The Mac version is contributed by Barney Boomslang.  His detailed instructions and download link can be found at his blog entry here.  In short, you need to have the current official viewer from LL, 1.18.3(5), installed first.  Then download Barney’s patch, which opens into an executable inside a disk image that will then patch the SL client within the targeted directory (be sure there’s only one such SL client in this directory).  Finally, just run your SL viewer and it will have a banner notifying you it’s the Nicholaz patched version. FYI, the Nicholaz builds are updated quite frequently, things can break, your mileage may vary, etc.  If something does break, you can just install an earlier patch version or reinstall the official LL viewer.  The current patch available as of today is BleedingEdge-S.

If you do give this viewer a try, please comment on your experiences here.  Good luck and enjoy!

Aside from the enhancements promised by Leopard, it is strongly hoped that both of these releases will fix the graphics driver and related problems experienced by those who own new Macs affected by extremely poor performance in SL.

I do not advise you do this.However, if you have a macbook pro which locks up all the time when running SL, there may be hope. A driver for the macbook has a nasty bug which has a workaround:

https://wiki.secondlife.com/wiki/MacBook_Pro_2007_Graphics_Freeze_Workaround

As a new owner of the MacBook Pro, I was chagrined to realize that my connection to SL was destined to end in a crash within only a few minutes of logging on. Some sessions I crashed up to ten times:( A visit to my local Apple shop gleaned some information that I’ll describe in my non-computer-ese (so bear with this if you’re a computer genius). The newest MacBook Pros have been equipped with an enviable graphics card that offers incredible resolution. This card, however, is somehow not compatible with SL. Or, rather, the driver that runs the card is not compatible with SL. According to “D” at the Apple Store, there is some type of ‘bug’ in the driver when it connects to SL that causes the visual memory to stack up without occasionally clearing itself, which eventually results in an overload to the graphics card and the inevitable crash (I warned this wouldn’t be technical!). Anyhow, both Nvidia (the maker of the card) and Mac (the maker of the driver) are aware of the problem and are working on a solution. “D” pointed out, however, that with Mac slotted to release the new OS ‘Leopard’ this October, it’s probably not their highest priority to fix problems with the old OS ‘Tiger’ that is on the most recent macs. However, since the new MacBook Pros with the OS ‘Leopard’ will have the same graphics card, it is almost a guarantee that Apple has people working diligently to ensure that problem is rectified for all ‘Leopard’ users, which will hopefully mean that ‘Tiger’ users will also receive an update that will solve the irksome issue. If not, an upgrade to ‘Leopard’ just might solve the problem. Since being known as a ‘gaming friendly computer’ is important to Apple, one way or another a solution should be coming at least some point in the near future… what an embarrassment if it doesn’t!

Meanwhile, for users like me who would like to keep their current computers (or have no choice), there are a few things that can for now remedy the frequent crashing, or at least scale it down considerably (without having to switch to Windows and use Bootcamp). Since the crashing occurs when there is too much graphic memory built up, minimizing that memory can help. There are a few ways to do this. On the SL login page, you can go under “Preferences” before you log on and alter the settings. To do this, select the tab that says “Graphics” and at the very top of the screen you will see a box with the words ‘run in a window’ beside it. Make sure that this box is NOT checked. This will make SL fill your entire screen. Operating it in a window requires more from the graphics card because it is required to essentially read and store the information for TWO screens. Next, play around with the ‘Draw Distance’ setting. 128 or 96 are best. You won’t be able to see as far in the distance, but then what joy is a ten second view followed by a crash? If you don’t mind a slight decrease in the graphic quality, you can also decrease the Fullscreen Aspect Ratio. The standard selection is 1440×900, but you can change that to 1152×720, or even lower, though this will significantly decrease the pixels and make the picture look fuzzy. I have found that I do not need to change this last setting at all to get good results, but it’s another option. Finally, one other alteration you can make is to the Mac setting themselves. For this, you go under the Apple in the upper left hand corner of your desktop screen (before SL is running), select ‘System Preferences’ and then click on the ‘Display’ icon. Here you will see that the normal display setting is 1440×900. If you lower the setting to 1280 x800 your screen will seem a bit more fuzzy, but this too will help decrease your chances of frequent SL crashes. When I’m not using SL, I change the setting back to standard. With some or all of these changes, hopefully your SL experience will include more time enjoying the metaverse and less time crashing.

@116 - KatieLynn:
1. uninstall SL
2. (optional) make a backup of your chat/IM logs found inC:\Documents and Settings\(ps username)\Application Data\SecondLife\(sl username)
3. Delete the C:\Documents and Settings\(ps username)\Application Data\SecondLife\ directory
4. Empty the recycle bin
5. Reboot
6. Empty the temp directory
7. Empty the recycle bin again
8. Install SL
9. Run SL but don’t connect
10. Set prefs to show logon location
11. on the logon screen slelct to specify logon region
12. Enter Io as the region
13. Log on to SL

In almost every case this resolves the permanently ruthed avatar problem. I do not know why region Io has such “magical powers” in respect to asset system issues related to a single account.

Hope it helps. 

 Poppy Linden - 28/Aug/07 06:01 PM

Latest update: (copied from VWR-1978 - Meta-issue: 2007 MacBook Pro (nVidia 8600M GT) issues) Hi everyone, I have been in contact with Apple regarding this issue. This is what we know: * There are driver issues specific to the nVidia 8600M GT on MacBook Pros. * Apple knows about this. * nVidia knows about this. * Other graphics-intensive apps are seeing similar issues. * There is no date for a fix right now. * I am having regular follow up calls with our Apple Partnership Manager. * This is high priority for Second Life, but there is not much we can do at Linden Lab. I am sorry for the lack of updates. I’m not convinced this is anything more than a summary of what we knew before, but I’m hearing that’s better than silence. Another workaround (aside from reloggding) is to toggle fullscreen modes. This deletes and re-creates your GL context. Thanks to Runitai Linden for that insight, and other debugging help.

You’re creative, you have style, you like things to just *work* — that’s why you use a Mac! This Blog, Forum, and Wiki is the place for us to share our advice and experiences about all things Mac in SL, from content creation tools, to hardware configurations, to SL issues affecting Mac users in particular. Welcome!