Mac OS X 10.6.5 Notes: exFAT Support, AirPrint, Flash Player Vulnerability Fixes
- exFAT Support: Apple began including support for the exFAT file system in builds of Mac OS X 10.6.4 shipping on some of the company's latest iMacs and Mac minis with SDXC card slots, but Mac OS X 10.6.5 extends compatibility to all Macs.
- AirPrint: As had been rumored, Apple at the last minute removed support for printing via AirPrint from iOS 4.2 devices to printers shared on Macs running Mac OS X 10.6.5. The feature had been touted by Apple in its initial AirPrint press release and was present in early developer builds of Mac OS X 10.6.5, but was removed for unspecified reasons. Note that the basic AirPrint functionality, including direct printing to compatible HP printers, is included in Mac OS X 10.6.5.
We've heard claims of technical or legal/patent issues being behind the removal of support for shared printers, but have not received confirmation of any single reason for the change. Notably, those developers who installed earlier developer builds of Mac OS X 10.6.5 have retained access to the shared printing feature even with the public release, and one developer has outlined a process by which users can add the capability.
- Flash Player Vulnerabilities Fixed: Apple's attempts to distance itself from Adobe's Flash technology are well-known, and the list of security issues addressed in Mac OS X 10.6.5 is only adding fuel to that fire. Of a massive 134 security issues addressed in the update, 41% of them are directly attributable to Flash, the largest single source of security holes patched in the update. The second largest source of security flaws patched in Mac OS X 10.6.5 is X11, the optional install that allows Macs to run certain windowed Unix applications, with 12% of the total fixes.
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i have a feeling this is going to be a really stupid question, but why can't Apple develop their own version of Flash Player, or something similar, would knock Adobe and HTML5 out of the park!
Ah... you mean like the success Microsoft is enjoying with Silverlight now? :rolleyes:
I wonder how vulnerable Windows is in this regard?
It doesn't appear that the printing feature was removed for technical reasons. It must be a legal issue that needs to be cleaned up. It should be released before version 2 of the iPad hits the streets, IMHO.
How about Trim? I really hope they got trim in this one. I know people say that SSD's don't slow down on Macs, but I beg to differ. They take longer but eventually slow down like a pc.
I've seen this feature mentioned by name before, but have never read a good description of what it does or how it does what it does. Anyone have a link or short description?
*FINALLY* we have a filesystem we can put on external hard drives and be able to share them between Macs and Windows boxes without limitations.
FAT32 had a 4GB file size limit. NTFS-3G, while available for Mac, is rather slow for writing (10-15Mbyte/sec whereas on the same hardware with HFS+ you get 30). HFS+ support is only available on Windows as a commercial (paid) add-on.
It'll be nice, when visiting friends, to just be able to hand them an exFAT formatted external USB drive and have them be able to read and write to it without having to install drivers or incur any performance penalties.
This is a lot bigger than just being able to use SDXC, folks. Time to start formatting those external hard drives with exFAT instead of HFS+. :)
EDIT: This will also be awesome for sharing data between OS X and Windows on a boot camped system. Just put your videos, music, etc. on an ExFAT partition and off you go.
exFAT is amazing news.
*FINALLY* we have a filesystem we can put on external hard drives and be able to share them between Macs and Windows boxes without limitations.
FAT32 had a 4GB file size limit. NTFS-3G, while available for Mac, is rather slow for writing. HFS+ support is only available on Windows as a commercial (paid) add-on.
It'll be nice, when visiting friends, to just be able to hand them an exFAT formatted external USB drive and have them be able to read and write to it without having to install drivers or incur any performance penalties.
This is a lot bigger than just being able to use SDXC, folks. Time to start formatting those external hard drives with exFAT instead of HFS+. :)
Of course, Windows XP doesn't support it by default, which means that it won't be as widespread as we'd like.
Of course, Windows XP doesn't support it by default, which means that it won't be as widespread as we'd like.
It's available from Microsoft as an add-on for free, so it's not that big a deal.
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