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Apple's Snow Leopard now due August 28

In many ways this is what happened to Windows Vista, they rewrote bits of it for that exact reason and people got mad at them when 3rd parties were too slow in fixing compatibility issues.

Anyway, I'm spending most of tomorrow on an airplane so it seems like a bad time to upgrade my MPB. I'm not expecting anything to go wrong (though this is my first OS upgrade as I bought the thing earlier this summer) but it just seems a bit more prudent to wait until next week when I'm done traveling!
 
Vista both had a lot more dead wood to clean out, and made more radical changes for less effect.

As I read it, most of the under-the-hood changes for Snow Leopard were about leveraging their new technologies like Grand Central Dispatch for better inherent multi-core support. I couldn't even tell you what prompted MS to change the driver model for Vista----I'm sure they had a reason, but it's not something you can point to and nod knowingly.
 
Lindley said:
The point of this OS version is to clean out the dead wood from the code base and provide a cleaner, more flexible framework going forward. You get cases where supporting an API method used by 1% of software generates 50% more code, and the like. Some compatibility issues are to be expected in such a move. It seems to me that they've minimized them though.
Click to expand...

I was expecting that, but Parallels 3 and Photoshop CS3 just aren't that old. and are used by tons of people. I'm not shelling out for CS4 so I guess I'll skip Snow Leopard. It's too bad, I was really looking forward to it.
 
Guartho said:
Lindley said:
The point of this OS version is to clean out the dead wood from the code base and provide a cleaner, more flexible framework going forward. You get cases where supporting an API method used by 1% of software generates 50% more code, and the like. Some compatibility issues are to be expected in such a move. It seems to me that they've minimized them though.
Click to expand...

I was expecting that, but Parallels 3 and Photoshop CS3 just aren't that old. and are used by tons of people. I'm not shelling out for CS4 so I guess I'll skip Snow Leopard. It's too bad, I was really looking forward to it.
Click to expand...

It should be noted that, while Adobe cannot officially claim CS3 is 100% compatible with Snow Leopard, Adobe has nonetheless done "extensive testing" of CS3 on the new OS and says it "works fine" with only two minor issues discovered (and one of those is only in the Japanese-language version). Read all about it here.
 
Guartho said:
I was expecting that, but Parallels 3 and Photoshop CS3 just aren't that old. and are used by tons of people. I'm not shelling out for CS4 so I guess I'll skip Snow Leopard. It's too bad, I was really looking forward to it.
Click to expand...

From what I've heard (and I could be wrong) CS3 isn't so much incompatible as Adobe just doesn't want to provide support for it... and frankly, Adobe's support is pretty poor to begin with. I was reading before that people were running CS3 fine on the pre-release versions of Snow Leopard.

Even if it doesn't run, it's hardly Apple's fault if a 3rd party vendor doesn't want to support their own product.
 
Rocketman said:
The same goes for reducing the OS size--I imagine dropping support for PowerPC (and therefore reducing binary size) would lead to quite a significant reduction already.
Click to expand...

Actually, that was pretty much averaged out by adding in all the 64 bit code. The space reductions came from general tightening up, better use of compression, and the elimination of all superfluous printer drivers in favor and downloading and installing them on-the-fly when a different printer is connected.
 
Dr. Horrible said:
Only two things have broken that I have noticed so far - Cyberduck (an FTP program) for which I understand there is a working beta version, and my mouse - Expose and Spaces can no longer be controlled from the thumbwheel. I gather from a bit of googling that an update should be soon (this is a Logitech mouse in case you were wondering).
Click to expand...

The mouse problem on my iMac is sorted - it seems in 10.6, both Expose and Spaces have been moved to the utilities folder within the applications folder itself, so the mouse software couldn't find them. If you copy (don't move) those two applications back into the applications folder, my thumbwheel works again. Hurrah!

Still awaiting a non-beta Cyberduck version. I'm not too fussed though, as it is free software. When it's working properly, I'll make another donation. :)

I did note over the weekend that the Logitech software also played havoc with the trackpad on my Macbook. None of the finger gestures worked, other than the two fingered scrolling. So I removed the Logitech software, and everything is now fine. I can pinch and Expose myself at will. :techman:

Link to info.

So all my stuff (except Cyberduck) works. But then I don't run all the really fancy stuff. :)

Guartho said:
What's the deal with all this incompatible software? This is not what I've come to expect from Apple.
Click to expand...

As far as I can tell, it's not an Apple problem, rather other non-Apple developers not keeping up. Snow Leopard has been out a while for developers. But as noted by others, