Mac OS 10.4.9 - still without GPS-CS1 support

Update 14th March
It appears that 10.4.9 fixes GPS-CS1 support for Intel Macs, but not PPC ones. Please check the comments to see how people are getting on with different Macs.

Well Mac OS 10.4.9 has now been released. I've downloaded the software update, installed and rebooted. Plugged in my GPS-CS1 and... nothing.

If anyone out there has had a different experience to me, please let me know. Perhaps it's just because I installed USB logging a while back, or something.

For those Core 2 Duo owners out there who did have GPS-CS1 support - install 10.4.9 at your own risk. It may actually break your support. Anyone in this category who has already installed 10.4.9, please let us know what happened.

Now I know Apple never said that it this work. It was just my hope that since a slightly newer version of Mac OS X 10.4.8 running on Core 2 Duo Macbooks supported the GPS-CS1, then 10.4.9 would add that support to my iMac.

However I have also tried bringing this to Apple's attention. To try to make sure 10.4.9 would fix this Mac OS X bug. I've tried raising it through Apple bug reporter. I've tried asking if it would on Apple forums, only to be told that you aren't allowed to ask questions about unreleased Apple software on their forums, and that my question would be deleted. I understand how Apple uses this secrecy in their marketing, but I'm not asking about secret Leopard features.

I just wanted to know if, six months after this device went on sale, it was ever going to "you know, just work" on my Mac. Like Apple say in their adverts.

Like it does on Windows.

March update

If you haven't visited this blog before, it has been set up to share information on Mac support for the Sony GPS-CS1 photo geotagging device.

Although Sony do not advertise it as being Mac compatible, it should mount as a removable disk on a Mac. However unless you have a Core 2 Duo Macbook, then your version of Mac OS X 10.4.8 has a bug that stops the GPS-CS1 from mounting.

A workaround (other than using a PC to download the files and then transfer them to your Mac) is to boot your Mac in Ubuntu - you can do this from CD. The GPS-CS1 mounts without problems in Ubuntu.

As it does work with Core 2 Duo Macbooks running a slightly newer version of 10.4.8 (with Kernel version 8.8.3), then it is believed that the soon to be released Mac OS X 10.4.9 will fix this problem for other Macs.

We've been waiting for 10.4.9 for some time now. Lots of different builds have been released to developers and if you have a look at some of the older articles on this blog you will see some of the history of that. Nobody here has claimed to be running one of these developer builds so we don't know for certain if the problem is fixed. I am updating you with details of developer builds purely as a guide to how soon the full public release might be.

The last developer build to be released was 8P132 for PowerPC Macs or 8P2132 for Intel Macs, released February 28th. It contained only one more bug fix than the previous release which came out on 19th February. As these builds have been coming out roughly once a week for a while now, with a smaller number of bug fixes each time (and no known issues left), my guess is that the public release may be as early as next week.

Once you manage to get the GPS-CS1 files on your Mac, you can convert them to GPX files to make them more useful. Use gpsbabel for this. GPS-CS1 files are in NMEA format, and you do not need to rename the files from .log to .nmea or anything else to do this.

Recommended for geotagging your photos with your newly created GPX files - GPSPhotoLinker.

To export your geotagged photos from iPhoto to Google Earth - use iPhotoToGoogleEarth.

Technorati Tags: 10.4.9, geotag, GPS, GPS-CS1, Mac, Mac OS X