The Snow Leopard experience

My time is torn between installing the latest (and greatest?) iteration of OSX – Snow Leopard and playing as the caped crusader in Batman: Arkham Asylum. And since upgrading our systems is inevitable, I decided to go through with it sooner than later.

Before anything else though, as with any other computer that has to have an OS upgrade, creating backups of all personal files (photos, music, movies and other documents) is a given. Actually, making regular backups of your files is necessary so as not to hit yourself in the head in case something happens to your computer. Ensuring that apps you can’t live without works with the upgrade will save you from further headaches as well.

Also, reading up on other people’s experiences on the same upgrade is a very good idea since there is a big possibility that you will be placed in a similar situation. So knowing how to avoid something that needs to be avoided is definitely a plus.

Another thing I came across surfing the interwebs is the printer and scanner compatibility list for Snow Leopard. This is actually a good read BEFORE you go out and purchase your own copy of Snow Leopard. As for myself, the printer I purchased is fairly new and is included in the list so, no worries for that part at least. If your experience on your printer is not as good, then go check Apple’s Support Downloads for a possible driver download.

Using a set of Logitech wireless keyboard and mouse? Here’s how to have it up and running again. Kitchie’s Logitech V470 cordless mouse seems to work just fine sans driver update.

The Path

Being the geek that I am, I chose the path of enlightenment the clean install. It has been well over a year since I installed Leopard on my machine, and doing this will definitely get the kinks out of my system as well as get rid of the stuff that I don’t need and just take up space.

The downside to this is that I haven’t found I way of doing a clean install using the Snow Leopard disk. The original Leopard disk does offer this feature so I had to first reinstall 10.5 and all the necessary security and OS updates and then pop in 10.6. Apple also released a 10.6.1 update so I had to put that one in too.

iLife ’09 and iWork ’09

There isn’t really anything new here. I just decided to install iLife ’09 and iWork ’09 after the upgrade to avoid any issues. As of now, I am still heavy into transferring all my files into the other machine and unto an external drive. So far, all the corresponding apps for these 2 suites are working as well as they did before.

Scratch that. It seems that iPhoto ’09 is having an issue with some of my older photos. I manually copied the entire iPhoto library into the one for Snow Leopard, and it only detected the more recent half. Good thing I decided to check before actually wiping the iMac.

Re-archived the entire iPhoto library, and this time, explicitly had iPhoto do the importing itself.

Adobe CS3 Design Premium

I had lingering fears that I, an Adobe CS3 user, will have issues after moving to 10.6, and Adobe would not even care. Luckily installation and test runs were without a hitch. Even Adobe’s updater ran automatically and updated the suite’s underlying components.

Under my working conditions of creating XHTML, CSS and PHP templates as well as some basic Flash animations, it seems like the suite is working so far, albeit the somewhat slow startup times. I can’t recall if it was the same with both Tiger and Leopard.

Other Apps and Add-ons

Below is a list of 3rd party applications that I installed and have been running great. Versions newer than what is posted should work just fine.

1. 1Password 2 (64-bit Safari not supported)
2. Adium 1.3.6
3. Caffeine 1.1
4. Camino 1.6.9
5. Evernote 1.4.8
6. Firefox 3.5.3
7. Flickr Uploadr 3.1 (Uploading works but has UI issues while doing so)
8. Flip4Mac WMV 2.2.3.7
9. Google Notifier 1.10.5.778
10. Growl 1.1.6
11. Handbrake 0.9.3
12. InstantShot 2.5
13. MacFuse 2.0.3
14. MAMP 1.8.2
15. NTFS-3G 0.9.8
16. Perian 1.1.4
17. Skype 2.8.0.659
18. Tweetie 1.2.2
19. VLC Media Player 1.0.0 Goldeneye

The above list isn’t much, but these are the only apps I have actually tested so far. For a more in-depth look at Snow Leopard compatible apps, you might want to look at the Does it work on Snow Leopard? website.

Quicktime X

The changes made to the latest iteration of Quicktime has rendered some of the plugins I have useless. But since I do not rely on these plugins on my working environment, the change does not really affect me that much.

I did find out that Quicktime X will enable you to convert video for the iPhone or iPod Touch. This solves an issue for me when I discovered that VisualHub, although installs properly on Snow Leopard, sends out a stack overflow error when I try to convert for the iPod.

Since VisualHub is no longer offered by Techspansion, this feature of Quicktime X is definitely a bit of good news for me. People have been suggesting VisualHub’s open source predecessor ReduxEncoder, but creating a DVD image and then burning a DVD using it seems to just stall for me.

iTunes 9

This isn’t really part of the OSX Snow Leopard upgrade, but the availability of iTunes 9 fits in nicely for someone like me who pretty much has to migrate all iPod content from music to apps to a second machine while updating another.

My dilemma rests in the case where iTunes needs to be connected to the internet the entire time the transfer is being made. Turning on airport does not really help since that will make the transfers wirelessly and hence, super slow, especially for large files and huge libraries.

It took me a couple of tries until I figured out that disabling the airport on the portable and having to turn on internet sharing to the desktop while the two are connected via an ethernet cable does the job. Transfers are quick and, you are still on the internet via the shared connection.

Take note that if your computers are all connected via ethernet cable, then as long as Wi-Fi is disabled, you don’t have to go through this.

Running the thing

The very first thing I noticed about Snow Leopard is how quick boot up and shutdown times have improved. And I thought my machine running on Leopard was quick.

Changes to the dock, specifically how stacks and other views work is a welcome addition for me.

Having gone through some issues minor as they may seem, it makes me think about how careful I should be when it comes to doing it on my work machine. Its one thing to have some issues on one and then have a backup then to not have anything to run to if the need arises.

I will be giving more insight on 10.6.1 as I work my way through it. In the meantime, let’s hope that this update or anything coming in the near future wouldn’t as much break an app that we use, but maybe just inform us that the stuff we need running has to be run under emulation or something like that.

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I was going to take photos and post it here, but searching for Snow Leopard on Flickr has yielded a heap of results, so I won’t bother.

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5. Looking through Leopard’s eyes

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