Apple seeds new Mac OS X 10.7.3 Build 11D46 to developers
Apple delivered a new build of Mac OS X to developers, focused on iCloud Document Storage, Spotlight, Safari, and Mail, iCal and Address Book features.
The new gigabyte-sized delta version of the 11D46 build replaces last week's 11D42, three other builds released in December, and the initial developer build in November, all of which were designated as Mac OS X Lion 10.7.3.
The focus of these builds hasn't changed, underscoring the complexity of Apple's shift to iCloud, and the support for it required in both its new features open to third party developers and in basic messaging apps including Mail, iCal and Address Book.
While Apple already supports iCloud document features between its iPhone and iPad versions of iWork apps, its Mac version of iWork hasn't yet rolled out support for seamless cross-platform document editing.
Once publicly released, the new 10.7.3 build will extend official Mac support for Catalan, Croatian, Greek, Hebrew, Romanian, Slovak, Thai and Ukrainian languages. The last update Apple released for Mac OS X Lion was 10.7.2 in October.
The new 10.3.7 build also incorporates fixes related to smart cards, directory services authentication, and Apple's homegrown Windows file sharing, which the company just began using in Mac OS X Lion after dumping SAMBA as the code it uses for working with Windows PCs over the network. Additionally, it includes drivers for new AMD (ATI) "Tahiti" graphics cards.
New Mac OS X Server build
The new build is accompanied by a parallel Mac OS X Lion Server 10.7.3 build that focuses on Apple's Address Book Server, Calendar & Contacts Server, WebDAV Sharing and Directory Utility, as well as tweaking the user interface of the Server Application related to Sharing, Web and VPN services.
The new server build also includes support for the Profile Manager (used to deploy and manage Macs and iOS devices), Webmail, adds iPad editing support in its Wiki Server and fixes elements of the Xsan file system Apple now ships for free within $50 Server app available in the Mac App Store.
Comments
I'd give up all that and more just to have some of the glaring bugs and idiocies which Lion introduced into the Finder corrected.
Such as??
The only thing I can think of would be the idiotic Cover Flow-esque sorting debacle.
Such as??
The only thing I can think of would be the idiotic Cover Flow-esque sorting debacle.
According to the blogs, Lion is less then ready for prime time for a multitude of reasons. I'm still holding off going there but would like to upgrade soon.
According to the blogs, Lion is less then ready for prime time for a multitude of reasons.
Been using it since DP1. Other than Safari, it has been pretty dang ready since even then.
My only issue? Get 10.7.3 out and fix this stupid Wi-Fi problem already!
Also: would like to be able to turn off automatic termination for Preview and TextEdit.
And I can't use any multitouch gestures when dragging icons. I'd also like to be able to more fully customize my gestures.
I think that's it. Oh, and the input menu sometimes forgets to hide input source name when I log in.
And an option for rounded corners on the bottom of windows or really anytime they'd be obscuring content within the window (i.e. QuickTime).
Speaking of QuickTime, I don't want my video players to act like fullscreen apps when I fullscreen my video and have everything switch to the next available desktop. Thank goodness VLC doesn't do this.
So OK there is a handful of little design missteps that are really getting on my nerves.
....and the new Exposé is a huge step backwards in terms of usability, particularly when using multiple monitors. This issue alone has almost made me revert back to SL.
I switched and haven't looked back. Unless you use ppc programs you can't replace with something equivilant or better, I don't understand any hesitation.
We need more graphic drivers!
Apple doesn't write graphics drivers that they don't currently sell in their product line up.*
When Apple offers the 7000 series AMD Radeon it will release the driver set.
* They obviously have drivers for prior devices in previously releases.
Such as??
Ever since I upgraded to Lion, this has been horribly broken (or at least inconsistent, a problem I NEVER had under 10.6). They need to differentiate between the 'Always Open in..." and "Browse" options more clearly. I'm sure others will mention their own pet peeves, but this one bugs me because I have to constantly correct for it in List view. On a related topic, has Apple ever tried using Cover Flow in combination with Column view? I've heard that it was in 10.5 betas years ago, but I'm a bit surprised that it hasn't been worked into a final release...
I just want to be able to set whether my windows reopen on startup once and have my preference saved.
Also: would like to be able to turn off automatic termination for Preview and TextEdit.
And I can't use any multitouch gestures when dragging icons. I'd also like to be able to more fully customize my gestures.
I think that's it. Oh, and the input menu sometimes forgets to hide input source name when I log in.
And an option for rounded corners on the bottom of windows or really anytime they'd be obscuring content within the window (i.e. QuickTime).
Speaking of QuickTime, I don't want my video players to act like fullscreen apps when I fullscreen my video and have everything switch to the next available desktop. Thank goodness VLC doesn't do this.
So OK there is a handful of little design missteps that are really getting on my nerves.
