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        <title>ZDNet Blogs</title>
        <link>http://blogs.zdnet.com</link>
        <description>ZDNet Blogs Focus: Leopard</description>
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<title>What is the rate of Mac OS X Leopard adoption? </title>
<link>http://blogs.zdnet.com/Apple/?p=1483</link>
<pubDate>Mon, 31 Mar 2008 11:19:43 -0700</pubDate>
<dc:creator>David Morgenstern</dc:creator>
<guid>http://blogs.zdnet.com/Apple/?p=1483</guid>
<description><![CDATA[Back at the Macworld Expo in January, Apple CEO Steve Jobs said that some 20 percent of the installed base was running Mac OS X 10.5 Leopard. But do we have any sense of the current adoption rate for Leopard? Of course, Apple has the best statistics but it's unlikely that we will receive much word on adoption rates until the Worldwide Developers Conference in June.  Still, aside from the semi-educated guesstimates available for a fee from analyst companies, there are several developers that provide a unique view of the installed base. Mac developer The Omni Group, a Seattle-based maker of a number of Mac OS X business applications, collects OS version information from its customers and provides it for free ... ]]>
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<title>Alsoft releases DiskWarrior 4 v4.1 CD updater for Leopard</title>
<link>http://blogs.zdnet.com/Apple/?p=1432</link>
<pubDate>Tue, 18 Mar 2008 10:17:23 -0700</pubDate>
<dc:creator>David Morgenstern</dc:creator>
<guid>http://blogs.zdnet.com/Apple/?p=1432</guid>
<description><![CDATA[Alsoft on Tuesday released a free software updater that will let users create a Mac OS X 10.5 Leopard-compatible startup CD for its DiskWarrior 4 Version 4.1 directory repair utility. The CD is a universal startup disc for PowerPC- and Intel-based Macs. Of course, Alsoft's word "universal" here is a bit constrained. Please note that the new startup CD will start up the same set of Macs as your current DiskWarrior CD. Your new CD will not start up any Mac that your current DiskWarrior CD can not. What does this mean? According to the company, DiskWarrior supports Mac OS Standard (HFS) or Mac OS Extended (HFS Plus) formatted drives including "RAID volumes, journaled disks, case-sensitive disks, FileVaults, Time Machine backups and iPods." Version ... ]]>
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<title>Fun facts about Mac OS X Leopard's icons</title>
<link>http://blogs.zdnet.com/Apple/?p=1416</link>
<pubDate>Sun, 16 Mar 2008 08:43:11 -0700</pubDate>
<dc:creator>David Morgenstern</dc:creator>
<guid>http://blogs.zdnet.com/Apple/?p=1416</guid>
<description><![CDATA[Computer users on Mac, Windows or Linux must take icons for granted. But the standards for these interface elements keep changing. Mac OS X 10.5 Leopard offers new challenges for icon designers. Leopard supports 512-by-512-pixel icons, which are much larger than the previous 128-x-128  standard. However, in its Human Interface Guidelines, Apple suggests that developers need to make fresh versions of the icons and not just blow up their old images. For example, the 512 x 512 pixel version of the icon should not have thick strokes or look    vectorized.    In general, the larger icon should be a higher quality rendition of the 128 x 128 pixel resource, which exhibits richer texture, more details, and greater realism. I didn't realize that the ... ]]>
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<title>Wintel Vista conspiracy screws customers: Another win for Apple</title>
<link>http://blogs.zdnet.com/Apple/?p=1367</link>
<pubDate>Fri, 29 Feb 2008 02:34:05 -0800</pubDate>
<dc:creator>David Morgenstern</dc:creator>
<guid>http://blogs.zdnet.com/Apple/?p=1367</guid>
<description><![CDATA[The latest PC market scandal - that Microsoft, Intel and some PC makers knew that the "Vista Capable" logo certification program was a lie and that some chipsets for popular machines couldn't support the new Aero interface stuff - must be music in the executive suites down in Cupertino. The story provides more evidence to PC users that there's a good reason to join the switcher movement to the Mac. This amazing story  continues to unfold. Microsoft officials gave the green light to Vista certification for an older Intel chipset with integrated graphics that wouldn't support Aero.  According to reports, back in 2006, Intel decided that it might not be able to ramp up production for its 945 chipset ... ]]>
