Got another one for you. The AT&T web conferencing service won’t work in browsers that run in 64-bit mode in Snow Leopard; you can log in, but the browser just sits there forever on the “please wait” screen. The workaround is to run Safari in 32-bit mode, or run it inside the Windows browser of your choice in your VMWare VM.

So I found another sort-of issue with Snow Leopard today. It used to be, in Leopard, that I could open up a bunch of images at once in Preview.app by just highlighting all the images in Finder, then either dragging them to the Preview icon in the dock, or by selecting Open With > Preview.app from the contextual menu (or, yes, typing ⌘O). I discovered that when I tried to do the same in Snow Leopard, only a few of the images would open up, and oddly, at that—if I tried to open, say, 30 images, only the first one of them would open in one window, and then the 2nd would open in a separate window. If I tried again, then 2 would open in one window, and the 3rd in a separate one, and so on.

Very strange. After some Googling, I found out that my problem was being caused by the fact that these particular images I was trying to open had been downloaded from the internet. Now, you’re no doubt familiar with the fact that Mac OS X tags every file you download so that when you try to open it for the first time, it asks you if you’re sure you want to open the file, since it’s been downloaded from the internet. The way this is accomplished is by setting an extended attribute (com.apple.quarantine) on the file itself, so that the OS knows to display the “Are you sure?” warning.

So the solution to the opening-multiple-downloaded-images problem is to run the following command in Terminal, inside the folder the affected images are in:

xattr -d com.apple.quarantine *.jpg

Where of course you’d replace the “jpg” with the correct extension. You can also run the command on directories and their contents recursively:

xattr -rd com.apple.quarantine <directory-name>

Now Preview behaves as I expect it to. Yay!