Snow Leopard 10.6.1 update released

Two weeks after Snow Leopard went on sale, Apple has released the first system update. 10.6.1. is described as containing ‘general operating system fixes that enhance the stability, compatibility and security of your Mac.’ Available now through Software Update or as a direct download, the 71.47Mb package is recommended for all Macintosh’s running Snow Leopard.

Removing Google Software Update

Much has been written about how far Google intrudes into your online privacy. I notice this when I use my Gmail account and have small targeted advertising links at the top of the page. Occasionally they are useful links so I don’t mind the small loss of privacy. That’s all changed with the latest release of Google Earth and Picasa.

I recently mentioned Picasa for Mac as a fast photo viewer and intended to use it alongside Lightroom for browsing photo’s. Google earth has been updated to version 5 adding lots of interesting new features. Both of these apps tie in with the Google Software Updater which is a background task claiming to exist only to regularly check for software updates.

My objection here is a having a resource consuming process that is out of my control and providing a remote service with information I can’t see. Most Macintosh apps have an easily controlled update check that runs at a user configurable interval or on app startup. Even Apple’s Software Update can be turned off easily. Google give you no controll over the update app, and don’t even make it clear that the updater is being installed. Several sites including ArsTechnica and Wired have covered this story in detail so I won’t go into detail. It all comes down to Google’s attitude that ‘it’s in the EULA’ so they aren’t doing anything the user isn’t told about. And we all read EULA’s before installing software, don’t we?

iPhone/iPod 2.2 features revealed

Details are starting to appear of the rumoured features expected in the upcoming V2.2 firmware for the iPhone and iPod Touch. Perhaps the most interesting is the addition of Google Street View to the Maps application. This allows the viewing of panoramic images taken from street level in cities that have been photographed by Google. Street view is a feature that I used quite a bit recently when picking a hotel in San Francisco for a future visit. It’s nice to be able to look at the area around the hotel to see what the views and amenities are like.

Also rumoured are emoticons for messaging and the ability to disable the auto-correction function. I’m not one for lots of icons in messages but there are time they can come in useful, and being able to turn off auto-correct would definitely be handy when I’m typing a technical message.

Still missing is the push alerts system that Steve Jobs demonstrated at WWDC08, and there’s no information on whether this feature will make it into V2.2.

Security Update 2008-005 released

The latest Apple security update is now avaliable, and has installed fine on my hackintosh. There’s no major changes with this, and the kernel is still version 9.4. As usual be sure to make a backup before installing. For more information on what security fixes are included visit http://support.apple.com/kb/HT2647

10.5.3 released

The Leopard 10.5.3 update is available now in Software Update. My Macbook is currently being backed up using SuperDuper, then 10.5.3 goes on for testing. If I get time I will try applying the update to one of my hackintosh test partitions to see how that goes. Fingers crossed the networking issues are finally sorted out for everyone, and hopefully Leopard will now be the (relatively) bug free OS we wanted.

UPDATE

The Macbook update worked fine, and it’s now showing my iPod Touch and hackintosh in the Finder sidebar. Trying to update the test partition on the hackintosh crashed the install and it’s now not bootable. Looks like I’ll have to wait for the hacked version of the software updater.