The AM Forum

Well, Apple surprised everyone and is shipping Snow Leopard for delivery this Friday, 08/28/2009.

They have redone Leopard’s core to streamline the OS and they added some new features.

I’m really curious about the new QuickTime X and support for Microsoft Exchange Server.

http://store.apple.com/us/product/MAC_OS_X_SNGL?mco=NzgxMDc2NA

i'm not sure what i am going to do yet, as i have two 10.5 boxes and one 10.4
I dont think i can buy the family 5 pack because only 10.5 can be upgraded to 10.6, you need to buy the full version for anything else
looks pretty cool though

Of course it's cool, it's SNOW Leopard.

How many OS X versions till Apple is reduced to using Tabby Cat for the name?

Part of Overview: Wake from sleep and shut down your Mac faster than before.

I always shut down my PC when I go to sleep, and when I wake from sleep, I turn it on. Sounds like a big Mac conspiracy.

Pre-ordered my "Family Pack" yesterday via the online Apple store.
Who else sells 5 copies of an advanced OS for $49?  ;)

Windoze never again.

I still remember that day I was liberated converted, July 31, 2006.

Even the OS icon is cool!

I'm happy with the current OS whatever cat it is, (Leopard?) I can never keep them straight.  I think mine is 10.5.8.  I know they use the cat names because it's supposed to be easier to remember but I find it the opposite--to me it only confuses things.
So, is this a whole new OS X version?  10.6?  I'm going to let you all debug it for me  :D


Rob

Don't know what you are talking about Brian, Vista runs fine on this!  ;)
(http://gallery.me.com/brucehowes/100226/Picture-201/web.jpg?ver=12512380040001)

It's a world gone mad, an OS shipped before its time.

Man bites dog.
Water runs uphill
K1JJ runs 50 watts into a dipole
An OS ready ahead of schedule

   "  It's a world gone mad, an OS shipped before it's time.   "


A preachment, dear friend
You are about to receive on John Barleycorn
Nicotine and the temptations of Eve

No parkin' by the sewer sign
Hot dog, my razors broke
Water drippin' up the spout
But I dont care, let it all hang out

Hangin' from a pine tree by my knees
Sun is shinin' through the shade
Nobody knows what its all about
It's too much, man, let it all hang out

Saw a man walkin' upside down
My T.V.s on the blink
Made Galileo look like a Boy Scout
Sorry 'bout that, let it all hang out

Sleep all day, drive all night
Brain my numb, can't stop now
For sure ain't no doubt
Keep an open mind, let it all hang out

It's rainin' inside a big brown moon
How does that mess you baby up, leg
Eatin' a Reuben sandwich with sauerkraut
Don't stop now, baby, let it all hang out

maybe finally time to retire the 2003 dual 1.8 G5 here. I think the current mac mini with the intel core duo and the 9400M video would cream it. any of the intel imacs or the pro's would crush it like a bug.

no more power pc support. You can buy dual 1.25ghz g4's on ebay for around 100 bucks now.

I love the iMacs Derb.

One cable off the back only, the power cable.
Everything else is wireless!
A work of art!

(Flame proof suit snuggly fitted on) Well, I guess I'm probably the only one here that doesn't have much affinity for the 'Mac.' I guess it stems from the halicon days of working at NASA LRC, (just south of HUZman). Mind you this was the late '80's and the price you paid for a Macintosh with a 13" B&W screen, with a high performance 68XX processor, (I don't think the the 68XXX was used until the Mac II). You could get a an IBM AT with a 30MB disk drive and EVGA color monitor. The other thing that stood out was that a standard centronics interface cable for the printer was ~$15. Apple charge $35 which was pretty much the same cable but came in a nice white box with a big colorful apple logo on it. After many cries from users, Apple finally relented and licensed first (memory is hazy on this) Rodime and the Q-drive to manufacture psuedo outboard HDD's, (these were in same color scheme as the Mac and served as a pedestal for the MAC). Later Apple licensed other companies to make larger monitors because they were being left in the dust by the DOS machines. The point is that you pay a large premium because it has that apple logo on it. Hence why I still use a PC. It does what I want it to do and I bought it pre-loaded with most of the software so maybe I made a donation to Herr Gates but he doesn't get anything else from me. Let the fires begin!!  ;D

