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Sunday, October 4, 2009

Snow Leopard, yes but...

.. it's not that good
Hi everyone, I'm sorry if I let you in the dark for two weeks but I had a lot to do recently and didn't had much time write. Who knows, it might even get worse as time goes on. Anyway, I'm here to talk about Apple recently released operating system. Snow Leopard, as it is called, is a very nice OS. It does have a lot more punch than his predecessor 10.5 but I'm not here to talk about stuff that you already know.

Core upgrade
Apple rewrote a very big part of the os with snow leopard and that's nice for performances but, they also introduced an incalculable number of bugs. Nothing major but all of those things just keep on bothering you until you want to kill yourself. That's what I'm going to talk about. The way Apple bunched 10.6 to release it before Windows 7.

First, Exposé. They did a lot with it and the new version is gorgeous; if you don't have a MacBook. If, like me, you do, well, you'll want to punch yourself in the face each time you use those wonderful 4 finger gestures. There's a glitch with them that cause Exposé to stick and render it unproductive. If you bring Exposé and close it using your trackpad without lifting your hand of it first, shit will happen. It will get stuck in the mode you activated and the only way to get your windows back is to do the inverse gesture! It's a very easy thing to solve and could take about ten minutes to fix but it look like it didn't make it in 10.6.1 released just one week after the official release.

Next, Stacks. Finally, we can walkthrough a folder hierarchy without open a finder window. This was a long awaited feature but... It's buggy too! It work very well until you have a stack of a network volume. Here's what happen. First if the volume is not available and you click on it, it will display a transparent interrogation mark which is great but, if you click on it a second time, they stack up! Indefinitely! If the volume finally came online, they'll stick there! They don't even go away! Well that's most of a graphical problem and is indeed pretty minor. But still, it's just the start. As you'll use this stack, you'll realize that some obvious feature doesn't work. Deleting a file for instance. Yup, you can't delete a file from a network volume stack. Don't ask me why but dropping them in the Trash Can does nothing.

Finally, Upgrade. OS X was always stated for it's upgrade capability. I decided to test it, just for fun. I installed 10.5 and then upgraded to 10.6. No change in the settings, no app installed. And guess what. After one week, half of my icons doesn't appear, VMware fusion icon display as 512x512 pixel of garbage, spotlight sometimes refuse to listen to my keyboard, and I'll pass over random freeze (not kernel panic, just complete computer lockup) and random application crash.

Ho, I just forgot! There's also a keychain issue with the clean install that can get you locked up from your own computer. The only solution, if it is a solution, is to make your way to the keychain application and reset your keychain password.

Moral
OS X 10.6 is a great operating system. It does work faster and has some new interesting stuff. On the other side, don't, ABSOLUTELY DON'T try to install it as an upgrade. You'll want to punch yourself so bad that you'll actually do it before doing a clean install.

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