Ditto on the re-opening windows thing, it drives me crazy to uncheck that box every time I shut my Mac off.
And let's not forget to include an option for scroll bar arrows.
I also don't understand this. Why do we need arrows? Particularly with gestures on a touchpad or magic mouse? You can use your keyboard to click left right up or down if you just want to go over or up 1 click. And if you want to drag fast, you just click it and drag it. Why do we need to have a single click arrow?
According to the blogs, Lion is less then ready for prime time for a multitude of reasons.
Funny, I've been running it since it was first publicly available and have found it the fastest and most polished version of Mac OSX to date - by a wide margin.
How sad for you that your allowing "blogs" to influence you in such an idiotic way.
I'm still holding off going there but would like to upgrade soon.
Download it and install to an external drive or a secondary partition on your hard drive and see for yourself. I have a few machines in organizations I support that are still on SL - and it's very annoying to have to deal with them now that I'm used to many of the little tweaks and enhancements in Lion.
Ditto on the re-opening windows thing, it drives me crazy to uncheck that box every time I shut my Mac off.
huh - to me the greatest feature of Lion is when I restart my Mac, everything comes back to exactly how I had it. Theres no penalty to shut down. And since transporting your laptop shutdown instead of sleeping is the only way to truly secure it if you need and use filevault, it's far less of a chore than before.
I mean, if you have text highlighted in a document your state is restored to that level of detail on reboot automatically - it's not "just" reopening windows/documents! It's pretty freaking sweet and I'm so used to it I now curse Windows 7 whenever I have to reboot. Especially since I typically have to reboot Windows far more often than my Mac
I also don't understand this. Why do we need arrows? Particularly with gestures on a touchpad or magic mouse?
No kidding. I'm ready to bring my Magic Trackpad into work and try to get these drivers working so I can have two finger scrolling on my Windows 7 box. Once you get gestures down (or a scrollwheel on a mouse) scrollbars are superfluous. I don't miss 'em in the least.
huh - to me the greatest feature of Lion is when I restart my Mac, everything comes back to exactly how I had it. Theres no penalty to shut down. And since transporting your laptop shutdown instead of sleeping is the only way to truly secure it if you need and use filevault, it's far less of a chore than before.
I mean, if you have text highlighted in a document your state is restored to that level of detail on reboot automatically - it's not "just" reopening windows/documents! It's pretty freaking sweet and I'm so used to it I now curse Windows 7 whenever I have to reboot. Especially since I typically have to reboot Windows far more often than my Mac
The only time I've been glad that this is in Lion is for the few times that I've had to do a hard reboot if my machine locks up (2007 MBP Core 2 Duo), but other than those rare instances, I can't get used to it. 20+ years of Windows and 10+ on the Mac and I still close windows when shutting down. Some people use it, but I have my ways (However non-sensical they may be
Such as??
The only thing I can think of would be the idiotic Cover Flow-esque sorting debacle.
Such as returning scroll bar arrows to the user interface. Create an option to turn them on and off if you must, but lack of scroll arrows have been the most maddening change from Snow Leopard to Lion for this user.
Here are just some of the issues:
Time Machine backups stopped working for some people, especially when done over your LAN to a remote hard drive. Just ... stopped ... working ... no matter what was done. I was immune for a while and then BAM I cannot get them to work, or they take 1 hour instead of 2 minutes.
Safari is a huge memory leaking sieve of an app. I think this applies on all platforms though.
Lion is configured differently in terms of paging/swapping, the way it uses virtual memory in general. The side effect of this is my 4Gb of RAM computer now swaps when previously it didn't at all. But what I suspected and now have (sort of) confirmed is: it doesn't matter if you have an SSD. Without an SSD you get the spinny ball of death routinely, with SSD you can swap quite a bit and everything works just fine. This leads me to believe that Apple developed Lion on computers with SSD leaving behind the loyal customers who have old fashioned HDD instead: namely about 99% of us.
Restoring apps after reboot is an illusion: applications cannot run between reboots, but they fake it really well. But only if you have an SSD. If you have an HDD the restore takes so long, your reboot process is suddenly a 5 or 10 minute long ordeal as the OS pages everything back into memory slowly. It restores a screen shot and only when the app is finally loaded can you interact with it. Again, this is a strategy that works great for the iPhone/iPad which are SSD based computers, and also OK if you have a new SSD-based Mac.
So there's a lot to like about Lion but if you think the performance is better than Snow Leopard, you must have bought a new computer with an SSD drive. Otherwise it is infuriatingly slower after the upgrade, and somewhat less reliable.
If I could have my cake and eat it, Apple would redesign Lion so that it has one set of features and configuration parameters for HDD systems and another for SSD systems. That will never happen, so if you want to upgrade to Lion plan on upgrading your hard drive to an SSD. That is the single best impovement BY FAR that you can make for your computer nowadays. I am still in shock at the performance gain from doing that.