Snow Leopard Hassles and Bugs

With every operating system release, Apple seems to find a way to do at least a few stupid or visually ugly things.

Here are a few usability bugs, real bugs in terms of getting work done.

Kernel panics Permalink

Update: this bug appears to be fixed in Mac OS X 10.6.2.

A kernel panic is a hard crash requiring reboot of the machine.

Mac OS X 10.6.1 appears to have a least one kernel panic (SMP threading bug) that crashes the machine. See my blog entry.

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Aliases don’t authenticate Permalink

In Mac OS X Leopard, dragging a file to a folder alias on a file server brought up an authentication dialog. On Snow Leopard, an erroneous and misleading error appears:

A bug: nothing is wrong when double-clicking the same alias

Mail addresses adorned with cruft Permalink

This is the single most irritating new bug in Snow Leopard that I’ve found!

Every day, I copy at least a few email addresses. I do so primarily for searching, but also for entering into invoices or other documents. So I’m impacted every day, every time by this change.

Update: there's a fix for this. Open a Terminal window and enter the following:

defaults write com.apple.mail AddressesIncludeNameOnPasteboard -bool no

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Copying an email address

To copy an email address, right click on it (control click if you have your mouse set for one-button):

Right-click (control-click) to copy an email address

What you get when you copy

In Mac OS X 10.5 Leopard, the result is something like this (example mail address changed slightly to evade spammers):

info_@diglloyd_.com

The above is perfect for searching, pasting elsewhere, etc. But in Mac OS X 10.6 Snow Leopard, an ill-advised change was made. Now you get all the wrapper cruft around the email address also:

DIGLLOYD INC <info_@diglloyd_.com>

This might be good for reading, but it's unusable for other purposes.

For example, paste the above mess into Mac Mail’s search box, then search on From or To. You won’t find anything (“0 matches for search”). Brilliant— for every search, you’ll have to manually edit out the cruft surrounding the actual email address ("DIGLLOYD INC <") and ">").

Mail can’t find anything using what Mail itself produced as the email address!

This problem is an ongoing headache anytime one wants a plain email address.