldn't launch at all.

There were other issues, but I forget what they were- the ones listed above were among the most significant and/or most annoying

So my solution was to back-up my home folders. Perform a clean install of Tiger. Reinstall all of my apps. Copy over my home folder files.

Since then, I have had no real issues except for the one I mentioned at the beginning of this post. I highly recommend clean installs for Tiger.

With Tiger now running, I can say that this is one hell of an OS. Dashboard is useful but not revolutionary. Automator is awesome and I'm just starting to scratch the surface of what it can do. Spotlight and Smart folders have completely changed how I organize myself.

I equate the changes that Tiger brings to the following analogy. It's like taking a house and renovating it by mostly leaving it's appearance alone but then taking the underlying foundation of the house and changing it so dramatically that every other part of the house benefits from the improvements. Maybe not a good analogy, but it makes sense in my crazy mind.

 

[andysmith]

Is there still a delay with the PowerBooks going to sleep? I heard that there was an approx. 30 second delay with 10.4.0, which sounded annoying.

Also, on waking from sleep, does it automagically reconnect to the wireless network it was attached to before sleep?

Cheers,
Rob

My PowerBook takes around 5-10 seconds from closing the screen, to the sleep light coming on... I think it was the same in Panther.

But it now takes at least 10 seconds to wake up properly - and the mouse is usually locked while that's happening. In Panther it was almost instant from opening the screen. It's just a minor annoyance really.

 

[xsnightclub]

Fishermen tell tall tales

I couldn't agree more.

And it's not the bugs, although the bugs annoy me. I assume Apple needed Tiger out for Wall Street reasons or for future products which depend on Tiger. (I'm not making excuses for Apple, but there has to be a reason since they had another couple of months until the public deadline.)

But what worries me is the lack of Apple Touch in the thinking behind Tiger.

Examples:

1. To isync in Tiger across multiple devices, you now go to three different apps, and they all must be open for "Sync Now" to work. This was not the case in Panther, and is the type of thinking that comes from Redmond

2. No way to delete (easily designed for my Mom) widgets

3. Syncing and .Mac integration flat out does not work. This is a keystone feature of Tiger and it simply does not work.

4. Quartz 2D. Again, one of the 200 new features, and it's shipped turned off.

The list goes on and on. And it makes me sad.

See, I love technology. And because of the oligopoly on the PC side of the house, Apple is all we've got for excitement. And if they can't deliver, there is nowhere really else to turn.

So I hope this was a fluke, or even better, Apple has some sick products coming soon which require Tiger.

And until then, let's hope .2 has the hundreds and hundreds of bug fixes Tiger desparately needs.

Example 1: Wrong. I can sync just fine with any or all of the apps closed.

Example 2: Wrong. Since widgets are in fact tiny apps, you go to where the app is and delete it from there, similar to deleting a regular app.

Example 3: Wrong. Works great here, actually works much better than it used too with more functionality.

Example 4: See attachment,

Soooo sad to see Apple is pandering to those wall street types, releasing software that works.

 

[thequicksilver]

Example 1: Wrong. I can sync just fine with any or all of the apps closed.

Example 2: Wrong. Since widgets are in fact tiny apps, you go to where the app is and delete it from there, similar to deleting a regular app.

Example 3: Wrong. Works great here, actually works much better than it used too with more functionality.

Example 4: See attachment,

Soooo sad to see Apple is pandering to those wall street types, releasing software that works.

You've 100% missed the point on three of these, I'm afraid. I'll offer my views:

1. The point though is that now you sync to .mac via System Preferences, to a mobile device via iSync and to your iPod via iTunes. What if you want to sync all three at any given point? It's three apps, whereas it used to be in one - iSync.

2. You're right that you can delete from the folder, but that isn't the point. It's similar to the iTunes scenario. If you want to remove a song from your iTunes library, you hit delete, and it asks you if you want to remove it from your computer, or just remove the playlist entry. Dashboard doesn't offer this - if you remove a widget from your disk the alias in the Dashboard dock doesn't leave unless relaunched. A simple way to remove widgets and their dock entries like iTunes is called for.

