[MacDV] Tiger and problems with Third Party Application

[tucker ian]

This is probably a bit OT, but might be of use to those who have  
already upgraded to Tiger, or are contemplating doing so.

I am surprised that there has not been  a lot of postings regarding  
the operation, or rather,  non-operation of third-party Applications  
following upgrading to  10.4  ("Tiger").    From memory,  only one  
member has raised an issue.

In speaking to several other Mac Users I have found that I am not the  
only one to be having trouble in running such Applications as  
"Cocktail", "Techtool", "SnapZPro" ",ffMPEG", "Graphic Converter",  
"Virex 7.5",   and so on.....             Those, including me, with  
Epson Printers are finding they must also reload the Drivers.

All Apple Apps. are working OK  as far as I can determine.

Apparently the kernel for 10.4 is quite different from 10.3 and Third  
Party developers need to come up with patches etc.   As these  
developers were provided with Beta copies of 10.4 as early as the  
last Mac Developers Conference in San Francisco it would have been  
hoped that they could have been ready for the release of Tiger.
An Apple Club member here in Adelaide has suggested to me not to try  
and run any maintenance Applications until they have been upgraded.    
These include" Cocktail" and "TechTool", but do not include Mac" Disk  
Utility".  I think his suggestion is a good one and I am heeding his  
advice.    In the meantime I am going back to my OSX 10.3.9 partition  
to use some of the Third Party  Apps..

For those "Tiger" users that may be interested,  I quote from a  
portion of an IT column in last Tuesday's "Australian":-

"A nastily designed widget, once installed and running, could erase  
files and directories, run malevolent scripts, change ownerships and  
permissions. or capture passwords and send them out to an unknown  
server.

So far no one has reported any such widget, but it could happen.

Here's a simple step Tiger users can use to protect their Macs;  go  
to the Preferences file for Safari, look for the "Open Safe Files  
after downloading" box and remove the tick that it contains.

Now you can download widgets to your heart's content.   They won't  
run until you instruct them to and a non-running widget can do no harm."

The journalist suggests  Apple should supply future versions of  
Safari with the auto-install-and-run option disabled by default.

Ian Tucker.