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<title>Is Apple's Mighty Mouse too smart for its own good?</title>
<link>http://blogs.zdnet.com/Apple/?p=1349</link>
<pubDate>Tue, 26 Feb 2008 07:33:50 -0800</pubDate>
<dc:creator>David Morgenstern</dc:creator>
<guid>http://blogs.zdnet.com/Apple/?p=1349</guid>
<description><![CDATA[While most attention on Mac input is focused on multitouch gestures on new notebooks and iPhone screens, even longtime Mac users may not know exactly how many buttons are on the Mighty Mouse that ships with desktop Macs. But all will enjoy the new trick Leopard Finder has when scrolling with a mouse or trackpad. Before Monday evening's BMUGWest Mac User Group meeting in San Francisco,  longtime member David Schwartz and I ran down some of the Leopard 10.5.2 changes and our discussion strayed to input. I mentioned a scene that I overheard in a retail electronics store. A Mac critic said loudly that a big reason he hated the Mac was its lack of support for multibutton mice     of ... ]]>
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<title>Reminder: Backup before installing new Leopard 10.5.2 update</title>
<link>http://blogs.zdnet.com/Apple/?p=1299</link>
<pubDate>Mon, 11 Feb 2008 03:49:12 -0800</pubDate>
<dc:creator>David Morgenstern</dc:creator>
<guid>http://blogs.zdnet.com/Apple/?p=1299</guid>
<description><![CDATA[Apple late Monday released its Mac OS X 10.5.2 update, which addresses many  annoying bugs as well as tackling a number of interface issues that bugged longtime users. According to the technote on the release, users should backup before installing the update (this is really important). And Apple suggested that customers be patient with the updater software. The installation process should not be interrupted, even if the progress bar remains unchanged for several minutes. If a power outage or other interruption occurs during installation, use the standalone installer from Apple Support Downloads to update. Here are a few interesting fixes in the update: Addresses legibility issues with the menu bar with an option to turn off transparency in Desktop & Screen Saver preferences. Adjusts ... ]]>
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<title>Horrors! Linus Torvalds calls HFS+ 'utter crap'</title>
<link>http://blogs.zdnet.com/Apple/?p=1278</link>
<pubDate>Tue, 05 Feb 2008 07:19:57 -0800</pubDate>
<dc:creator>David Morgenstern</dc:creator>
<guid>http://blogs.zdnet.com/Apple/?p=1278</guid>
<description><![CDATA[In an interview at Melbourne's linux.conf.au conference, Linus Torvalds called the standard file system of Mac OS X "complete and utter crap." Mac fans are only slightly outraged, pointing out that HFS+ isn't really "complete and utter crap," rather, it's just slightly crap-ish. In the Sidney Morning Herald online, Nick Miller reported his Q&A interview with the originator of Linux.  He asked Torvalds about the hype surrounding the releases of Windows Vista and Mac OS X Leopard. According to Torvalds, "An o/s should never have been something that people (in general) really care about: it should be completely invisible and nobody should give a flying f*** about it except the technical people." It's stupid - when you make a big deal about ... ]]>
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<title>Things that suck somewhat: Mac OS X Sheets</title>
<link>http://blogs.zdnet.com/Apple/?p=1223</link>
<pubDate>Fri, 25 Jan 2008 03:50:24 -0800</pubDate>
<dc:creator>David Morgenstern</dc:creator>
<guid>http://blogs.zdnet.com/Apple/?p=1223</guid>
<description><![CDATA[There's a time and a place for transparency in the user interface and Mac OS X usually is right on the mark (unlike Windows Vista). However, Sheets, the animated window that holds buttons for some modal dialogs needs work. Apple this week released an update to its developer documentation on Mac OS X's Human Interface guidelines to cover changes in Leopard. Since, I've been annoyed about the behavior of the Save/Save As dialog windows (I almost called it a "box, which is the Classic Mac OS nomenclature), I decided to look at the rulebook. Mac users are familiar with Sheets, even if they don't know the name for them. It's the window that drops down from the title bar of the Save ... ]]>
