Filed under: OS, Odds and ends
Tiger Bugs
I've been keeping track of a few bits of odd behavior in Tiger, and following up on Laurie's post about Quicktime bugs, I thought I'd turn my observations loose and see what the rest of you have experienced. I've noticed that Safari RSS sometimes lists the time for posts an hour ahead of the actual post time. When this happened earlier, this TUAW post at 1:25 was time-stamped as 2:25 in Safari RSS (when I looked at the feed at 1:45).
I also had the Finder just crash on me when I closed a Spotlight search window. After it relaunched, MenuCalendarClock was on the other side of what should have been the corner of the screen. Quiting MenuCalendarClock didn't help, so I had to Force the Finder to relaunch (Command + Option + Esc). Admittedly, this could be a MenuCalendarClock bug rather than a Tiger bug, but I don't think so, as the Finder crashed when I closed a Spotlight search window and no where near MenuCalendarClock and Spotlight's menu icon.
These are just two little quirks and possible bugs that I've noticed. What Tiger bugs have you spotted, TUAW readers?
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Reader Comments (Page 1 of 1)
Dan Siercks said 4:17PM on 6-16-2005
I'm 20 minutes into my first hands on with Tiger, and I've ran into something odd. I do alot of work with raw .plist files, and when I saw a new .plist within ~/Library/Preferences my first reaction was to cat the plist.
This results in unreadable garbage surrounding the values, completely different then the plain text xml files on 10.3.
Is anyone able to read plist files from within terminal, either through cat or pico?
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Todd said 4:17PM on 6-16-2005
I haven't installed Tiger yet, but when I was at CompUSA last night, I opened Mail.app. It was filled with example e-mails (about 50 of them). All I did was scroll the e-mail preview pane down and clicked on a different e-mail and Mail.app "unexpectedly quit". Not exactly a reproducable bug, but it doesn't exactly make me feel good about upgrading.
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tj said 4:17PM on 6-16-2005
While Safari is very quick, it hates opening RSS feeds. It's slow and somtimes Safari will unexpectedly quit.
After I install, run, close and try to uninstall a widget, the dashboard will freak out. The icons in the well of the dash will get shuffled and it takes restarting the dock to fix it.
Not really a bug, but an annoyance: I really don't like when using Spotlight, I'll search a file and want to open the directory that it's in but you have to right-click or control-click to "Reveal in Finder". I wish you could just click the file path that shows up in the expanded info about the searched item like a link.
Those are my only negative observations so far. I LOVE everything else.
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Alix said 9:11PM on 8-23-2005
Not to brag, but my Tiger upgrade went quite smoothly and I have had no issues other than an initial quitting problem with safari, but I resolved that problem after the first 30 min. For the past few days I have nothing but positive experiences with Tiger!
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tnkgrl said 4:17PM on 6-16-2005
To #1: plists in Tiger are now binary by default... However, you ccan use "plutil -convert xml1.plist" in Terminal to change a plist named back to text readable XML!
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Dan Siercks said 4:17PM on 6-16-2005
So my comment was brash, and I see now that plist files are compressed, and that you can uncompress them using the plutil command. However, it seems that when any changes are stored to the plist, the file is overwritten and recompressed.
This frustrates me, wonder if there is a flag to leave plists uncompressed.
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tnkgrl said 4:17PM on 6-16-2005
Oops... My plist post got mangled a bit!
I was trying to say that you can use "plutil -convert xml1 -file-.plist" in Terminal to change a plist named -file- back to text readable XML.
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Mitch said 4:17PM on 6-16-2005
1) iChat 3.0 will not connect outside its own network. It whines about the other user not responding or about bandwidth limitations. The only part that works is text chat. Audio and video are broken.
2) Paired bluetooth headsets no longer show up as an audio input/output option in the sound system preference panels.
3) Address book still doesn't work with a bluetooth cell phone.
4) iPhoto crashes unexpectedly doing the most mundane of tasks.
5) Bookmarked RSS feeds sometimes show the new posts in parentheses and sometimes not.
