Apple Releases OS X 10.4.2 Update

kenthorvath was one of many readers to note that "Apple has quietly released an update for OS X Tiger. New features include a widget manager for dashboard and some 200 bug fixes and enhancements."

Re:need to fix spolight too

[GaryPatterson]

Sounds like a common thread in your case - external drives. I haven't used SpotLight when my external 80GB drive has been connected (and wouldn't expect much difference then - it's full of large media files)

Well, good luck with it. There's not much else I can do but hope Apple improve performance on it.

Re:Just got it

[Seumas]

The widget manager would be neat if I hadn't already turned my dashboard off.

Dashboard itself takes about 20MB of memory. Each widget takes at least 20MB of memory. Most people I've seen have at least a half dozen widgets going (if nothing else, the default calendar widget, a notes widget, a weather widget, calculator, countdown...)

Six widgets and dashboard will take up a good 150mb of RAM right there. I'll save my 150mb of ram and use stickies, weather.com, regular calendar and the OSX calculator instead, thanks.

Dashboard could be potentially useful, but not if it keeps sucking up the resources it currently needs. And not if all people keep making for dashboard are widgets to replicate what OSX already has readily available (why would I use a stickies/notes feature in dashboard for 20MB ram when I could use the builtin OSX stickies at 9MB?).

Please report bugs, folks!

[JoshWurzel]

I see a lot of people complaining on a lot of forums about this bug or that bug. Not that this isn't valid, but hoping that someone from the particular group at Apple will read your post is not a good way to go about getting your problem solved.

Step 1: Go to developer.apple.com and sign up for a free (as in beer) membership (or sign up for one of the expensive memberships if you want free software, hardware discounts, etc).

Step 2: Go to bugreporter.apple.com and fill out a report. You'll have to give up some info about your system and *detailed* info about the behavior, why its wrong, and what needs to be different. And if you can isolate the problem to a particular configuration, it'll help them fix the bug faster.

These enter Apple's internal bugtracking system. Some of your complaints are duplicates of existing ones, but if enough people bitch about a particular issue then there will be more pressure to fix it.

There is no step 3! (er, profit!)

The downside is that you'll likely never hear back from them. Even if the bug is solved, you'll never know until they release a new version. They may decide that the behavior is "works as intended" and ignore you. There is no way to follow the progress of your bug.

Under what conditions?

[MochaMan]

If you've experienced crashes since you installed the update, under what conditions did they happen? What were you doing at the time? What do you mean by "hard crashes"? Application crash? The Finder giving you a SPOD? Kernel panics? If it's kernel panics, what external hardware are you using? Did it happen when you plugged-in or unplugged a camera/printer/network cable?

Saying "I've had two hard crashes since I installed this" is neither informative nor useful in debugging the issue. I'd also recommend that you file a bug with Apple [apple.com] so they're aware of the issue. You might also get the feedback you want that'll help you decipher whether your iMac is dying or not.

My experience has been fairly decent, with Apple getting back to me within a couple days of reporting a kernel panic due to network switching from Airport to ethernet, and textual feedback on other issues.

Re:need to fix spolight too

[MagerValp]

Nope, I have the exact same problem here, and no external drives. If I (try to) search for "quicktime" it'll start chugging after "qu", and after about 30 seconds, and a bunch of useless documents containting "qu" in the list, it'll register the rest of the query. Clearly it should at least wait for 1-2 seconds of inactivity (and/or the enter key) before it starts to search.

Search results are also more or less useless, the fuzzy content search rarely returns what I expect, and often it misses content that I know is there. Something predictable like "name contains" is much more useful, but as others have noted it's impossible to change the default.

But what really blows is that they removed the file search functionality from Sherlock. It did exactly what I needed, and it did it fast.

Re:no zlib patch

[Anonymous Coward]

if you take a look at http://developer.apple.com/darwin/ [apple.com] and check out zlib there in it's source (http://www.opensource.apple.com/darwinsource/tarb alls/other/zlib-15.tar.gz [apple.com]) , you would notice that the fix was already in 10.4.1 if I'm not mistaken...

Re:Please report bugs, folks!

[MagerValp]

The downside is that you'll likely never hear back from them. Even if the bug is solved, you'll never know until they release a new version. They may decide that the behavior is "works as intended" and ignore you. There is no way to follow the progress of your bug.

And until they start communicating with people who file bug reports, people are going to keep complaining in public forums. Quietly waiting for months for Apple to (maybe) release a fix in the next update is rarely an option. Bitching in forums will usually get sympathetic replies from other users suffering from the same problem, and every now and then someone has a fix or a workaround that'll work until the official patch is released.

Sun, on the other hand, handles these kinds of things in an exemplary way (assuming that you have a support contract of course). If you file a bug report, a tech will get back to you for more details. Once the bug has been confirmed by their developers, you're informed. When they have developed a fix, they send out a test patch for you to try, and you get to confirm that it solves the problem. Granted, this is not the kind of support that you can give end users, but professional admins with a support contract deserve nothing less. Oh, and if you ever restricted access to an NFS share by subnet on Solaris 8/x86, you may buy me a beer ;)