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<title>Mac developers betting hard on Leopard</title>
<link>http://blogs.zdnet.com/Apple/?p=1213</link>
<pubDate>Mon, 21 Jan 2008 11:18:56 -0800</pubDate>
<dc:creator>David Morgenstern</dc:creator>
<guid>http://blogs.zdnet.com/Apple/?p=1213</guid>
<description><![CDATA[One of the nascent trends at the recent Macworld Expo was the arrival of Leopard-only applications. Despite the ballyhooed success of the Leopard rollout, selling your software to a subset of the market is an unusual move, especially so for small developers. Like a Hollywood studio, Apple in October waved the flag over the first weekend results of its release of Mac OS X 10.5, Leopard. In a release, Apple CEO Steve Jobs said that "Leopard   s innovative features are getting great reviews and making more people than ever think about switching to the Mac.    During his Expo keynote, Jobs said the rapid move towards Leopard by the installed base was continuing. He said the update was both a critical success as well ... ]]>
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<title>FileMaker fixes serious Leopard 'compatibility issues' for older versions</title>
<link>http://blogs.zdnet.com/Apple/?p=1118</link>
<pubDate>Tue, 18 Dec 2007 06:07:58 -0800</pubDate>
<dc:creator>David Morgenstern</dc:creator>
<guid>http://blogs.zdnet.com/Apple/?p=1118</guid>
<description><![CDATA[FileMaker on Tuesday released a compatibility update for flavors of the older (but still popular) FileMaker Pro 8.5. At the same time, the company strongly suggests that users move up to Version 9 when running Leopard. According to the company, the FileMaker Pro 8.5v2 update fixes bugs that caused the application to hang when exporting a database to Microsoft Excel format (or even saving one already in .XLS). It also would hang if there was a mismatch between the system language and region. Go figure. However, the company said that the Instant Web Publishing feature in Version 8.5 doesn't work and it won't update the technology to ever work on Leopard. FileMaker's meta message here is that customers might be better off staying ... ]]>
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<title>Are Mac users more honest than Windows users?</title>
<link>http://blogs.zdnet.com/Apple/?p=1114</link>
<pubDate>Mon, 17 Dec 2007 06:25:53 -0800</pubDate>
<dc:creator>David Morgenstern</dc:creator>
<guid>http://blogs.zdnet.com/Apple/?p=1114</guid>
<description><![CDATA[Details of new research on Mac OS X Leopard show that Mac users are buying family pack licenses, even though they aren't forced to. On the other hand, Microsoft goes to great lengths to validate every Windows installation. So does this mean that Apple customers are more honest than Windows users? Take a poll on Windows-Mac user honesty at the bottom of the story. A Reuters story on Monday said that Leopard was Apple's best-ever OS release. When comparing the first full month of sales of Apple Mac OS 10.5 "Leopard" (November 2007) to the first full month of sales for Mac OS 10.4 "Tiger" (May 2005), dollar volume for Leopard was up 32.8 percent and unit volume up 20.5 percent, NPD Group ... ]]>
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<title>Waiting for Leopard's  iSCSI support</title>
<link>http://blogs.zdnet.com/Apple/?p=1097</link>
<pubDate>Mon, 10 Dec 2007 05:52:10 -0800</pubDate>
<dc:creator>David Morgenstern</dc:creator>
<guid>http://blogs.zdnet.com/Apple/?p=1097</guid>
<description><![CDATA[Scanning though Apple's server discussion boards recently, I noticed a thread on iSCSI. This technology was a hot topic last year at the Macworld Expo in San Francisco and we can expect more of the same next month. iSCSI is a standard that uses the familiar SCSI storage command set but sends it over Ethernet. The technology allows for convenient shared storage over fast TCP networking such as the common Gigabit Ethernet and now faster flavors in the market such as 10Gigabit Ethernet. The technology calls for a initiator on the client side and then a target on the storage side. There was talk that Apple would provide both. However, as we may remember, Apple's shifting of OS X and QA (quality assurance) ... ]]>