3. I won't say you're wrong, but this .mac thing is a widespread issue and a known bug. To call the original poster wrong because it doesn't affect you is a little short-sighted if I may say so.

4. Quartz Extreme is not the same as Quartz 2D Extreme. Do a little research into it, they're very different things. (For a start, the requirements for Q2DE are significantly higher than those for QE - my iBook for one supports the former, but not the latter.)

I found 10.4 from retail to be a fundamentally flawed OS, which if I was anything other than a hobbyist user in the middle of exams I would have immediately removed and put Panther back on. 10.4.1 is a step in the right direction, but it's still not what it should be.

 

[Applespider]

My Powerbook seems to wake up slightly faster - it's pretty much instantaneous.

I've just timed it - 3 seconds from lid close to sleep light coming on.
And 3 seconds back from pushing open to cursor flashing in this box. iChat reconnected within another 2 seconds.

 

[dernhelm]

Was it slow before? Do you mean the part after the screen comes on and it's trying to acquire an airport signal, or something else? I guess that part could be faster....

I was wondering that as well. At work, my airport reception is lower, and it takes a while before it recognizes the signal and activates networking. At home, networking is enabled before I can even get Safari up and going - it is super-fast. I'm a relatively new apple laptop owner (just got my PB17" a week or so ago), so I'm still learning the ins and outs of these machines, but I can say this for the PBs - their sleep function simply way outperforms the sleep of the previous wintel notebooks I've used (IBM, Dell). Startup is just about immediate. When I first tried it, I wasn't sure the machine had ever actually achieved a sleep state it was so fast starting up!

Also, there is almost no perceptible battery drain (on the dell I used, if I didn't have it plugged in by noon the next morning, the battery would be dead). The PB also stays very cool while both the dell and ibm laptops I used would still get a little warm even in sleep mode. I also like the throbing white-blue light telling me if it is _really_ asleep, no other notebook I've ever used had so nice an indicator.

 

[camomac]

Unfortunately, longhorn cattle are indigenous to neither the Serengeti, nor the Russian Taiga, nor the jungles of India, the three natural habitats for the world's tiger population. The only way a longhorn would come into contact with a tiger, and subsequently be torn to ribbons and devoured, is if the summer cattle drive goes past Mike Tyson's house.

Thanks that was funny as hell.

 

[mkrishnan]

I was wondering that as well. At work, my airport reception is lower, and it takes a while before it recognizes the signal and activates networking. At home, networking is enabled before I can even get Safari up and going - it is super-fast. I'm a relatively new apple laptop owner (just got my PB17" a week or so ago), so I'm still learning the ins and outs of these machines, but I can say this for the PBs - their sleep function simply way outperforms the sleep of the previous wintel notebooks I've used (IBM, Dell). Startup is just about immediate. When I first tried it, I wasn't sure the machine had ever actually achieved a sleep state it was so fast starting up!

Also, there is almost no perceptible battery drain (on the dell I used, if I didn't have it plugged in by noon the next morning, the battery would be dead). The PB also stays very cool while both the dell and ibm laptops I used would still get a little warm even in sleep mode. I also like the throbing white-blue light telling me if it is _really_ asleep, no other notebook I've ever used had so nice an indicator.

I think when I measured this once the drain rate was approximately 3% of total capacity per 10 hours. So yes, you can definitely leave it on sleep over a weekend without worry. Which to me, at least, more or less makes up for the lack of hibernation. I've heard that sleep is much more reliable on more recent Wintels with XP, but I haven't tried it personally. I basically never do anything else. I only reboot for install/maintenance and crashes/lockups (sadly, yes, I do get some).

With respect to the network acquisition, I find that WEP is slower than WPA, but I'm not sure if that's a real pattern, or not, because the only WPA I have is my AEBS. If Safari or Mail is up though, already on screen, for me, in either place, it usually doesn't acquire so quickly that I needn't wait a second or two to update / get new mail.... But still very fast to me. This is with 10.4.0 and with Panther....

