The name's Leopard... Snow Leopard... and how I wish it was 10.7 instead of 10.6 so I could extend these hokey James Bond allusions further. That said, it is closer than the truth than you may think. Apple has given Snow Leopard a license to kill... but this doesn't have anything to do with espionage or even spyware (pardon the pun). Instead, it has everything to do with Apple's desire to make the shutdown process faster.

One of the systemwide refinements tells us that "Snow Leopard is up to 80 percent faster when shutting down." If you've ever waited impatiently for your Mac notebook to shut down while your flight was boarding or at the end of the day when you are anxious to get home, Apple is looking to reduce that frustration.

Towards that end, Snow Leopard allows developers to mark their applications as "clean" or "dirty" -- not that kind of dirty!

Here's an example of what "clean" vs "dirty" means in this context: imagine you have been working in Pages, but all of your documents are saved (or maybe you've closed all the documents but Pages is still running). Pages can mark itself "clean" which is similar to saying "I'm ready when you are!"

Now imagine that you are working in Pages, and you've saved your file, but after you saved it you made some additional changes. Perhaps you have several documents open and unsaved, or you've got a Preferences dialog open. If you look at the 3 circles in the top-left corner of the window, you'll see that the one of the far left has a hole in the middle which goes away when you save the file. If any of those situations are true, Pages is considered "dirty," the programmatic equivalent of "Just a moment please!"

When the user tells the operating system to shutdown (not just sleep), the operating system will look to see which applications are "ready to go" and applications are still looking for their metaphorical keys. The ones that are ready? They get killed, and killed hard.

It's like the difference between telling an app to "Quit" versus "Force Quit." If you ask it to Quit, it is going to check to see if it needs to do anything before it does. If you tell it to Force Quit, it's just going to go away.

If you are familiar with the Terminal, you may have used 'kill' to stop some process from running. Usually if you want to 'kill' an application nicely, you send 'kill -TERM' ("software termination signal") which says "OK, clean up your things and let's go!" However if you find that something refuses to stop, you might use 'kill -9' which is referred to as SIGKILL, described as "non-catchable" and "non-ignorable." This is like picking up your child and carrying him or her away because it is time to go now with no questions asked. Applications which mark themselves as "clean" are telling the operating system: "You can use 'kill -9'/Force Quit on me without worrying about losing anything."

How much longer does "Quit" take compared to "Force Quit"? Maybe only a second or two, maybe a fraction of a second. But if you have a lot of applications running and the majority of them can skip that time, it helps the overall speed of the shutdown. Think of it like this: imagine you had a bunch of family members over and you were trying to get everyone out of the house to go to a restaurant: young kids, a couple of older aunts and uncles, and maybe grampa. You've probably asked something like this: "Does everyone have everything they need? Kids, did you go to the bathroom? Uncle Joe, did you get your coat and hat? Grampa, do you have your sweater in case it's too cold?" Even if everyone says "yes" it took longer than if you said "Let's go" and everyone replied "We're all ready!"

Is this a "sexy" feature of our newest cat-themed operating system? Not at all, but it is one of those "little details" that makes life a little easier as a Mac user: a little faster, a little more attention to detail, and exactly the sort of thing Apple promised to pay attention to with Snow Leopard.

(Big tip o' the hat to John Siracusa's epic Snow Leopard review at Ars Technica for bringing my attention to this feature. I look forward to John's operating system reviews almost as much as I look forward to the operating systems themselves.)

photo via flickr creative commons: danzen

Hey, iPhone 3G owners: Please do not download the 2,1 firmware files listed below. They are for the 3G S and will not work on your phone. Read the whole post for details. The correct firmware for the 3G will start with "iPhone1,2" instead.

If you were up all night waiting for the new iPhone OS to arrive, you're in good company -- we were too, until we began getting Twitter reports from users in Hong Kong and Sweden that the local carriers sent out SMS alerts to their customers suggesting when they could download 3.0. Those times both align with a 10 am PT/1 pm ET go time, and that's when we're calling it for now; Engadget concurs. That's why you're still seeing 2.2.1 as the most current version in iTunes; the new version hasn't been released yet.

curl -s -L http://phobos.apple.com/version |\
 grep -i restore |\
 grep '_3.' | open -f

The results will look something like URLs ending with this:

iPhone2,1_3.0_7A341_Restore.ipsw
iPhone2,1_3.0_7A341_Restore.ipsw

The model number indicates which unit has downloadable firmware. As of right now, only the iPhone 3G S firmware has been updated. That's the 2,1 iPhone model. Yes, the 1,2 iPhone 3G model was considered a revision of the first generation 1,1 iPhone as it only had moderate hardware changes. The two iPods are 1,1 and 2,1 for the first and second generation.

To download, copy the URL and paste it into Safari's download window or use any other favorite method to retrieve the firmware. Then hold the Option key and click Update in iTunes. Navigate to the firmware (the ipsw file), select it, and 3.0's good to go. Of course, you can also download directly through iTunes as soon as the update is available.

This weekend, the iPhone Dev Team delivered an iPhone 2.0 jailbreak. Today, TUAW invites you to chat about the jailbreak, about the new Cydia installer, and about the future of iPhone jailbreak development and use. Follow the jump to join in our discussion.

