Sunday, September 6, 2009

Snow Leopard

I am a tad disappointed I must say. Snow Leopard leaped out of his lair last weekend and I was a little miffed that he was not that easy to trap in The Land of the Long White Tiny Market. Not surprised that the States got their copies before us but a little miffed.

However I tracked a copy down yesterday and installed him on the 24" iMac over the top of Leopard. One false start with the 'gear wheel' spinning for an hour before I gave up on it and hard rebooted with 'C' held down as instructed by several people world wide who had had similar experiences. After that installation was a breeze taking about 45 minutes. The machine certainly boots faster but the speed difference in the rest of the programs is not blowing me away. None of my data was lost right down to bookmarks and song ratings. All good. Stable? Well so far - but Macs aren't bloody PCs and don't crash anyway.

So what is there to moan about in a new operating system that only costs $59? I can't mount one of my USB external hard drives. No idea why not. I've lost a load of old friends as they either aren't 64 bit yet or are never going to be. Cocoa Gestures is gone forever. The Widemail plugin don't work in Mail 4.0 and this really pisses me off as I've lost my three column mail view which works really well on a large monitor. There is hope as I may get this back in a day or two when the idle toad who writes the code that costs me nothing pulls finger and gets it finished. But the worst is the slow demise of Quicksilver. I really have come to rely on this and it is hamstrung big time with most of its plugins buggered and the rumour mill saying that it is never likely to return to its glory days. This on the back of the author eschewing the glory of writing a great program for no money in favour of writing stuff for Google for eye watering amounts of dosh. I'm trying Launchbar at the moment and will give Butler a go as well.

I'm convinced Snow Leopard is a good idea but I think I am being bitten by a classic case of jumping in too early in the first few days of a software upgrade.

I'll be waiting before unleashing SL on my MacBook Pro.

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