Derb, I'm running a mac mini right now that I got last summer and it's been great.  I got the cheap model too; run it with a samsung monitor I got at tiger direct and backup with time machine on an external 300 Gb h.d.
Does everything I need.  I use a linux machine at work; operate an old Win95 PC in the shack that pretty much just runs a DOS logging program.  The Mac does everything I need on the network.

No flames; Hams used to say the same things about Collins, i.e. Drake or Heath SB stuff just as good; ur paying for the little round meatball logo blah blah....and I agree that some of the design decisions to make the products art museum pieces were dumb (remember the cube mac convection cooled, always a big mistake, and the products with the sealed batteries you can't field replace) but you get a modern OS X (i.e. unix) Mac and they work with few or no hassles  and mostly no viruses and malware.   I can open a terminal emulator window and get the command line and start writing python code, and interact with the shell if I want to which for me at least is convenient because I'm used to operating in a unix line command environment.  Not sure what you can do with Windows or even if you can get a line command prompt.  And when you get a new mac you can automatically port everything off the old one with a firewire, etc. etc.  A lot changed with OS X.  Check it out.  Oh yeah there's a lot of ham software running on macs now too, but to be sure, if price alone is ur criteria, a mac will probably never beat a PC box; just hope you never have to reinstall the Windows OS  :D

Rob said:
You know, it was interesting to watch the transistion between the PC's and the Mac. Generally the women liked the Mac's because of the icon driven software. No doubt about it, it was definatively alot easier to use than DOS. The guy that wrote the original software left Apple and wrote the OS for the Commodore Amiga. They clearly knew what direction to take with regards to software. Unfortunately, they didn't leave any money in the bank for marketing. Eventually, Gates and crew saw the light and developed Windows. I was gone by the time the Windows 3.0 came out and was working service engineer with a system that utilized the Z8000. Gone are those days.  :'(

I installed Snow Leopard yesterday, typing this with it. It looks as good or better than 10.5.6, and I see no problems besides Norton Antivirus stuck and needed to go to their site and update itself to work again. As for Quicktime, are you sure ('HRO) that the old Quicktime allowed exporting in different formats? I recall only being able to do that once I paid an extra $29 and got the Quicktime Pro update online. Then that worked, as the greyed out commands became functional. The new player does allow trimming movies, something that I did using Pro before. I tried to find out more abut Quicktime X but its not on the Apple Site yet. So maybe they will add that feature again, or make it an option. You can still find the old Quicktime 7 and Pro stuff:

http://www.apple.com/quicktime/pro/

Have you ever noticed how clunky installing updates are to Windoze, every time it seems like things were written entirely by a different programmer and nothing is uniformly simple? With new Mac OS, and older Mac OS, it is about as easy as it gets installing and updating. They are pretty smooth running, seem to have worked out bugs better than Microsoft does.

I got rid of PC last December completely. Only have this one MacBook Pro 15 inch laptop now, wireless anywhere at home. It has dual intel cores so I have VMWare running and it boots my same Windows XP SP3 copy that used to be on the PC. I still use it for only one application that isn't on Mac. Can run Windoze and Mac at the same time, very easy now, why even consider a Windoze machine anymore?

do a search for "MPEG Streamclip" on google. very nice and free movie encoder that does most everything quicktime pro did.

I'm still chugging away with 10.4.11 here,  never did get 10.5.

Yep. You've needed QT Pro to export for a long time. Been using it here since the 1990s. Well worth the few bucks it cost. Or you could always spring for Final Cut and spend a whole bunch more than $29.

All my Windows updates are done automatically. Microsoft sends them down to the machine, diddles with whatever it has to diddle with, and it's done. My hands don't get dirty and I don't ever see them unless I go and review the update list. I've been a happy Windows user since Version 1.0.

