The Fourth Iteration of Mac OS X 10.5 "Leopard" Is Here

Apple today released its third major update to Mac OS X 10.5 "Leopard." The update, technically referred to as Mac OS X 10.5.3, is a whopping 420MB download. Given the number of things addressed by the update, I recommend that business users move to adopt it after carefully testing it in their own environment.The proper adoption process, by the way, is to roll the 10.5.3 update on one or two different machines, and then two more, and then two more, before going company-wide. If you have dedicated evaluation machines, that's best. If not, do it slowly, a few at a time, until you're certain that the update doesn't break or affect your applications or users. Where changes are requires, you'll have time to research and document before a widespread rollout.

This release contains both bug fixes and security patches. You can see a longer list of bug fixes on the Apple site, but here are some that jump out at me, particularly the Time Machine ones.

General: Fixes an issue in which certain attached hard drives may not show up in the Finder, and General: Improves Active Directory binding and login.

Address Book: Addresses reliability issues when searching for contacts using built-in search, and resolves issues with mapping addresses that contain an ampersand character.

Airport: Improves 802.1X behavior and reliability, and improves reliability when using Time Capsule.

iCal: Addresses potential privacy issues by allowing events to be marked as private, addresses reliability issues with meeting alarms, invitations and attachments, and resolves issues with reliability when restoring from iCal backups.

Mail: Addresses stability issues that may be encountered when dragging large attachments into an email message; addresses reliability issues when changes are made to a mailbox while offline; and fixes an issue in which the Sent, Drafts, and Outbox mailboxes incorrectly list the "cc" recipients in the "To" column.

Time Machine: Includes fixes for Time Machine compatibility with Time Capsule; resolves certain issues when backing up a portable Mac that is on battery power; addresses reliability issues when performing a full restore from a Time Machine backup; fixes a possible alert message that incorrectly states a backup volume does not have enough space; updates Time Machine to reliably restore attachments and messages in Mail.

You can see the security fixes here  nothing jumps out as worthy of special mention.