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The MZA said 4:17PM on 6-16-2005
So far, the whole Tiger experience has been overwhelming positive for me. However, whilst playing with Smart Folders and doing some Spotlighting (good name for a band that), Finder stopped responding. Switching to different Spotlight targets (from Computer to Home, for example) within Finder seems to be particularly troublesome.
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Cory said 4:17PM on 6-16-2005
Right click on a dock icon to get the popup menu, now click outside of the menu and dock on an empty portion of the desktop. The dock stays magnified.
I had an issue where I deleted a widget or two that I had downloaded from a 3rd party website from my ~/Library/Widgets folder. One of the old widgets still showed up in Dashboard. I dragged it out and it appeared as the iTunes widget then crashed Dashboard.
Another was when I downloaded a piece of software and when it was extracted to a folder on the desktop I could not view the files via the GUI. A Terminal "ls -al" showed the files where there. I moved the folder inside ~/Documents and could then see the files in the GUI.
I have not tried to reproduce the last two since.
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Peter Nguyen said 4:17PM on 6-16-2005
I've had the Finder menu bar and the iTunes menu bar overlap, causing the text to layer. Text layering also happened in VLC...
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SpacePirate said 4:17PM on 6-16-2005
Viewing hidden files is also somewhat broken as well. Open up com.apple.finder.plist from ~/library/preferences, and add in AppleShowAllFiles (Boolean), set to Yes. Restart the finder (QuitMenuItem ((Boolean)) Yes is another good one ;)), and pretty much all non-drive icons are translucent, a state previously reserved for hidden files.
~ SpacePirate
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Ryan J. Bonnell said 4:17PM on 6-16-2005
I too was using MenuCalendar on Panther, and after upgrading to Tiger I can no longer get MenuCalendar to display on the right side of the Spotlight search window -- it defaults to displaying to the very left of the Apple menu extra. However, looking at the screenshot of MenuCalendar to the right of the Spotlight search icon, I almost now prefer MenuCalendar on the left side.
I'm guessing that the Spotlight search area is pushing all of the menu icons to the left, or maybe Apple has gone off and changed the NSStatus items again.
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Durandal said 4:17PM on 6-16-2005
When I first installed Tiger something was using 99.9 percent of both my processors according to the activity monitor it was something called vcheck.something. I spotlighted it and it turned out to be something to do with virex. Deleted it and everything to do with it and it solved my problem... yeah so apparently virex isnt tiger compatible anymore? My dad just told me this, he works for apple... look into it for me tuaw.
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Alex said 10:54PM on 10-24-2005
How 'bout some GUI quirks. Like some people having grey apple menu icons and grey spotlight search icons, while other people have the bright blue. Additionally, it would appear that a clean install gives the fresh ichat logo that is just a speach bubble. While an upgrad install retains the old icon.
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SpacePirate said 4:17PM on 6-16-2005
Alex, are you sure you don't have the graphite theme active? You can find it in Appearance. No clue about the iChat icon, though, it worked for me without a hitch on 3 different systems (yes, I got the family pack ;)).
~ SP
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Brian said 9:40AM on 10-29-2005
If you set a picture as your Desktop in System Preferences there is no option for how to resize the picture. In the past you had options for "Full Screen", "Stretch" and at least one other. Now there's nothing. So if you have a small picture it gets stretched out and ugly rather than just being centered in the screen with a solid border. Doesn't really bother me but drives my girlfriend crazy.
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willie Mason said 4:17PM on 6-16-2005
Great site please keep me posted
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John Lee said 4:19PM on 6-16-2005
the finder seems to want to search after putting in one letter of a name.
I typed in "A" looking for a document with the word "always". The Tiger finder wants to find every entry on my computer starting with the word "A". I could go on, numerous crashes, new drivers, and 3rd party fixes.
I don't see the point of this new operating system. Does it make my work easier or faster? No it creates more work, and I spend more time troubleshooting or installing new drivers, and some that don't exist as of yet, which makes my computer usesless. I recomend not buying tiger.
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