Skip to main content

The Snow Leopard Cometh

After using my lovely Gen1 Macbook for nearly three and a half years with it's default Tiger install, I decided to take the plunge and upgrade to the latest incarnation of Mac OS X, Snow Leopard. I never upgraded to Leopard because, well, Tiger did everything I want and better the devil you know. Or something. I dunno, Leopard just never really "clicked" with me. However, as soon as I heard about what Apple were doing with Snow Leopard I signed up for notification of release.

Snow Leopard isn't a dramatic upgrade from the point of view of the user interface. It's very much just Leopard with polish. But what polish! Lots and lots of small incremental improvements, including a smoother Dock, better popout windows for folders in the Dock, an overhauled Finder, improved window display in Exposé, better image preview and selection in the picture importer ... Just generally better.

Installation was ... well, very boring. Insert disk, double click installer, click continue a few times ... and wait for half an hour. After an automatic reboot, I was sat at the login window. All done, all working.

As part of the upgrade process I got the latest versions of iLife and iWork bundled in the "Mac Box Set". I was still running iPhoto '06 so upgrading to '09 has provided a nice eye opener. Events and face recognition work brilliantly, and the whole thing feels a lot less clunky, which is odd because I'd never noticed the previous versions clunkiness until I played with the new one!
Not much else to report really. I'm very happy with the upgrade, and it's made my aging laptop quicker, prettier and has already improved productivity thanks to the numerous small improvements to the window manager and built-in tools. Top stuff.

Comments

Popular posts from this blog

Juniper Network Connect on Mac OS X Snow Leopard

Juniper Network Connect is a very popular VPN client for corporate networks. It bootstraps from a Java applet and has native versions for Windows, Linux and Mac, and works very well. Unfortunately, it seems that Mac OS X 10.5 Leopard and 10.6 Snow Leopard have some issues caused by a dodgy installation program. One common way to make it work is to enable the root user and log in with full admin privileges under OS X and install it that way. This is a sledgehammer approach to a fairly simple problem, opens up security issues, and didn't even work for me. I won't even bother exploring that route in this blog post. There are a couple of other things that can be done to make it work, though. If you upgraded from a previous version of OS X and already had the Network Connect client installed, you may just be suffering a simple permissions issue. These instructions are for Network Connect 6.2.0, but they might well work with other versions with a tweak. From Termin...

Top 10 of 2013

One of the things a fan of music must do is put themselves through the annual trial of trying to figure out which of the albums they bought/borrowed/stole this year are the best. It took me until about March last year. This year I have been a little more proactive and have produced a list already. I bought 55 albums this year. I also acquired a further 58 through freebies, promos, borrowings and artists giving me stuff. That's a lot of stuff to choose from. I was considering limiting my self only to stuff released this year, but decided that some things were too good to leave off despite them being discovered by me this year, although released some time in the past. This didn't end up making the job any easier. Anyway, after much deliberating, thinking, changing of minds and giving up in disgust, I have produced a list of 10 albums split evenly across "metal" and "non-metal", as well as a handful of "honourable mentions." So, without further a...

Something is afoot - Opera Mini on iPhone

Strange things are afoot. 20 days ago, Opera submitted the iPhone version of Opera Mini , their mobile browser, to the Apple AppStore. 20 days later, it was actually approved, despite previous browser technologies and the like being rejected for "duplicating iPhone functionality". Strange indeed. Having used Opera Mini before on many different devices, both touchscreen and traditional keypad based, I have long appreciated its raw speed, excellent rendering engine and intuitive navigation controls. But can it stand up to Safari on iPhone for browsing excellence? The answer: sort of. The Good Like its predecessors, Opera Mini for iPhone is blazingly fast. Using Opera's own proxies, web content is compressed to within an inch of its life to reduce bandwidth requirements, and the browser itself renders what it downloads so fast that the likes of Safari just can't keep up. Even on a GPRS only connection it is almost as fast as Safari on 3G for largely text based page...