Well with the release of Leopard (OS X 10.5.2) being released during the week, I was really looking forward to the rumor of having native support for 3rd party Network Attached Storage devices for Time Machine, but alas, no, we didn’t get it. 
So you still have to use:
defaults write com.apple.systempreferences TMShowUnsupportedNetworkVolumes 1
to get Time Machine to backup to your own NAS device.
What we did get in 10.5.2 are some things that were certainly shitting me.
- Transparent Menus - Finally they got the idea the seeing your desktop under every menu bar was REALLY REALLY annoying! Especially for people like me who has a few hundred images in a folder that changes my background randomly every minute.
- Time Machine now has a little icon up in the menu bar so that you can force a backup now, browse your backup or access the prefs quickly.
- and the other main thing is Stacks.In 10.5.1 we had the ability to view Stacks as Grid or Fan view, Grid was good Fan was just annoying, but the staff in down town Cupertino (Apple Headquarters) have listened to their beloved users and in 10.5.2 we now have the 10.4 List view back again!
What else is happening in the Mac world?
Skype has release v2.7.0.057 which sees some stability and security issues addressed and a long list of bug fixes. See the release notes here!
Speed Download 5, a popular download manager for the Mac was released earlier this week to version 5. I must say that previous versions of this software have been fantastic, so it will certainly be interesting to see what the team over at Yazsoft have done this time.
Microsoft Office Mac 2004 has received a pretty big update this patch Tuesday addressing some fairly major vulnerabilities and bug fixes. You can read more about that here.
And probably one of the biggest to hit this week is the release of Apple TV Take 2. A free download for anyone who currently has an Apple TV and now shipping as standard on any new Apple TV’s. To find out the differences, I suggest you check out the blog entry I wrote on the MacWorld Keynote which has a lot of the information, or look here for some info on TUAW.
Well that’s about all I can think of in the Mac World for this week.
Have a good weekend
G
