Mac OS X 10.6 Snow Leopard

[W1UJR]

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

[John K5PRO]

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!

[N3DRB The Derb]

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.

[John K5PRO]

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.

[N3DRB The Derb]

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.

[nq5t]

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.

[John K5PRO]

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?

[Pete, WA2CWA]

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.

[Steve - WB3HUZ]

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.

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?

[W1UJR]

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.

[W1UJR]

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!

[W1UJR]

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.

[N3DRB The Derb]

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

also 10.6.1 is released.

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

[K5UJ]

glad i'm still using 10.5.8

[nq5t]

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

[W1UJR]

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

[W1UJR]

You are one of the lucky ones then. I get repeated application crashes daily. If you open certain applications and try to do something too quick they often crash. The last item on the list "Safari plug-in reliability" has been the most irritating problem. About 1 out of every 3 times when I open Safari I get the flash player plug-in crash and its not the Adobe player. And guess what? this 10.6.2 patch didn’t fix that problem either, its still doing it.

I think a lot of it has to do with many of the apps that now come up and run in 64-bit like Safari don’t fully like running in 64-bit mode yet and some of the older apps don’t like running 32-bit in SL. There seems to be some conflict between the different bit modes. The OS is not yet stable.

The next time Apple releases a new OS I’m going to wait 6 months until all of the bugs are worked out first. It was never a problem with them before, but that appears to no longer be the case. Never again…

If you are really having those problems, why not revert back to Leopard?

[steve_qix]

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

[Jim KF2SY]

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