If you use Dropbox, you might want to check out this experimental 10.6 Snow Leopard build.

Using the previous release of Dropbox, I noticed that when sleeping and going to a different wifi network, then waking up, Dropbox would sometimes use 100% of the CPU and get stuck in a loop.

This new version claims to be more 10.6 compatible, and it does start up very quickly!

Snow Leopard uses 64 bit applications throughout the system. This is good for everyone, but sometimes older 32 bit code cannot work hand in hand with newer 64 bit code.

An example of this is System Preference panes. If you try to use an older 32 bit preference panel, System Preferences will quit and re-launch in 32 bit mode.

The next time you launch System Preferences, it will reset to 64 bit so you’ll be re-launching System Preferences often until those older preference panes are re-written.

This compatibility issue applies to all plugins, such as Mail.app plugins, when the host application is delivered as a 64 bit version.

Steve

P.S. Original Mac Book Pros, iMacs and minis shipped in 2006 are 32 bit computers and won’t run into this issue as they cannot use the faster 64 bit code

Time Capsule

1. Backing up over 802.11n to a Time Capsule is much, much, much fast now. Finishing still takes time, but the overall
2. Using the Time Machine UI is much faster to load and to search back through time
3. There is a new “Calculating Changes” phase in the Time Machine menu while a backup is being performed
4. Spotlight only uses 250mb when indexing after a backup, vs the 700mb it used in Leopard
5. There is a bug where sometimes your time machine can show as having no data. The workaround for now is to cancel out of time machine, and enter it again.

Finder

1. The Finder will tell you which application is keeping a disk from being ejectable
2. Navigating around mounted volumes is faster
3. You can choose the default spotlight search via the Finder’s Advanced preferences. Your options are Search This Mac, Search the Current Folder, Use the Previous Search Scope. Under Leopard, Spotlight behaved like the default “Search This Mac” option. I think most users will enjoy the “Search This Folder” option.

Menubar

1. The international menu displays a new palette icon if you are just showing the character or keyboard palettes in the menu

Safari 4

1. Even faster under Snow Leopard
2. 32bit plugins do not work, you’ll need 64 bit versions, or open Safari in 32bit mode by selecting the Safari application in the Finder, choosing “File Info” from the File menu and then checking “Open in 32-bit mode”

Rosetta

1. Rosetta, the technology that allows a Macintosh with an Intel CPU to run programs written for older PPC machines is no longer installed by default. However, if you try to run one of those programs, the Mac will offer to install Rosetta without needing the Snow Leopard DVD

Mail

1. Mail is much faster to launch
2. Mail disables incompatible, 32 bit plugins

Spotlight

1. Spotlight searches are much faster, particularly to bring up applications.
2. You can now type/edit in the Spotlight menu during searches without that annoying lag. The UI is very responsive

Installing

1. You can install onto a non-boot volume without rebooting onto the Snow Leopard DVD
2. The option to Erase and install is gone. Installs are now upgrades only. If you want to erase, you can use the Utilities menu to erase the hard drive.
3. An upgrade from Leopard to Snow Leopard, with default settings except for turning off extra languages, took 29 minutes
4. When choosing what to install, the Installer can look on the network for “nearby” printers and install those drivers only

Printing

1. The first time you print to a printer, Snow Leopard will query the printer and determine its characteristics.
2. Snow Leopard now displays ink level information right in the print dialog, even for my Canon which never grabbed proper ink information before. Choose Supply Levels from the print options popup menu (You might have to disclose the print dialog first)

System Preferences

1. System Preferences is now 64 bit. Like all plugins, it requires 64 bit preference panes, however, if you choose an older 32 bit pane, System Preferences will offer the option to re-launch in 32bit mode. System Preferences does this every time you launch it.
2. The Login Items section of Accounts now lists global login items (those installed for all users), but does not allow you to delete them. However, this is a great way to get alerted that something system wide is installed.

Screen Sharing

1. If you reboot a remote Mac via screen sharing, the screen sharing app will wait and try to reconnect once the reboot is complete.

Stacks

1. Stacks can now be navigated by keyboard, both by typing the name of a file or folder, or with the arrow keys

Dock Exposé

New to the Dock is Dock Exposé. If you click and hold on an application icon, the windows on your screen will all hide and be replaced with just the windows for the clicked upon application.

