Mac OS X 'Leopard'-related Discussion


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Mac OS X 10.5 Leopard build 9A499 is believed to be the first widespread seeding of the software since June. At that time, Apple treated attendees at its annual developers conference to an exclusive preview of build 9A466, later broadening distribution of that same build to its vast Apple Developer Connection community.

According to people familiar with this week's near 7-gigabyte seeding, the new build is noticeably snappier than the one it replaces. Those same people, however, continue to report that software is rife with bugs, making it somewhat unstable.

"I'm recommending to other developers that they stick with the earlier 9A466 build," one said. "[The latest build] is very buggy."

http://www.appleinsider.com/articles/07/07...pard_build.html

If I can track down the latest build, I'll give my own mini-review. When I boot into the WWDC build, though, I'm still surprised how amazingly stable it is. I wouldn't worry about Apple missing the October deadline, stuff like this happens all the time with Firefox builds, for example, and even uTorrent, where a "public" beta will be stable, and the quieter, internal releases are usually much less so.

If I can track down the latest build, I'll give my own mini-review. When I boot into the WWDC build, though, I'm still surprised how amazingly stable it is. I wouldn't worry about Apple missing the October deadline, stuff like this happens all the time with Firefox builds, for example, and even uTorrent, where a "public" beta will be stable, and the quieter, internal releases are usually much less so.

A store in a nearby shopping mall here has the newest build and I was surprised with how well everything worked. The wireless, computer sharing and many more were working properly and it seems to be a bit smoother than the WWDC build. One thing I notice though is that Quick Look took a long time to load images especially documents. The OS was running on an iMac Core 2 Duo.

Scirwode

Not sure what happened, but somehow I managed to freeze my mouse & keyboard (Maybe pulling out the USB Mighty mouse and going to the laptop trackpad did it) but that's the only major thing I've noticed in my short time with the build. It definitely does feel snappier than 9a466. There is a new wallpaper available in the build Sea Mist Blue (Although no new Aqua wallpaper (Maybe Steve wasn't kidding when he said that. :unsure:)

No new features that I've seen in the hour I've been playing with this, but I really doubt there will be *many* new features (There might be some) due to the current time and target release date, Apple might be starting the bug squashing process and frozen the features.

Yeah, there are some new features...

Right click button on the finder icon gives different things and there's now a nice Path option in the Finder :D

I didn't try the build though...it seems that it would be a lot faster, but buggier. Yeah, WWDC 2007's build was insanely slow here on my external drive on a 24" iMac...

Edit : Could you PM me where you found 9A499? :p

I was bored and curious to see as to how Apple changed the wallpaper in Photoshop.

To create your own Sea Mist Blue wallpaper, follow these simple steps!

1. Open Sea Mist in Photoshop.

2. Create a Hue/Saturation layer with these setting:

-Hue: 207.

-Saturation: 13.

-Lightness: 0.

3. Create a Colour Balance layer with these setting:

-Shadows: 0, 0, 0.

-Midtones: 0, 0, 0.

-Highlights: -15, 0, +16.

4. Set the opacity of this layer to 73%

5. Get the Magic Wand tool and have it set to a Tolerance of 32 and uncheck Contiguous. Select a part of the clouds in the upper left. Then go to the Select Menu > Modify > Feather. Set the Feather to 5.

6. Set your foreground colour to a light grey.

7. Click on the layer mask for the Colour Balance layer and fill with the light grey.

8. Duplicate the Colour Balance layer and change its settings to this:

-Shadows: 0, 0, 0.

-Midtones: 0, -8, 0.

-Highlights: 0, 0, +3.

9. Create another Colour Balance layer with these settings:

-Shadows: 0, 0, 0.

-Midtones: 0, 0, 0.

-Highlights: 0, 0, +15.

10. Get the Magic Wand tool and select the misty bit in the middle. Then go to the Select Menu > Modify > Feather. Set the Feather to 5.

11. Press Cmd+Shift+I to inverse the selection.

12. Change your foreground colour to Black. Click on the layer mask for the 3rd Colour Balance layer and fill it with the Black.

And there you have it, your very own Sea Mist Blue! :p

Here is my result:

myseamistblue64090.png

It runs pretty quickly off my external hard drive, almost as fast as my native installation of Tiger.

Same here, but it's on my internal HD. I wiped Tiger and put on Leopard, as you know. This was quite a while ago. Been using it as my everyday OS. Runs great. I think Safari crashed once, but that's it.

That path feature in Finder (in build 9a499) should be a nice finishing touch to an already much-improved (if not great) Finder.

I'm happy with build 9a466, but if Apple misses their October deadline, I might just hunt down 9a499.

drygyn, have you been using Time Machine? If not, you're missing out. It's already saved me once. Works like a charm on 9a466.

To create your own Sea Mist Blue wallpaper, follow these simple steps!

*snip*

Ok, a bit ( ;) ) more work when you chizzle down to the specifics, but still :p.

And yeah, as for Time Machine, I've never been all that scared without a backup application, but it's nice to know that it's there when you need it. The only drawback is that it does its backups at what seem to be set intervals, which means if you create a file in between them, and then delete it...well, you get the picture. So it's not quite instantaneous, but for most backup and restore purposes, it should fit the bill.

I believe Google Talk support was formally visible in 9a466, but then again, it's based upon the Jabber network anyways, so if you want to get technical...it's been there for a while.

As for a/v capabilities, I don't use Google Talk myself, so you'll have to see about that.

Ok, a bit ( ;) ) more work when you chizzle down to the specifics, but still :p.

And yeah, as for Time Machine, I've never been all that scared without a backup application, but it's nice to know that it's there when you need it. The only drawback is that it does its backups at what seem to be set intervals, which means if you create a file in between them, and then delete it...well, you get the picture. So it's not quite instantaneous, but for most backup and restore purposes, it should fit the bill.

Correct me if I'm wrong, but I believe that as soon as you make a change to the filesystem (i.e., addition of a file), Time Machine saves the change to the backup list. I haven't been paying very close attention to it, as it's very hassle-free, but it seems to go on often enough when I'm, saving downloads, etc. Now it might not be instantaneous, but it seems fairly quick. I'll have to test this.

But I'm glad you mentioned this point.

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