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Friday, April 15th, 2005 at 10:56 PM

Mac OS X 10.3.9 has been released, and will be the final update before Tiger is officially available. It appears that Apple fixed the font issue documented at daringfireball.net about three weeks ago. The software update KnowledgeBase article (delta updater) states:

Addresses an issue in which the startup time in Mac OS X 10.3.6 through 10.3.8 may be extended if a large number of PostScript fonts are installed.

I’ve successfully installed the update on two systems and haven’t had any problems so far.

This entry was posted on Friday, April 15th, 2005 at 10:56 pm and is filed under Mac. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.

Thursday, April 14th, 2005 at 1:10 PM

When Mac OS X 10.4 “Tiger” is released on the 29th, it will only be available on DVD media. If your Mac doesn’t have at least a DVD-ROM, you will be unable to use the install disc. Apple’s site says “Tiger ships on a DVD, but if your Mac doesn’t have a built-in DVD-ROM player, you’ll need CD media. When you buy Mac OS X Tiger, you qualify to purchase Tiger CDs for only $9.95.”

Although they say it will be on DVD only, I suspect that it will be possible to use another computer with a DVD drive booted into Target Mode to install 10.4 on a non-DVD Mac. More on this as it becomes available.

This entry was posted on Thursday, April 14th, 2005 at 1:10 pm and is filed under Mac. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.

Wednesday, April 13th, 2005 at 12:31 PM

Menu Bar items in Mac OS X are those little icons that live in the upper-right of your screen and do useful things like show the clock, change the sound volume, switch displays, etc. A while ago I bookmarked an incredible list of menu bar items, and I think it deserves a link here, too. Personally, I use MenuMeters a lot.

It’s tough to not use a lot of these items, but keeping too many starts taking up a significant portion of your menu bar. However, applications’ menus do take priority over menu bar items, so they will simply be hidden if an application (iTunes comes to mind) needs their space.

This entry was posted on Wednesday, April 13th, 2005 at 12:31 pm and is filed under Apps, Mac. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.

Tuesday, April 12th, 2005 at 7:19 PM

Apple has updated their homepage with a sleek black look to promote the release of Mac OS X 10.4 “Tiger.” The site says that Tiger will officially ship on April 29th. I’m eagerly awaiting all the new goodies from Apple, along with many others, I’m sure.

The number on feature I’m looking forward to is Spotlight. I tend to save all sorts of things (text clippings, random little images from websites that I thought were neat, etc.), and categorizing it would be more of a hassle than just letting Spotlight sift through it all. It seems like Spotlight will be picked up by many developers, too. We should see a huge flurry of activity in the 30 days following Tiger’s release as developers add in metadata to their files and applications. In testing, Spotlight indexes remarkably fast and should do so in the final GM release as well.

Hopefully developers are already working on updating their applications to work well with 10.4. Apple is right in saying that this is the most significant update to Mac OS X yet. I can’t wait!

Update: Here is a list of all the new features in Tiger!

This entry was posted on Tuesday, April 12th, 2005 at 7:19 pm and is filed under Mac. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.