Taming the Leopard

It’s unfortunate timing that right at the moment of a major OS release when Mac developers need Apple engineers the most there’s no WWDC. This would make asking questions, talking with Apple, and demoing Mac OS X 10.5 issues much easier.

That said, it looks like the folks from Apple’s Developer Technical Support (aka DTS) are swamped at the moment by hungry third-party developers pummeling them with all sorts of Leopard-related questions. We’ve also contributed to that pile over the course of Leopard’s development and we’re not quite done with them for quite some time it seems :)

With the release of 4.8.2 we’ve fixed the most annoying Leopard compatibility issues. I mentioned some of them in my recent blog post and you can find the rest of the fixes in our changelog. However there are still some mildly annoying issues on Leopard that we were unable to fix and we’re waiting for Apple’s help.

• Moving items across partitions copies instead of moves - Normally when you copy a file across two partitions with the command key held down, it’s moved and the original is deleted. Unfortunately this is broken under OS X 10.5 and instead of moving the file, OS X copies it. This appears to be an OS Bug in system frameworks and we filled a bug with Apple. Hopefully it will be fixed soon in an upcoming OS update. This is annoying but since it fails in a ‘data safe’ manner, this is less critical. The workaround is to manually delete the source file upon the successful completion of the “move” operation.

• Path Finder’s desktop disappears when Expose is triggered - As I mentioned in my previous post, there’s no public API to “stick” Path Finder’s Desktop in place when hitting F11 and we still need to find a hack. My suggested workaround would be to make a Path Finder alias (File -> Make Alias -> Make Path Finder Alias) of the Desktop folder in the Dock, so that the Desktop folder is revealed in PF by clicking on the docked folder.

• When copying/deleting in List View it collapses subfolders - this seems to be an OS Bug in NSTreeController and we’re working with Apple to find a workaround or a fix. This is now fixed in Path Finder 4.8.3

• Network shares are missing from the Path Finder sidebar - On Tiger the system was finding the shares for us - there was a hidden /Network folder where all local shares were listed. On Leopard that is no longer the case. When we started to look for our own solutions, it turned out that public frameworks on Leopard allow third-party developers to find only Bonjour-based devices e.g. essentially Macs. Windows and Linux shares use another technology (NetBIOS) to broadcast their presence on the local network and we’re currently talking with Apple (yet again, thanks DTS folks :) ) to find a solution. In the meanwhile the workaround is to use the Connect to Server dialog.

If you notice any additional issues, please, report them to us so that we’re able to fix them in a future update. And while we’re working our asses off to fix the aforementioned issues, please enjoy new Leopard features: you can now QuickLook your documents from PF (just hit the Spacebar) and Reveal documents in Path Finder instead of Finder from your favorite third-party applications (check out the Preferences -> Reveal -> Set PF as the default file viewer).