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<title>Believe it: Sherlock is really, really dead</title>
<link>http://blogs.zdnet.com/Apple/?p=1089</link>
<pubDate>Fri, 07 Dec 2007 05:57:18 -0800</pubDate>
<dc:creator>David Morgenstern</dc:creator>
<guid>http://blogs.zdnet.com/Apple/?p=1089</guid>
<description><![CDATA[For generations of Mac, Apple pushed its Sherlock application as the preferred interface for searching Web resources as well as local content. But with the release of Mac OS X Leopard, search is all about Spotlight, the integrated desktop search architecture, and Dashboard, the Mac's front end to Web services. No Sherlock allowed. We could see the writing on the wall for Sherlock in the previous Mac OS X 10.4 Tiger. Spotlight and Dashboard widgets had most if not all of Sherlock's functionality. But it still lived on the Dock for users who loved it. In Leopard, not only is Sherlock out the door, but don't even think about returning it to your Dock. In a support document released late last week, ... ]]>
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<title>Do switchers now rule the Mac? </title>
<link>http://blogs.zdnet.com/Apple/?p=1085</link>
<pubDate>Thu, 06 Dec 2007 12:11:01 -0800</pubDate>
<dc:creator>David Morgenstern</dc:creator>
<guid>http://blogs.zdnet.com/Apple/?p=1085</guid>
<description><![CDATA[Switchers keep gaining in importance to Apple and that's easy to see in the company's advertising campaign during this holiday season. Almost all the stories are aimed at switchers and Windows users: one compares the many Vista SKUs with the single Mac Leopard SKU; another tells Windows users not to give up on Vista; and several present characters telling Mr. PC that their relatives have bought Macs. The most recent 'vert is Misprint, which points to a recent PC World review that says "the MacBook Pro outperformed the rest of the notebooks we tested, all of which claim Windows as their primary     nay, their only     operating system."  In the ad, Mr. PC howls that this is a "serious ... ]]>
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<title>Leopard compatibility ups and downs</title>
<link>http://blogs.zdnet.com/Apple/?p=1072</link>
<pubDate>Mon, 03 Dec 2007 02:23:20 -0800</pubDate>
<dc:creator>David Morgenstern</dc:creator>
<guid>http://blogs.zdnet.com/Apple/?p=1072</guid>
<description><![CDATA[The list of applications compatible with Mac OS X 10.5 keeps growing, but a good number of Leopard-savvy updates to printer drivers are still on hold. Before upgrading, Tiger users should make sure that their printers will be supported completely under Leopard. At last week's meeting of the BMUGWest user group in San Francisco, I polled the crowd on Leopard adoption. About 65 percent were still waiting to upgrade. The primary reason given was concern over compatibility with critical applications. The Leopard compatibility situation is a moving target and appears to be improving quickly. I was encouraged to see that Prosoft late last week announced the release of a fully-compatible version of its Data Rescue II recovery program. The previous release would ... ]]>
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<title>Developers come to the 'rescue' of Leopard's Stacks, Dock</title>
<link>http://blogs.zdnet.com/Apple/?p=1065</link>
<pubDate>Thu, 29 Nov 2007 10:10:55 -0800</pubDate>
<dc:creator>David Morgenstern</dc:creator>
<guid>http://blogs.zdnet.com/Apple/?p=1065</guid>
<description><![CDATA[One of the most heated complaints about Mac OS X Leopard concerns the new Stacks navigation  feature and the new behavior of folders on the Dock. A variety of small applications recently surfaced to fix the "problem." In previous flavors of Mac OS X, users could drag a folder to the dock and when they held down the mouse button, a hierarchical menu of the contents was presented. Users could move up and down the list and select an item. The Leopard release changed that behavior. Now, the Dock can have Stacks, a new kind of folder that shows the items in the Stack as a fan or as a grid of icons in a preview pane. The image of the ... ]]>