Launch System Profiler. Choose Apple > About This Mac > More Info.

Identify your iPod In System Profiler, go to Hardware > USB and locate the iPod or iPhone you're using. Look up the Manufacturer ID (0x05ac (Apple Computer, Inc.) and Product ID (0x1291 for my iPod touch)

Launch Terminal. This requires shell access.

Find the utility. Change directories to /System/Library/PrivateFrameworks/MobileDevice.framework/Versions/A/Resources/.

Run reenumerate Give it one argument: the vendor id followed by a comma followed by the product id, e.g. ./reenumerate 0x05ac,0x1291

Wait. iTunes will reload your iPod or iPhone and sync it.

Today's evidence comes to you courtesy of the Apple iPhone. iPhone Developer Pumpkin. He has discovered even more rental-specific information, this time in the iPhone's lockdown daemon file. Lockdown is responsible for authorizing your iPhone for services. For example the lockdown files are involved in authorizing phone service and is also responsible for communication between the device and the computer in general

A string search through the lockdownd executable in /usr/libexec produced the following hits when searched for "rental":

pumpkin:~ pumpkin$ strings /usr/local/share/iphone-filesystem/usr/libexec/lockdownd | grep -i rental
 trigger_rental_bag_verification: Could not retrieve FairPlayID
 trigger_rental_bag_verification: Could not initialize FairPlay context
 trigger_rental_bag_verification: Could not verify the rental bag response: %d
 load_rental_bag_request: Could not retrieve FairPlayID
 load_rental_bag_request: Could not initialize FairPlay context
 load_rental_bag_request: Could not generate rental bag request
 load_rental_bag_request: Could not create mutable dictionary
 load_rental_bag_request: Could not create CFData from request message
 load_rental_bag_request: Could not create CFArray
 load_rental_bag_request: Could not create CFNumber from indice
 RentalBagResponse
 RentalBagRequest
 pumpkin:~ pumpkin$

As of last night, Apple still did not have a public rentalBag web objects interface the way it does for storeBag and secureBag, the two XML files it publishes on its Phobos server. Hopefully, once readers start occasionally pinging http://phobos.apple.com/rentalBag.xml.gz and http://phobos.apple.com/rentalBag.xml, you'll let us know via the Tip line if and when you see any life.

Thanks PlanetBeing

Ryan Irelan doesn't like the way Leopard grabs window shots. When you press Command-Shift-4/Spacebar, Leopard includes about 50 extra pixels of transparent background around your Windows. This extra space grabs the window's drop shadow along with the window itself. Enter CleanGrab.

CleanGrab is Ryan's script for grabbing just the window, without the background pixels. He describes the script and offers a download link on his personal weblog. You'll either need to run the script directly or trigger it via a macro program like Quicksilver. The script essentially runs the command-line screencapture software using the -io flags. -i tells screencapture to run interactively. -o tells it to omit the window shadow.

If you'd rather just use the terminal command-line, issue a screencapture -io command. I've posted about this handy utility a few times at least.

You never know when instant karma is gonna getcha. Take my playaudio application. Yesterday, I was chatting with some developer buddies about maybe putting together an Internet radio application and discussing the fact that the Celestial iPhone framework is essentially QuickTime repackaged. While talking, I decided to try using my existing playaudio app with a URL rather than a local audio file. So I typed the following at the iPhone command line:

playaudio http://steiner.math.nthu.edu.tw/ne01/tjy/music/06.I%20Just%20Called%20To%20Say%20I%20Love%20You.mp3

And...it worked. Just like that, the instrumental-only cover began to play back through my iPhone speakers. Apparently, Apple has merged the concept of "local file" and "URL" a lot more closely than I'd thought. I haven't had any luck connecting to .pls or any other live radio feed but if you'd like to play back Internet-based files, playaudio works just fine.

In OS X, you can always toss a file onto the command line instead of laboriously typing out a complete path name because Terminal supports drag and drop. Over at Murphymac, Murphy has posted a video showing you how to create a shell script using DES3 encryption to protect your files. It takes advantage of this drag and drop support so you can basically run the script and drop the file you want to encrypt. Even if you're not all that interested in encrypting your files, this videocast shows how to think about creating shell scripts with a particularly interactive OS X flare flair.

Ever try to open a man page in TextEdit using man | open -f? You end up with the kind of unreadable repeated characters shown here. This all dates back to the days of dot matrix and daisy wheel printing when the only way you could produce bold type was to repeatedly print characters. Fortunately, there's an easy way to convert man pages into simple, non-redundant text. Use the command-line utility col with the -b flag enabled. For example, man col | col -b | open -f will open the col man page in TextEdit without repeated characters. The -b flag tells col to exclude all but the last character written to any column, ignoring any backspaces and repeats.

Basically, you update your .zprofile or .bashrc or .kshrc to include the line export PS1=">: ". Me? I'm a csh weenie. I'd have to use set prompt=">: " to get the same effect. (The same thing applies for tcsh users.)

Winter also includes instructions on how to get the green-on-black color settings used in the program.

4 8 15 16 23 42 and all that.