During last month’s Worldwide Developer Conference in San Francisco, Apple announced the prices and official release date for the Mac OS X Snow Leopard (Mac OS X v10.6).

Back in June 2008, right after Steve Jobs announced the new version of the Mac OS X Snow Leopard was to be released some time this year, we previewed it here and highlighted some of the improved features.

As we get closer to its official release date, the Mac OS X Snow Leopard or if you prefer Mac OS X v10.6 is due to a more detailed preview.

First things first, Apple’s “refined” operating system will be available from September 09 with prices starting at $29 (for users updating from Mac OS X Leopard).

The Mac OS X Snow Leopard is not a brand new OS by Apple, it is simply, as Apple like to call it, a refined version of the Mac OS X Leopard, prove to that is Apple focus on improving and simplifying built-in applications to make it faster, more reliable and most importantly easier to use.

The first major improvement was to make the Mac OS X V10.6 installation faster, easier and more reliable, upgrading from older versions just got 45% faster and in case of a power cut, it can start again without losing any data. Disk space usage has also been reduced by half, freeing about 6GB.

A completely new QuickTime Player has also been included, which will feature optimised support for modern codecs, new trimming interface, easy uploads to YouTube and MobileMe and hhtp-based live streaming, all with improved colour accuracy.

But without a doubt the biggest refinement is the transition from 32-bit to 64-bit, this means a support of up to 16 TB RAM, you might think that Apple exaggerated a bit on the RAM support, but it wasn’t just the other day when we were happy with our 256 MB RAM PC’s and look at them now, obsolete.

Nearly all built-in applications are now 64-bit which makes them faster and more responsive.

For the printing industry the good news is the ZFS File system with support for storage pooling, data redundancy, automatic error correction, dynamic volume expansion and snapshots, this will allow applications like Photoshop to make better use of multi core systems and larger memory configurations.

No doubt Apple has built the Mac OS X Snow Leopard thinking away ahead of its time, this new OS is ready for the next generation of professional and personal computers.

What do you have to say about Apple’s refined operating system, will it stand up to expectations?

We have had some issues recently with duotones not printing from QuarkXpress 7.3, It’s very strange but once a duotone is placed in Quark, all you get when printing to a proof is a black or grey box, however after searching the blogs we found a remedy:

• Import a Tiff with a blank or white background into a separate picturebox the same size as the original duotone
• Make sure it is in front of the original image
• In the colour palette; make the background none
• Hey presto the original image prints perfectly

Just another quirk of Quark it seems perhaps we should call it QuirkXpress (Duotone images print fine from InDesign).

Tech Help team

We have had some issues recently with duotones not printing from QuarkXpress 7.3, It’s very strange but once a duotone is placed in Quark, all you get when printing to a proof is a black or grey box, however after searching the blogs we found a remedy.

Import a Tiff with a blank or white background into a separate picturebox the same size as the original duotone, but make sure that it is in front of the original image. Then in the colour palette; make the background none - hey presto the original image prints perfectly.

Just another quirk of Quark it seems perhaps we should call it QuirkXpress (Duotone images print fine from InDesign).

by Tech Help team

CS3 Updates can cause problems
Over the past few months we have had issues with automatic updates for CS3 applications - in particular Illustrator. Once installed which can take some time, the CS3 suite will automatically download any new updates. These include of course the Illustrator update.

When updating illustrator the download hangs and as a result the programme no longer wants to load - quitting at startup, ok no problem I thought, I will just delete illustrator and re-load it, unfortunately this doesn’t work, it seems the the installer disk will only load all the CS3 applications at once, if you try to install just the illustrator programme it asks for a second disk which isn’t supplied!

So you end up having to delete all the apps via the uninstall on the CS3 disk and then re-install all the relevant applications, you can imagine how many times I have had to do this before realizing that the updater was at fault.

At the present time it is best to not update the applications once installed until Adobe decide to do something about this, but I have to say that most of the installations I have done only a few have suffered in this way the others seem to be fine, so It could be down to some settings or connections on the mac. This has also not been affected by the type of Mac either, Intel or PPC had the same effect.

If you know of any work around please email me or log in a leave a reply to this blog. Pete (Pre-Press Manager)

At last the long awaited Leopard Mac OSX is here! and it looks good but how well does it work. Well it seems from the forums that the main issue is actually the installation and which option you choose to use. It would seem that people that have used the basic ‘upgrade’ option have fallen foul of the blue screen, once installed and re-started your Mac hangs on the blue startup screen, this then requires you to completely erase and re-install from scratch, bit of a disaster if you haven’t done a back up.

Undoubtedly the best option is going to be to ‘Archive and install’ keeping the ‘Network and preferences’ button ticked, this archives your old system folder and labels it ‘previous system folder’ and then creates a completely fresh system folder but copies back your old preferences and Network settings. This was the option I choose for my Mac Pro and it has worked well, with just a few application updates needed.
The overall look and feel of Leopard is clean and fast, but there are some slightly irritating issues. When doing a find file now in Leopard, you can’t choose individual networked disks, instead you can only choose ’shared disks’ which is basically any networked disks attached to (mounted) on your desktop, now for the average user this might be ok but what about corporate networks like Gemini Press where we can have up to 7 or 8 mounted network points to search, and I might also know which mounted sharepoint the file is likely to be on - but instead I have to search all of the attached volumes and this is obviously this is going to take longer, from my point of view its not a great improvement over Tiger.

Whilst we are on the subject of finding things maybe I should mention ‘Spotlight’ this was something I was greatly looking forward to seeing as I was lead to believe that in Leopard, Spotlight would be able to search mounted disks, but I was sadly disappointed we are left with the same spotlight that we had in Tiger.