Another click restores your windows. This is great for “peeking” at an application’s windows. For example, you can peek at mail to see what is new, or peek at an application, determine you don’t need it open at the moment, choose “Quit” from the menu that popped up when you entered Dock Expose, and then be immediately back to your current working set of windows without the hide/tab/unhide/reorder game.

You can also press TAB while in Dock Expose mode and tab through the windows for each application, one at a time.

You can also mouse over a window while holding down the mouse button in Dock Exposé and then press the space bar. This will let you Quick Look a window.

And lastly, if you see a window you want to focus on, just click it while in Dock Expose mode!

Services

The services menu, found under your Application’s menu, is finally usable. If nothing is selected, the Services menu is empty, other than an option to open the services’ preferences.

However, if you select text, you get options for text only. No more ugly awful menu. And better yet, the menu is broken up into sections, such as stickies, or mail related, or my new favorite, Search with Google, which has the shortcut of command-shift-L.

Run the Snow Leopard installer while booted in Leopard. Don’t boot from the DVD and run the updater that way. I have confirmed that the Snow Leopard updater is smarter if you start it while booted from your Macintosh’s hard disk.

The following bugs/conflicts exist in Snow Leopard 10.6.0:

1. It is reported that the Fujitsu ScanSnap S510M is not compatible, and that a user was told to “contact Apple.”
2. If you use a Time Capsule wirelessly, sometimes when entering Time Machine your capsule’s history may not appear. Canceling Time Machine and re-entering it will resolve the issue.
3. I have experienced random hard locks on a MacBook Pro with 9600GT while playing World of Warcraft.
4. 1Password 2 is not 64 bit compatible and thus requires a paid upgrade to version 3 in order to work in Safari 64 bit. You can change Safari to run in 32 bit mode, but you lose the crash protection and it is still not supported by Agile.
5. IRC client Linkinus users will need to upgrade to version 2.0.2
6. iShowU 1.7.2 creates movies that are scaled incorrectly. iShowUHD works better but is a paid upgrade.
7. Mail can hang and not be able to be quit unless force quit.
8. Movies may open with the new QuickTime X player, or the older QuickTime 7 Pro player, which is included to provide functionality dropped by the newer player. If you have movies opening in the older player, select one, choose Get Info from the Finder’s File menu, and use the Open With… section to change which player the movie will open with, then click Change All…
9. The new QuickTime X Player is not smart about opening really tall, narrow movies. It will clip the in-window controls.
10. The System UI agent that does things like updating the iCal icon to have the proper date can silently crash, leaving your iCal dock icon showing the improper date.

If you use 1password and planning to upgrade to Snow Leopard, then you’re looking at a paid upgrade to 1password 3.0. I personally don’t like this, but you’ll really want the 64 bit support, because that allows crappy Flash to crash without taking down the rest of Safari.

Check out their website for more info

That’s right! Apple has announced that Snow Leopard is shipping early.

On Friday I’ll be posting what I know about Snow Leopard!

Update: I received an email from TomTom Support:

All updates will be provided through iTunes. This application is not compatible with TomTom HOME. This application is not compatible with MapShare.

---

I picked up TomTom for iPhone for $99. It is really expensive, and we have a TomTom 720, but I’ve been interested in the all-in-phone concept so here we are.

We took it out for a spin today and it worked fairly well. Unlike the 720, it does not announce street names, just turn left/right etc. It does show lane changes.

The software does not appear to use the compass, as it had me facing the wrong way in the driveway. Maybe this is due to being used vertically or horizontally. The compass in the iPhone seems to stink and even then only works well when the phone is horizontal, which is not how you’d be using the GPS.

I have not tried receiving a call yet but I read that it quits the TomTom app, however, you can re-launch it and remain on your call. If this is the case, then it seems like a software update can make this better.

The TomTom support site sucks. It mentions using TomTom Home to upload maps, etc, but that just doesn’t seem right for the iPhone. Other support pages show the handheld device UI, not the iPhone’s, so that makes me believe their knowledge base is matching similar articles, not the right articles.

The performance is fine, and you can even look up addresses in the contacts list. However, two out of three of mine so far could not be recognized. It did allow me to “enter them manually” but in reality, that just confirmed the data that was already there, so I didn’t have to enter much. I believe the bug has to do with parsing the state field, as it was trying to find my address in the right city, but wrong state.

What I don’t know is how the map updates and IQ updates work. Nothing in the manual and nothing on the site about this. It should just work over the 3G/WiFi connection, but I have no clue.