Really. They sent you Vista free? You must be special.

Nothing new. You've always need to get a new version of QT Pro for each new (or every other) version of the OS. There is nothing different with Snow Leopard.

Yea, that sux. Can you still use QT Pro 7?

Vista was already installed on the last two machines I brought from HP. My other machines are running XP. Support for XP runs out in 2014. The last time I bought a software version upgrade was around 2000 or 2001 when I went from Windows ME to XP on one machine.

You bought a software upgrade when you bought the two new machines. No free lunch.

 We're not talking about updates to an existing system, we talking about a new OS. Two different things.

At work (contractors to the gov't), we are not allowed to even order Vista, it is scrubbed from new PCs and replaced with XP Pro w/SP3. We have to pay extra for that. They do automatic updates on PC's at least twice a month now, for security. Mac updates about 4-5 times a year on average, without needing IT personnel to do it for us. Now this is, mind you, a network with thousands of users; the IT people don't trust PC owners to do it themselves. And they don't trust Microsoft to do it automatically, can you imagine that? I have been a PC user since the first 8088 4.7 Mhz machines with DOS. I got my first MAC at work in the 1990s and have used them since. I kept both flavors running until past month. The PC is getting ditched, as it is far too much of a liability anymore, not to mention that it is getting patches sent to it from IT every two weeks. I wonder if 7 will be as problematic? 

3 days with Snow Leopard, and all is well.

I can't say that the iMac is notably faster, but then again it was running fine before, nary a problem.
I do like some of the new features with the Dock and Expose, and find the new borderless QuickTime to be a nice change. Sorry Brian...know you did not not like that one. Appreciate the new QT as I can use the basic record function to record screen videos for demos.

Time Machine is supposed to be quicker, still have let to test that one.
The automatic time change feature will be nice when I travel with the Macbook Pro, that just makes sense.
I've always appreciated Preview, and the newer version is even more useful for peeking at files before opening them. In short, well worth the $29, or in my case, the $49 to upgrade my three Macs.

MacWorld has great coverage -->> http://www.macworld.com/article/142459/2009/08/snow_leopard.html?lsrc=top_1

W1UJR, thanks for posting that link to MacWorld. Pretty much explains it all. I read the section on Quicktime, and it says the old version of QT 7.0 PRO is still for sale for those who want the old features, as the new QT X removed a some of the export stuff. If you already had PRO in Leopard, then it moved it to UTILITIES folder. I didn't have PRO, only QT player 7, so it removed that. I think I will pick up a fresh copy of QT 7 PRO (same price as the entire Snow Leopard upgrade!), as I use it regularly to reduce the size of movies out of my digital camera to stuff that i can post on Facebook, email, etc.

Interesting comparison of Windoze 7 and Snow Leopard features there too.

The 64 bit stuff is, of course, a big plus, for future software. Good to see Apple focusing on the Dual Core CPUs instead of trying to cover all bases with PowerPC's as well - a compromise at most. My Macbook Pro smokes!

use the share menu in Iphoto to share to Mail to compress pix. it can take a 6mp photo down to less than 200kb. I've never seen a better file size reducer.

once it has your downsized pix in a mail window, just drag them off onto yer desktop and dont send the email, or send them out if thats what ye want to do. I use this trick very time I post pix on here.

Derb, good tips for photo reduction! I have used Photoshop since I can also touch up brightness, contrast, exposure, and crop pix for placement online. But for movies, products like Quicktime, Windoze Movie maker (or whatever its called), and so forth are needed to crank the raw many MB file from my camera into a MPEG, AVI, MOV, WMF etc. W5HRO, I imagine they will eventually add to Quicktime X, hard to believe Apple would continue to offer QT7 Pro as well as X for sale simultaneously.

I had final cut HD, but I never used it because they made Imovie HD so capable in iLife 06. I think I'm going to keep this dual G5 just so I can keep using the iLife 06 version of iMovie HD.