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<title>Macs that hate Adobe fonts, love Microsoft ones</title>
<link>http://blogs.zdnet.com/Apple/?p=1057</link>
<pubDate>Tue, 27 Nov 2007 08:48:40 -0800</pubDate>
<dc:creator>David Morgenstern</dc:creator>
<guid>http://blogs.zdnet.com/Apple/?p=1057</guid>
<description><![CDATA[The turkey holiday offered a chance to catch up with Apple Support articles. One rubbed me the wrong way: a recent document about Mac OS X 10.5 Leopard and Apple's Keynote presentation software. It seems that the pair don't care for several Adobe fonts that have been with the Mac since 1986. According to the article, "Keynote may unexpectedly quit when using specific fonts on your Mac OS 10.5 (Leopard) system. This unexpected behavior will most likely occur when adding a build to text ..." The fonts in question are Courier Oblique, Courier Bold Oblique, Helvetica Oblique and Helvetica Bold Oblique. These fonts are part of the Adobe Courier and Helvetica typefaces found in the original LaserWriter's PostScript interpreter and have shipped ... ]]>
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<title>Leopard: Trying to love Help Viewer's new fascist behavior </title>
<link>http://blogs.zdnet.com/Apple/?p=1029</link>
<pubDate>Tue, 13 Nov 2007 08:36:19 -0800</pubDate>
<dc:creator>David Morgenstern</dc:creator>
<guid>http://blogs.zdnet.com/Apple/?p=1029</guid>
<description><![CDATA[Unlike other less-helpful systems, the Mac's Help Viewer app has been seen as the model for answering questions from newbies and sophisticated users alike. But in Leopard, the program's new behavior is hateful to many. However, a recent post offers a command-line fix. When you invoke Help Viewer in Leopard its window appears on the desktop. It looks like the usual helpful interface we've come to know and love. But it's now a tyrant: no window from any application, including the Finder, can move in front of Help Viewer. Help Viewer is now the boss of that desktop real estate whether you like it or not. Of course, this new action can cause some confusion, especially for those of us who have grown ... ]]>
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<title>Quality time in Panther before Leopard</title>
<link>http://blogs.zdnet.com/Apple/?p=1024</link>
<pubDate>Mon, 12 Nov 2007 11:03:49 -0800</pubDate>
<dc:creator>David Morgenstern</dc:creator>
<guid>http://blogs.zdnet.com/Apple/?p=1024</guid>
<description><![CDATA[Not everyone moving to Apple's new Mac OS X Leopard will come by way of Tiger. A significant share will upgrade to Leopard from Panther (or even Jaguar) and these users may have some outdated notions of Mac-to-Mac migration. With Tiger hanging around for years and the transition to Intel-based Macs, it's easy to forget Mac OS X 10.4 Panther. However, Panther is still a popular version for users still running PowerPC G3 and G4 Macs. Take the poll at the bottom of the story: What Mac OS version are you upgrading from? For example, Net Applications' recent market share report states that half of the Mac share is for Intel Macs and the other half for plain "Mac OS." The survey is ... ]]>
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<title>Apple prepping 10.5.1 update</title>
<link>http://blogs.zdnet.com/Apple/?p=1018</link>
<pubDate>Thu, 08 Nov 2007 07:22:25 -0800</pubDate>
<dc:creator>Jason D. O'Grady</dc:creator>
<guid>http://blogs.zdnet.com/Apple/?p=1018</guid>
<description><![CDATA[There's no shortage of people that have had problems with Mac OS 10.5 Leopard (including data loss, login jams, Time Machine errors, Finder weirdness and even the dreaded BSOD). Apple appears to be moving to address these bugs in a quicker-than-usual manner. According to AppleInsider, the initial builds of 10.5.1 have over 24 bug fixes including: Firewall, Spotlight indexing, iCal syncing, Keychain login, text drawing corruption and fixes for Leopard's email client, to correct Mail syncing, HTML anchors, Email alarms, To-Do Notes, and smart mailboxes. MacRumors adds that the update will address problems with Disk Management, DesktopServices and moving files across partitions, Text Drawing, iCal and CalDAV syncing, Read-Only Issue with SMB and AirPort 802.1X. No timeline has been given for release of ... ]]>
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