10.6.3

Long awaited. Mostly loved.

Get It Try It

The long awaited Apple OS update 10.6.3 for Snow Leopard is here. There are mostly good things but there are also a number of lingering questions.

√ The forums mostly report happy campers. A few people have had issues but most are happy with the update.

√ The size of the update varied from machine to machine. The combo update was the biggest. The update ranged in size from ~450 MB to ~750 MB.

√ No password was needed to install. This is the second time in recent history this new system with suhelperd and launchd has been used.

√ People regularly report winning back disk free space. The first update at Rixstep, involving 4248 files, won back ~400 MB. Users report winning back as much as 2 GB. This has got to be a first (or close to it) and it's a good sign.



√ There's evidently a long laundry list of things that had to be fixed. Not all bugs were fixed. One user reported he went directly to bugreporter.apple.com and refiled the same bug reports he's been filing for the past six years.

√ Open source components are still dangerously out of date. bash is at 3.2.48 but is supposed to be at 4.1.5. curl is at 7.19 but is supposed to be up to 7.20. rsync is at 2.6.9 but is supposed to be up to 3.0.7. X11 is at 2.3.5 but is supposed to be up to 2.50. Users will download and install the updates themselves; why can't Apple do this? These components contain important security fixes; why can't Apple keep their open source components reasonably up to date?

√ The NSTableView team still haven't learned how GUI selections work. All they had to do is look at the code their predecessors wrote for 10.4 Tiger and earlier to see where they screwed up. This has been an embarrassment since Leopard in October 2007 - almost three years old. No other graphical user interface for any platform screws this up. Not even Microsoft.

√ NSDocumentController's still destroying files on file saves instead of updating existing files like the rest of the world. This flaw is also three years old. And it's downright dangerous with massive data losses begging to happen again. The system used to have failsafes but they've been totally abandoned.



√ The 'locked file' nonsense continues. A file with no permissions whatsoever can be overwritten without privilege escalation. The associated risks are obvious. This is another three year old bug.

√ Mail still garbles non-ASCII text in the Drafts folder. They're suddenly using 'charset=cp932'. Why? People using OS X in other languages aren't able to use the program properly.

√ Matt Neuberg's famous bug in Finder file copying, discovered in November 2009, is still alive and well. The bug only rears its head in Snow Leopard but it's still there. Directory hives can in some cases not be copied with Finder Snow Leopard across file sharing points. The bug may be connected with symlinks and a flawed use of low level APIs by the Finder coders.

√ Apple have a new info gathering tool. You can automatically send info, never send it, or be prompted each time. The info gathering tool will cull information about your third party applications and hardware 'anonymously'.

√ Users get the traditional OOTB QuickTime 'welcome' greeting and are prompted to once again submit their personal info.