The other thing TomTom could do better is handling blocked streets. We ran into a right-turn-only that TomTom wanted us to make a left on. The only option (which was buried, these should be on the top menu!) was to mark the street as blocked. TomTom should know it was asking me to make a left and offer a “Right turn only” option, which would give the software the exact input it needed.

The TomTom app seems to disable sleep on your iPhone, so don’t leave it running on battery. This includes the preferences screen too, not just the navigation map screens.

Is it worth $100? Depends if you want a GPS on the iPhone. You can’t sell this TomTom, you can’t give it to a friend. The software is yours forever. But if you don’t want charge/carry two devices, you might want to check TomTom for iPhone out.

At PMUG last night we talked about calibrating your laptop battery. I mentioned using the ‘yes’ unix application to run the battery down, but it appears at OS X now sleeps even though yes is running.

Apple’s instructions just state to use the machine until the battery is dead, but if you want the battery to drain while you sleep, you’ll need to turn off sleep.

1. Open System Preferences
2. Open Energy Saver
3. Click the Battery tab
4. Slide computer sleep to ‘Never’

Now the machine will drain the battery over night, hibernate and then sleep for the Apple required 5 hours. You can recharge it in the morning while using it.

Be sure to reset your Energy Saver settings when done

I’d bet that there is an application to keep the machine awake, but I prefer this approach as it makes sure there is no extra software running the 99.99% of the time you are not calibrating your battery.

hehe MS is trying so hard to copy everyone, and still they fail. I tried searching for “easiest computer to use”

Bing:

Notice the dell and hp ads, with the only sponsored ad being a “Fix Windows Now” ad. Then it takes us to a link whose page is no longer available, something about hacking NETBIOS and yet another windows fixit tool.

Rofl.

Let’s see what Google came up with:

Hmm, a couple ads for target and some seniors, the sponsored ads are from Consumer Reports (nice) and BizRate.

Then top hit is an epinions article talking about the mac, a techmo forum post and a shopping.com/epinion MacBook review.

If you are a Mac user and have used OS X 10.4 Tiger, then upgraded to OS X 10.5 Leopard, there may be lurking problems in your system.

In Tiger, each of your users had a group id (gid) which matched your user’s Unix ID. Your first user would be 501, second would be 502, etc.

In Leopard, the rules changed so your group should be ’staff’, or a GID of 20. The Leopard update installer didn’t change this for existing users, so things can go awry later. For example, if an application that runs fine now is later changed to run with the ’staff’ permissions, it won’t be able to access your own files. Oops.

So the fix, which took literally 20 hours and many forum pages, is long and drawn out, and might not even be fully correct, but here is what I know you need to do at a minimum:

1. Change your user’s group ID to 20. You do this by opening System Preferences, then click Accounts. Click the padlock to authorize as an administrator, and then right-click your user, choosing Advanced options. Check that the group field reads “staff” or 20. If it does not, change it to 20. Also note your User ID, for example 501.

2. Change your temporary folders. Yes, this is very geeky unix, but if you don’t do it, any new files created by Apple apps will have the wrong group IDs. BE VERY CAREFUL WITH THIS, AND HAVE A BACKUP! (Mom you ignore this, we’ll fix this for you )

   1. Copy the following command to your clipboard: sudo find /private/var/folders/ -group 501 -prune
   2. Open Text Edit and paste the command into a new document
   3. Change the 501 to whatever your User ID was that you noted above
   4. Copy the changed command and paste onto the clipboard
   5. Open Terminal.app found in /Applications/Utilities
   6. Paste the command into the terminal window and press return
   7. Type in your admin password

Now you’re going to see some gibberish, like:

/private/var/folders//IY/IYc8-0-KHNKv-n6jayvDRE+++TI

1. Copy that output, from the /private.. to the end of the line.
2. Type (the case is important, and don’t press return): sudo chgrp -R staff
3. Type a space
4. Paste in the gibberish so it ends up looking like: sudo chgrp -R staff /private/var/folders//IY/IYc8-0-KHNKv-n6jayvDRE+++TI
5. Press return

Whew. That should do it. Try making some new files with text edit, saving them to the desktop. Get info and check the permissions, the owner should be you, and the group should be staff.

If you want to fix up old files, you can change every file in your home directory, but the ramifications of that are unknown. However, if you really want to do it (Make sure this is what you want to do!):

1. sudo chgrp -R staff ~

Will change every file in your home directory to have a group of staff.

All of this nonsense, because Apple has decided to not fix it. Thanks.

Thanks to:

Apple Discussions