Snow Leopard Review and Thoughts
This is really the first time that I have upgraded to a new OS. I reformated when I went from Tiger to Leopard, and since I just recently put a 1.5TB drive in my iMac, I didn’t really want to go through the hassle of reformating again.
The entire process took me 37 minutes. Not too bad. I stepped away from my desk, and when I came back it was waiting at a log in for me. There were no buttons needing pushed, everything was cake.
Upon logging in, I only noticed the the default Aurora screen is a bit different, when you right click the dock, it’s dark instead of silver, and mail.app has to reinitialize your settings.
Oh, and the fact that I got 13GB of disk back. From what I have read, you can expect to recoup anywhere from 3GB to 30GB of space! A friend of mine got back 23GB.
It broke the Logitech Control Center software that I run for my MX revolution mouse, so that kinds sucks (but the logitech software isn’t known for it’s reliability) I have also tested Aperture, iPhoto, iTunes, cyberduck, adium, firefox, safari, iCal, all my dashboard widgets (like 4 of them), Transmission, Photoshop CS4, and Quicktime.
I didn’t choose to install quicktime 7 because I didn’t see any point. I fired up some Top Gear episodes that I had, and my first impression is that I like the borderless window. I normally watch full screen when using quicktime, but it’s nice to no have a border when you don’t. However…. quicktime locked up twice on me thus far, trying to play an .avi I don’t know if this is Perian or what, I have not yet looked for any updates from Perian. *update* There are currently no Perian updates, and I usually don’t care for VLC. I downloaded the latest VLC version (1.01) and it locks up on the same part of the videos as Quicktime does. This is a big bummer thus far.
I also noticed a few System preference panes had to close and reopen in 32bit mode. A little annoying. Growl seems to be borked. Connect 360 appears to work after a quick test to my Xbox 360.
Overall, this is a pretty transparent update to OSX, you may not notice a big difference in your day to day usage, but trust me for $25 bucks in comparison to what it’s going to cost to update Vista, it seems like a steal. I timed my boot sequence and it takes 22 seconds now. I don’t know what that means as I rarely reboot.
98% of what I do has been unaffected, but there are a few Aperture plugins that have stopped working or crash all together (Aperture to Adoramapix exporter)
All in all, I say this is just a stumbling block for the few things that are not working right now. Some of my custom workflows are screwed for now, but in due time this will improve OS X a great deal.
Here is a list of what I can find that’s different.