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

Sheffield CAMRA 35th Steel City Beer Festival!

The first weekend of October has rolled around, so once again it is time for the Sheffield CAMRA Steel City Beer Festival. Now in its 35th year, the festival has seen a lot of change in the recent past. After the terrifying ordeal that was the Darnall Liberal Club, standing out in a field with beer seems like a much nicer proposition. Unfortunately, reviews of the 34th festival were tainted with dissatisfaction, both with the venue and the organisation as a whole. I didn't attend last year, but I attended this year with some trepidation. Thankfully, the whole event was better run than I had been led to believe, but not without its fair share of hiccups. Two marquees provided more indoor space, the place didn't smell like a donkey sanctuary, and the beer tasted great. There were around a hundred beers to try, and thirty ciders, so even more than some previous years. After a couple of false starts, our little troop of merry drinkers (myself, Emma and Chris) finally arrived at

iPhone OS 3.0.1 fixes SMS hijack bug

A lot of Apple haters have been rubbing their tiny hands with glee recently after news reports of a security flaw in the iPhone OS 3.0 that could allow hackers to "Hijack every iPhone in the world" . Many were quick to point out how slow Apple were for not releasing a patch, and many simply made it a soap box for "iPhone sucks, use Android" rants. However, on July 31st, Apple released iPhone OS 3.0.1, with a patch for this SMS issue. It installs easily enough, job done. Of course, not being privy to such information as how to hack my own phone with this exploit, I can't check if it does the job. Either way, there it is. A fix. More detail on the OS 3.0.1 release notes .

Why won't I leave me alone!?

Sometimes I just wish I could ignore my brain so I might be able to concentrate for ten minutes.