The most significant thing about what’s changed in OS X 10.5.4 may be what hasn’t changed with Monday’s release of the OS X update. The ARDAgent security hole - discovered just a few weeks ago - remains unplugged. This actually isn’t all that surprising—if the chatter around the Internet is to be believed, Apple has been working on the 10.5.4 update for quite a while, predating the discovery of the ARDAgent issue. System updates are complex things with many inter-related parts, and adding in a fix for the ARDAgent issue would have required more testing, and perhaps delayed the release of 10.5.4.
As for new things introduced in OS X 10.5.4, I dug around a bit in the bom files, as I did with May’s 10.5.3 release. This latest update is much smaller than 10.5.3, and I didn’t find anything nearly as interesting as I did last month, other than the non-fix for ARDAgent. There are a slew of extension updates, though it’s tough to figure out exactly what changes those may entail.
There were a number of updates to PDF-related utilities, including the Mail PDF, Save as PDF-X, and Save PDF to Web Receipts Folder workflows, as well as changes to many PDF-related Automator actions. Non-English language files in many programs were updated, and there was some sort of change to Mail’s preferences, though I couldn’t see any obvious change when compared with Mail on a 10.5.3 machine. iChat received updates to the balloons, boxes, and compact styles, as well as some (also not obvious) changes in its preferences.
The Apple-provided dictionary in Dictionary was also updated, adding (at a minimum) the definition of MobileMe, Apple’s soon-to-launch online service:
An Internet service from Apple Inc. for Macintosh computers, iPhone, iPod touch, and PCs. A MobileMe subscription provides push email, push contacts, and push calendar to keep your data automatically up-to-date on all your devices.
Given the size of the updated file, I expect there are more new definitions, but MobileMe was the only one I could think to check.
There are also changes on the Unix side of OS X. Some Perl and Ruby related bits were updated, as were snmp-related Unix programs, and various other Unix components, such as the pasteboard server.
I’ve been running 10.5.4 on two machines now for a few hours, and haven’t experienced any issues—though as with any update, I strongly recommend having a current backup before proceeding.
Editor's Note: This article is a reprint from Macworld.com. For more information and cutting-edge Mac articles please visit its Weblogs.
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