World of Warcraft®

Things you need to know for workarounds and basic trouble shooting

1. ANY file located in the applications folder (or any sub folder therein like oh say a wow wtf folder) is considered unsafe to move and as such lion default behavior now for drag and drop is to create a shortcut to file instead of moving it, leaving original item where it was.
Workaround: You now have to always press and hold command/apple key when moving files out of applications folder to actually move them.

2. Safari no longer gives option to delete individual cookies, now it associates all cookies and caches into one consolidated domain in the UI, meaning, if you want to delete a single battle.net cookie, you cannot (at least from within safari). You must delete ALL of them. Big annouance with how often us mac users have to delete cookies on broken forums.
Workaround: Going into file location safari actually stores cookies and manually edit them there in a completely non beginner friendly way that also takes a lot more time.

3. Another part of lions handholding is it no longer allows users to see their own library folder, even if they are an admin user. This means users/username/library is invisible. This is a pain in the !@# for SC2 or other applications that store files there. Sigh.
Workaround: Hold option and choose "library" from "go" menu in the finder.

4. Cursor will become unresponsive in wow if you attempt to move it immediately after mouse button release fires an event. Any time you release mouse button you'll want to wait a second or two before moving mouse to avoid this http://us.battle.net/wow/en/forum/topic/2649815432
UPDATE: Apple semi addressed it in GM version but only with a bandaid, not a correct fix quite yet. But it's much more tolerable.

5. Spotlight indexes will be deleted and rebuilt after a fresh lion install. This will cause degraded performance (temporarily) until indexes are rebuilt. Your solutions are to wait it out (recommended) or disable spotlight completely (not recommended, it will have side affects that adversely effect functionality of app store). I do however recommend adding wow folder to spotlight privacy do not index list as wow has a ton of temp files that change all the time that don't need spotlight in there trashing about on.

6. Time Machine still very much tanks wow performance if not disabled. As wow touches (updates modification dates of all data files) every time app runs, and as suck, time machine will treat the files as modified and intiiate backups on them. This causes heavy disk usage and IO access. This problem existed prior to lion too but some of you may have long forogten about it. So this is a reminder, a fresh install of lion will have default settings, check time machine!

7. Lion changes software update back to default automatic download. That coupled with all the recent updates to all of apples products, and if you aren't on some super blazing fast internet, you will notice high latency (in and out of game) and may be wondering why iniitially. This should be first thing you check. See if software update is automatically downloading updates. Maybe disable the checkbox in system preferences that lets it download automatically. That way software update notiifies and asks you instead in future.

Performance

1. Lion runs circles around 10.6. It also essencially completely eliminates the stutter issue outlined in stickies.

2. Lion supports all OpenGL extentions up to 3.2, and even a couple from 3.3. It has 0 support for 4.x. None of this really matters to wow though at the moment as it still uses 2.1 context with hand picked 3.x extentions.s

Sandboxing and Privilege Separation

Modern applications are becoming progressively more dependent on networking. Users view webpages from untrusted sources, download documents from untrusted sources, and obtain information via network connections to untrusted sources. The growing reliance on untrusted data represents an ever-growing attack vector for viruses and other malware.

With traditional applications, if the application becomes compromised through a buffer overflow or other security hole, its attacker also gains the ability to do anything that the user can do. Mac OS X v10.7 provides built-in support for two common techniques that can improve security: application sandboxing and privilege separation. These can be used independently or together to improve security.

Application sandboxing means that the developer of a particular application, tool, or other binary specifies a list of things that it is expected to do during normal operation. Mac OS X then enforces that list. For example, a typical text editor might need to edit files on disk that have been opened by the user, but it probably does not need to open arbitrary files in other locations or communicate over a network. If the application has a security hole that allows arbitrary code injection, that injected code cannot open an network conenction or access arbitrary files.

Privilege separation means breaking up a complex application, tool, or daemon into pieces that individually require fewer rights. By doing so, if one part of that application is compromised, the damage it can do is limited by the sandbox for that component.
For example, if a text editor needs to update its help files, it might include a helper that has the right to download help files from the Internet, but only the right to write files inside the application’s container.

Because of the reduced privileges of the helper and the main application, any flaws in either part of the application that might otherwise be exploitable are ultimately of limited utility to the attacker because neither part of the application runs with the complete privileges and capabilities of the user.

You should adopt these security features as soon as possible to maximize the safety of your users’ data. For more information about sandboxing and privilege separation, read Mac OS X Application Programming

Guide. Then read Daemons and Services Programming Guide.
The project editor in Xcode 4.1 provides a UI for setting up entitlements for Mac OS X v10.7 applications. There is also a default code-signing entitlements file available in the file templates in the Xcode 4.1 utilities pane. (For more information about this and other enhancements in Xcode 4.1, see Xcode New Features User Guide.)