Time machine is one new feature that looks promising, but again Apple dont seem to have gone far enough with it, Time Machine gives you the ability to have a constant back-up always there if you should accidently delete a file or loose one. This requires that you have a suitably sized external firewire drive attached to your mac night and day, why oh why they didn’t configure it to allow backups to be done onto a network disk is beyond me, with a big network of people it would have been so easy to set up a network back-up sharepoint for everyone to backup to this then could have been backed up to tape for a fail safe implementation.

All that said there are some great improvements in Leopard, spaces for one is a great improvement. Spaces gives you multiple desktops that you can switch between with a click of a button or mouse, if you, like me always have lots of projects on the go and run out of desktop space with cluttered windows everywhere, then you’ll love spaces.
Apple mail looks and feels nice to use but there are problems with it I can see already, firstly sending attachment to windows machines doesn’t seem to work very well with recipients complaining that they cant access the attachment. The other little annoyance is that the ‘rules’ options don’t seem to work at all, I get a lot of spam these days like a lot of people and filtering them out is important but Mail just doesn’t seem to want to take any notice of the rules I have set.

Overall I am happy that all the applications still work as they did and with no major surprises and the system itself looks and feels professional there are some small irritations some of which will get ironed out by Apple over the coming months, but I do tend to feel that that Leopard has been somewhat over hyped.Pete (Pre-Press Manager)

PDFs from Quark 7.3 still a problem
Sadly even after the long awaited 7.3 update the ‘export to PDF’ issues are still there. Quark updated there pdf export setting in 7.3 to try to sort out issues with the compression of images, this unfortunately has backfired somewhat as we have found out to our cost recently.The only way to overcome this problem is take off the compression of images and set them to ‘none’ which has the obvious problem of file size.

Gemini have performed many tests on the compression of images within the Quark export to pdf settings, and found that there was only a couple of instance where compression made no difference. This was where the picture was exactly the same dpi as we were trying to downsample to ie. the setting was set to ‘downsample’ above 320dpi to 300dpi this seemed to make little difference to the picture quality, however if the image was 600dpi and it was downsampled to 300 the image showed signs of pixelation!

The result is if you export to pdf from Quark 7 you had better check carefully the images in the resulting pdf as they could look dreadful when printed, my advice is to take off all compression and live with the large file size for time being until this is adressed by Quark inc.
Pete (Pre-Press Manager)

Viewing Overprints in Acrobat
Acrobat Reader and the full version of Acrobat view pdfs very differently! If you only have Acrobats’ free reader version then you won’t be viewing documents correctly for ‘print’. We use a full version of Acrobat plus Enfocus Pitstop for editing pdfs. This allows us to changea vast array of elements within a supplied pdf. However if the original document is set up incorrectly there may be elements that just wont work when it is submitted to print. The most common by far is white type on a coloured background which is setup to overprint, if you overprint white over a colour it will disappear when printed! not what you want to see on your final print job.

We would always recommend having a paperproof - this would show up the problems. The process for making proofs is the same for platemaking, however, most customers don’t require paper proofs and have a pdf emailed to them as there ’soft proof’, this is where the problems start. If you use Acrobat Reader then you can only view the document with overprint off (there is no option to enable this) - this shows the document as you probably expect to see it with everything in place, now view the same document with a full version of Acrobat Professional, and make sure the overprint setting is on, suddenly all the overprints disappear, and this is exactly how it would be reproduced to print.
We always make sure we check documents but sometimes they slip through the net. If you don’t havetime for proofs then at least provide us with up to date laser run outs, at least then we can check the contents of the pdfs against them. For the most part try not to adjust trap settings in an application, all ofthe print packages ie. Quark, Indesign, Illustrator and so on have the correct default set up for trapping, if you should need to change it then you must at least understand the basics of trapping. Most printers prefer to add the trap themselves and this is done by the pre rip software, these settings have taken time to get right, so If you want to achieve a special effect with trapping get some advice first - otherwise you are heading for trouble!

Preferential Treament
Your Mac performs a few house- keeping routines early every morning around 2am which keeps the system running sweetly however if you close down your Mac everynight you might be heading for a few problems, there are a few applications that can perform the same routines as your Mac would normally do. Preferential Treatment can do all that the mac does with a few more bells and whistles as well, it also freeware. you can download it here, but you will need to install the bsd subsystem on your mac if you haven’t already (its on your original OSX install disks).

Keep your permissions up to date is critical
Having trouble copying or saving files? it could be that your permissions are up the creek!, it should be something we all do at least once a week, but we always put it off and onething leads to another and its forgotten, that is until we start to have problems.There is a remedy and it is very simple, just open up the Disk Utility which you will find in the Applications/Utilities Click your hard drive and hit repair permissions, it will probably find loads of files and directories that it will attempt to repair, once it has finished start it over again until it finds nothing to repair and your done.

Bouncing Application Icons
Have you recently installed or updated a new application? if so you may suffer from theoldbouncing icon in the dock syndrome. This can be very frustrating but is also fairly simply solvedproviding you dont mind a trip into the terminal world.First of all open your Applications/Utilities folder in there you will find the application called’ Terminal’ open terminal and you should be presented with some similar lines of text

Last login: Thu May 17 09:10:38 ttys000 on ttyp1
petes:~ petelaw$ after the symbol type
’sudo_update_prebinding’ press enterYou will have to wait a minute or so but you will get the promt back as below once again
petes:~ petelaw$ just type ‘exit’ press enter and close the terminal application, then try your application again, they should work fine now, but you might need to restart you mac to finish the process.