MacBook on Snow (Leopard)

Two weeks ago I decided to upgraded my MacBook to Snow Leopard. I must admit that I’m really late with this update :-) Normally I’m an early adopter who is pressing the update button while it is hot, but this time I was a little more careful.

First of all I’m using my MacBook productive for my software development projects. So I had to be sure that I’m still be able to do my work after the update. After reading several forums and the list of incompatible software I was surprised how many software had problems with the new OS! A main show stopper was also that my Line6 sound hardware was not supported and switching to windows just to play guitar wasn’t an option for me.

Then after 3 months I finally had the time and confidence to do the upgrade. Just before the upgrade I’ve gone to the list of all my hardware and software and checked if there is a new version available and if is necessary to update (AppFresh is really helpful for that!). After that I did the mandatory Time Machine backup and I was read to go. The installation of Snow Leopard went very smoothly, after inserting the DVD and clicking “Install Max OS X” the upgrade process started and was finished in about 1 hour. After that the system rebooted and voila…. my MacBook was running with the latest Apple OS.

The first thing after the reboot I noticed was that I noticed nothing. At the first sight everything was looking and behaving the same. After some days I recognized the following things:

• The new Expose and Dock Expose is really nice
• QuickTime X looks nice but the interface takes a while to get used to it
• Bugfix No. 1: On my system I’m not logged in as an admin user. So every time when I install or update a software I’m asked for an admin login. Leopard had the very annoying bug that sometimes when you tried to replace an application you had to enter the credentials many times. This is fixed now.
• Bugfix No. 2: When using FileVault it was not possible to change the default application of a file type. On every reboot Leopard forgot your settings and the file had the wrong icon again and on double click the wrong application started. Works like a charm now.

I must say that I’m happy with my Snow Leopard. Though there are some minor bugs the system feels a lot more mature and I’m looking forward what Apple is going to do with it in the future. OS X 10.6 doesn’t have many new features and I can’t see any performance improvements on my system, but at least It has fixed two annoying Leopard bugs and I can use XCode 3.2 for my projects.

A Happy New Year 2010 to everyone!