Window behaviors

UPDATED. Most of my info here must have been a bug that was fixed in GM/release. Windows are now properly closed when you exit program if the option to restore them is disabled if they are documents with no unsaved changes. If however they do have unsaved changes, then auto save takes priority and the document will stay open despite the option to not remember windows on application launch. But it doesn't appear you need to rigorously close windows to avoid growing application heap size anymore.

Compatability

1. Rosetta is GONE. There is no PPC compatiblity left in OS. The age of PPC is dead.

2. Little snitch will cause MAJOR Problems if you do not update it to nightly build that's compatible with 10.7
http://www.obdev.at/products/littlesnitch/download.html

3. Chax obviously doesn't work, remember to uninstall it so iChat doesn't repeatedly crash or hang.

Folder Permissions and Ownership

A number of folders in the System and Local file system domains now have different ownership and permissions. Specifically:

Many folders in the System domain that were previously owned by the admin group are now owned by the wheel group.

Permissions for the root directory (/) are now mode 755 (writable only by root) instead of mode 775 (writable by the admin group).

Permissions for /Applications/Utilities are now mode 755 (writable only by root) instead of mode 775 (writable by the admin group).

Permissions for /Library are now mode 755 (writable only by root) instead of mode 775 (writable by the admin group), no longer sticky.

All subdirectories within /Library now have mode 755 (writable only by root) permissions instead of mode 775 (writable by the admin group) except:

/Library/Caches

/Library/Fonts

/Library/Java

/Library/QuickTimeStreaming ● /Library/Receipts

/Library/Tomcat

The subdirectories listed above have the same permissions as in previous versions of Mac OS X (usually
mode 775, sometimes with the sticky bit set).

Permissions for /Network/Applications and /Network/Library are now mode 555 (unwritable even by root) instead of mode 755 (writable only by root).

Permissions for /var/log/DiagnosticMessages are slightly more lax, with mode 770 (writable by the admin group, unreadable by non-admin users) instead of mode 750 (writable only by root, unreadable by non-admin users).

<Obsolete, revised OP for GM version>

Great. An OS version that does so much hand holding it makes the "new" features of the upgrade almost not even worth the trouble.

I can see myself spending a very frustrating week or so figuring out how to do stuff I used to do with ease :(
________________________________________________
Bringing you walls of text and cookies since 2005 :)

Mac Tech Support MVP (moonlights in other forums)
Here to Help :)

<Obsolete, revised OP for GM version>

06/17/2011 01:36 PMPosted by Candyx

Heh and I upgraded a few days ago and it broke my PTR :( says it can't find base-OSX.MPQ .. (Apparently it moved ALL my applications in my /username/ folder to some other folder.. -facepalm-

AFAIK base-OSX.MPQ doesn't exist. At least it didn't when I scanned through the PTR folder.

Can you make a directory listing of your PTR folder ? Will have to confirm this when I get home from work.
________________________________________________
Bringing you walls of text and cookies since 2005 :)

Mac Tech Support MVP (moonlights in other forums)
Here to Help :)

<Obsolete, revised OP for GM version>

06/18/2011 06:03 PMPosted by Omegal

Workaround. Any time you quit an application, you have to manually close all windows you don't want that application to "remember" (whether you see them or not) next time you launch application.

Is there a close all windows short cut key for all applications ?

Or do you have to bring each one up separately then close ?

06/18/2011 06:14 PMPosted by Aislin

After reading all if this, I'm not so sure I want to upgrade any more. At least, not for the first couple of months. Might be easier to wait until all the hacks come out showing how to disable everything.

I certainly hope there is hacks to disable the silly hand holding.

The problem is with the match of progress we may eventually not have the choice of not updating. Updates from Apple would be put out for 10.7 first with 10.6 becoming a red headed step child that every now and then is lucky to get a security update.

I saw the same thing happen with 10.5. People starting putting out all their new cool stuff for 10.6 and above only. Apple Updates started to favour 10.6 over 10.5 first.
________________________________________________
Bringing you walls of text and cookies since 2005 :)

Mac Tech Support MVP (moonlights in other forums)
Here to Help :)

yeah, EOL on 10.6 would come very shortly after, MAYBE one last incriment, but even that i doubt, 10.6.8 seems to be the final milestone for 10.6 in all honesty, barring any major bugs. 10.6 would probably only get security updates. i certainly would doubt it'd ever see another driver update even if there is a 10.6.9

btw holding the option key stikll makes "close" act as "close all"

My whole issue with lion is not the introduction of new features, but rathor the introduction of FORCED features that quite simply don't ask the user crap. Trust me i scoured through the options for disable boxes. That's why i thought disabling the box for restoring windows was a good idea, and boy did the OS proove me wrong there.