It's still pretty amazing what this 2003 computer can do. I guess at some point I'll get 10.5 for it.... now that 10.6 is out, should get cheap pretty fast with no more power PC support. I still have a beige 333 Mhz Server G3 running OS9 that I'm going to use to play iTunes mp3's out in the garage.

dual 1.25 Ghz G4's are going for just over 100 bucks on ebay with 30 day warranties.

QT 7 PRO was pretty much pirated to death -  serial #'s everywhere. Probably why they killed it.

No more Windoze here.  Gone, kapooey.  No more registry, things that half work, hangs, reboots, or uninstallers that fail and leave you with a mess.

My last two Windoze desktops sit 99% idle, and the only reason I touch it at all is because I have to use Exchange/Outlook/XP under Bootcamp for work.  Now that the 10.6 supports Exchange, that may go by the wayside, too.

MacBook Pro (mine)
MacBook (wife)
4-core Mac Pro with 4 TB of disk and 32G Ram (for other stuff).

They all just work, no muss, no fuss  ..  all the time :-)  Not that Apple doesn't let a bug or two out the door from time to time.

I thought Windoze had jettisoned its DOS foundatation in WIN98. I keep an old 486 machine in the closet that runs 98 just so I can use DOS for a very few programs that I keep.

Snow Lizard won't allow Norton (Symantec) Antivirus to work any longer. There is quite an uproar starting on the Symantec company forum about this, as it leaves many Mac users without functional virus protection. And for Symantec to not be aware that SL would be sold by the thousands and thousands of copies this week, well, thats pretty stupid of them. Wonder what happened to ol' Peter Norton, anyway?

All of my old DOS programs, that I still use, run fine under Vista and XP in the "Command" (DOS) shell.

Peter Norton sold his Company to Symantec in 1990. I think he's dabbling in collections of art now. Seems I remember reading that he spends his time living on Martha's Vineyard and NYC.

Skip Symantec and McAfee. Those are for PC weenies. Get the free ClamAVX or iAntiVirus. If you are worried about script attacks, run NoScript on Firefox.

One problem only which I have found with Snow Leopard.
The Okidata color laser printer drivers are not ready, so my color laser does not work off the iMac anymore, have to use one of the PCs.

I have some biz apps which are not ported into Mac OS, so I use Windows XP with the Mac OS using Parallels, seems more stable then when running on a Windows machine!

Otherwise, the machine is stable, most of the changes in Snow Leopard are in the background or incremental in nature. Seems as solid as ever.

The announcement for the printer driver issue is that Mac no longer supplies all the drivers with the OS, that is one way they tweaked the size of the OS down. http://support.apple.com/kb/HT3669

Boot Camp works, but I want to run both OS at the same time, so Parallels is a very elegant solution!

Cool, thanks for posting, hoping to get the color laser printer fired up now, its been broken since the Snow Leopard upgrade.

Love the new iTunes, and the Nano, Apple's back on top.

theres a new security update, at least for us power pc users.

also 10.6.1 is released.

http://support.apple.com/kb/DL930

glad i'm still using 10.5.8

Sure it's a long list.  But consider how many (few) items actually impact any one user.

I've been using SL since the first day it was available in the Apple Store, on 3 machines, and never looked back.  And never (yet) had a problem. 

Grant/NQ5T

Thank goodness they fixed the "four finger swipe gesture"... ;)

My only complaints with SL were:
1) Can't empty trash when Mail is open.
2) Fix my Okidata color laser driver so it can print in duplex.

Otherwise, I'm 100% in love with my Mac and the new OS.
Apple's stock performance seems to agree...

Thanks for the update news, need to download that on my systems.

-Bruce

OS X is really quite nice.  Being a unix / PC hacker, I was pleasantly surprised when OS X had UNIX underneath it!

I would like to get vtun (vtund) working under OS X.  Anyone done this?  vtun is virtual private networking software (virtual tunnel) that is VERY VERY easy to configure, and runs on most unix and unix varient (Linux, FreeBSD, etc.) platforms.

Regards,

Steve

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KMU0tzLwhbE&feature=fvw