Leopard: Not Quite Right
Apple’s Leopard is several months and a few upgrades old now, but some things still aren’t meeting expectations. Although my experience with it is has been very good (and I know some folks have had serious problems), an accumulation of troubling problems have, well, troubled me.
Apple has made some fixes to Parental Controls, but in our house we’re still having trouble with it being too strict. It is not domain related, rather it is page related. Thus every page you visit on Wikipedia, for instance, has to be authorized! Ouch.
Thought I’d give the new whizz-bang DVD sharing a go recently. Ha! I tried to copy 1GB of files from one Mac to another but I gave up after 3 hours as it had only copied 900MB and still had an hour to go.
So I tried it the other way, that is, copying the files from my Mac to the client Mac, and it took a little over 10 minutes!
I really hope some tech-head is not going to say, “Well, duh! It’s always going to be slower copying from the client,” because that means they would be saying DVD sharing is totally useless. But I haven’t heard massive rumblings on the net about this, so maybe it’s a rare problem. (Be interested to hear how the MacBook Air folks are getting on.) I’m sure DVD sharing is not totally useless, but I did re-attempt this several times and every time it staggered to a crawl.
Safari hangs daily. Anyone else got this problem? My Safari hangs virtually every day. It’s been fun sending reports to Apple with messages like “Hi, just the daily hang.” I started using Safari 3.1 today (which has some nice new features for developers) so it’ll be interesting to see if this hanging problem has been fixed.
On Safari 3.1, it is not certified compatible with Adobe’s Buzzword yet. And no wonder. Pressing the Delete key inserts a period!
Occasionally my iMac doesn’t wake properly from sleep. And I never trust the locking screen saver because it is even less reliable at waking from sleep. Actually, waking from sleep seems to have been a problem with Macs for the five years I’ve been around them. No wonder Apple got rid of the light on the new iMacs. Now you just figure you must have turned it off.
A funny thing happened the other day. I got a Window-esque error message that had me checking to make sure it wasn’t April 1. The message read: “Error, internet appears to be online.”
Finder has been improved, but creating a new folder in List view always shoves it in the root folder of the window you are viewing. This does tend to drive one batty.
I will finish with a a good rap for Apple. In February it finally brought iPhoto books to Australia. I made and ordered one and took it to school. It blew away anyone that looked at it, and now everyone at school wants to make them, including the teachers, and make their folios in them. So on this, Apple has got it very right and the price is reasonable too.
So long and thanks for all the fish
Well, I’ve taken the decision to take an extended break from AM while I finish my study. Plus, after three years and some 180,000 words, which is well beyond the extent of my vocabulary, and so not surprisingly, I feel like I’m not saying anything new. 
You will still see me around, as I will continue to contribute in the comments, and hopefully occasionally post an article when time—and inspiration—permit.
And of course, I’d really like to thank all you readers. You’ve made AM a great site, and you’ve made me a better writer. Thanks.
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I have the same problem with sleep on my MacBook Pro. It was broken in 10.5, they fixed it in 10.5.1, and it’s broken again in 10.5.2. Before anyone suggests going back to 10.5.1, let me say that 10.5.2 fixes too much other stuff.
When I am working in closed-lid mode and disconnect the keyboard and power supply, I get an ominous gray screen crash instead of sleep.
On my iMac, I notice that right before a system sound, the system appears to be suspended. I say “appears” because the only thing I can see is that my typing goes into a buffer instead of onto the screen. After the system sound is finished, the typing appears. It seems to me that Leopard ought to be able to play system sounds in the background. It’s not the speed of my computer; it’s an aluminum 24” Core 2 Extreme.
My biggest concern is over the recent 10.5.2 update causing my MacBook Pro C2D 2.16GHz to intermittently freeze when running on battery power (requiring a cold reboot).
Apparently, the issue is minor enough not to garner any attention but on the Apple Discussion Forums, there are many who are having this issue.
http://discussions.apple.com/thread.jspa?threadID=1390673
Hmm.... been having the “not waking from sleep” issue on my MacBook for a few months. Not sure what causes it but it started happening after 10.5.1. Hmm…
The Mac mini seems fine.
Ah yes, Hug, I also get a Kernel Panic quite regularly when restarting. Except I couldn’t remember if it pre-dated the upgrade to Leopard. I think it came along around 10.4.11, but not sure.
Strange thing is it goes away if I leave it for a few minutes. So maybe it’s hardware. Anyone?
Good luck with your studies Chris - your contributions here will be missed.
Regarding problems with Leopard - I just thought it was because I was running it on a PowerBook instead of MacBook. Now I know better…
The DVD Player in Leopard locks my system with a spinning fireball and no one knows how to fix it. I have been hoping for a fix since the beginning, but no luck so far.
Front Row and VLC work fine, but I would like to use the DVD Player’s features though.
I suppose that striving for perfection is an ongoing process.
I’m still waiting for the fix to my MBP after the video driver update… clamshell mode has effectively been wrecked when connected to my external monitor (HP 2207).
My 2 yr old MBP has problems the odd time with waking from sleep. I find that you must make sure the “sleep” light is pulsing before moving it.
My iMac (Oct ‘07) has never had a sleep problem, however if you are using Front Row and have the iMac set to shut down automatically, it won’t.
Happy studying Chris.
Cheers:
Bob
If it weren’t for Time Machine, I probably wouldn’t boot into Leopard at all. So far, it offers nothing compelling (other than TM) and a lot of incompatibilities still.
One weird and consistent glitch: When I eject a volume from the Finder and I happen to be browsing that volume, it closes all of my Finder windows. In Tiger, it simply browses to a different volume. Very, very annoying.
yes! Forgot to mention that one, Beeb! It drives me around the twist.
I think Leopard has no big issues, but still too many little ones.
Hmm. My MacBook has had only one problem. No Safari freezes. If you have anything in /Library/Input Managers, remove it (SafariBlock 2.1 works fine for me, FYI). You should also check /Library/Internet Plug-ins (name?) to ensure you don’t have any junk in there. I had a helper file in there for Flash and it was confusing the newest version. You might want to move all the plug-ins out and add them back one file at a time.
DVD sharing probably only works well on 802.11n networks and wired GigE.
The one time I had wake from sleep problems LONG ago, I had to do an Archive and Install(preserving settings). Worked fine after that as there was some software not behaving with the latest OS. I don’t recall what it was.
As for the window closing on volume eject, OS 9 did that. Is OS X supposed to randomly pick a location? Seems like a convenience to me but I like things tidy.
My one problem stems from my WPA security, I guess. The network “hangs” until I turn AirPort off and back on. Many others have it too. I did an Archive and Install with settings preservation. I think I have to kill all the related support files and start over.
As for the window closing on volume eject, OS 9 did that.
OS9 was a pile of crap, so that’s no selling point.
Is OS X supposed to randomly pick a location?
It closes all of my Finder windows, which is no convenience. Tiger ejects a volume and defaults to a sidebar view. But it could eject to the desktop. Anything would be better than closing the window altogether.