LOL, I think I'm the only moron who's still waiting to upgrade to 10.4.1 because I've just seemingly gotten over Tiger instability. After not being able to get more than 2-3 days of uptime, I am now nearly at 6! I think I'll hold off till the weekend!

 

[monkeyman05]

why you ask

Why are some people having lots of problems and others few or none at all? Frankly reading through this entire thread is enough to put off any potential switcher - Finder problems, software update crashing, unable to burn CD's (that ones a MAJOR problem i'd say)

(as i say this keep in mind i am not counting new machines that were just bought and people that don't hack their machines.) this is because most people that post more times than not have done some kind of third party upgrades and/or some kind of hack to their computer. Then they think that updating to the most recent will be ok. They don't realize that Apple puts out these updates to run and fix the problems that the normal everyday user would have. You would think these people would use a little common sense.

yeah i do think that this would turn away a potential user if they didn't know that.

 

[Bern]

What is this "Recovered Files" folder that keeps appearing in my Trash everytime I restart?

I emtyp the trash, but sure enough upon next restart it's there again and the contents are different (usually unimportant stuff).

 

[patrick0brien]

Didn't solve the issues in my little world.

-10.4 broke my iSync and iCal in a unique way. iSynch has issues synching with my bluetooth phone - because at the close of the sync, iSync would report the 'Device is full". Then when I'd open iCal after that, a lot of my appointments would dissapear in front of my face.

10.4.1 still hasn't solved this.

 

[Plymouthbreezer]

What is this "Recovered Files" folder that keeps appearing in my Trash everytime I restart?

I emtyp the trash, but sure enough upon next restart it's there again and the contents are different (usually unimportant stuff).

Others are having this... Uh, issue (it's not really an issue though) too, including me.

 

[Jesus]

Good news

In my opinion this is a good bug-fixing update, the right-click dock magnification thing has gone, Finder has stabalised (no longer crashes my iMac every 30 mins), my iMac no longer crashes when I plug in my iPod, software update has been fixed, so it now sees updates, etc. IMHO, this is Apple having to pay for rushing through a gold master. Was 10.3.0 as unstable as 10.4.0?

BTW, I had all these problems, and I did a Clear Install!

 

[hcuar]

Why are some people having lots of problems and others few or none at all? Frankly reading through this entire thread is enough to put off any potential switcher - Finder problems, software update crashing, unable to burn CD's (that ones a MAJOR problem i'd say)

My opinion is that people having most of the problems are those that have "hacks" and "tweaks" to the system when they try to archive and install / upgrade their system. I prefer to run a vanilla installation of OS X to alleviate these sorts of problems. The OS seems "fine" to me... I am having an annoying 1 second chirp in my PM... Apple knows about it, and is trying to fix Tiger to stop the crickets.

 

[shambolic]

What is this "Recovered Files" folder that keeps appearing in my Trash everytime I restart?

I emtyp the trash, but sure enough upon next restart it's there again and the contents are different (usually unimportant stuff).

My understanding is that this is a new Tiger feature - on shutdown, applications that don't properly clean up temp files themselves have these moved to the Recovered Files folder in the trash.

In my own case it always seems to be files related to Growl and/or NewsFire.

When I first saw this, I was concerned that Tiger was doing some sort of disk check (fsck) at bootup and that these were files recovered from damaged/corrupt disk sectors. (Like the lost+found directory found on other unix operating systems)

I'm reassured, however, as:
1) Types of file appearing there are too consistent from one boot to the next, indicating it's an application issue
2) Manual fsck shows no problems
3) Others are seeing the same thing

 

[Applespider]

What is this "Recovered Files" folder that keeps appearing in my Trash everytime I restart?

I emtyp the trash, but sure enough upon next restart it's there again and the contents are different (usually unimportant stuff).

I was curious about this. Apparently it's where OS X is dumping temporary files once they're finished with. If your system crashed, you may find some useful stuff in there for the files you were last working on. Don't worry about it.