This website is optimized to work in modern browsers like Safari 3+, Firefox 4+, Chrome 10+ and IE9+. If you are using a different browser, you may experience visual glitches or other problems.
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!
Update 2009/10/29 11:18—Updated the path on the final setuid command per commenter David.
If you use a Mac as your work machine, chances are that you’ve had to use VPN at some point, and therefore the current de facto SSL VPN client, Juniper Network Connect. If you’ve recently upgraded to Snow Leopard, you’ve probably already run into the problem of NC not working correctly, and likely found the common solution to fixing the problem.
This solution works great if you’ve got a fully functional installation of NC, but what happens if your installation has become corrupted on Snow Leopard? What if, for example, some of the installation files are corrupted or missing, but some aren’t? That’s what happened to me, and here’s how I fixed it.
Charles Arthur is an idiot—he appears to be telling people that it’s perfectly all right to violate Apple’s EULA by upgrading straight from Tiger to Snow Leopard and still only paying the $29 upgrade-from-Leopard price, and that since you can get away with purchasing just one copy of the OS and installing it on multiple computers, that you should. No, what surprises me is that this piece of “journalism” apparently got past his editor and got published on the Guardian‘s website. Last I heard, editors are supposed to pay attention to pesky things like laws, or barring that, ethics.
No, I take that back. Maybe he’s not dumb. Maybe he’s just a charlatan. Jesus. (hat tip: George)
John Siracusa on Mac OS X 10.6, code-named Snow Leopard. (Via Daring Fireball)
I’d also like to take a minute here to note that Ars Technica is the hands-down best-designed news site I’ve seen; it makes simply excellent use of color and contrast to draw the reader’s eye where it needs to go. Notice how the only part of the page with a white background is the news content, the most important content on the page. In fact it’s the only site I frequently visit, other than Penny Arcade*, where banner ads and animations aren’t distracting from the main content.
* Though that white-on-blue text is a killer on the eyes after a few minutes.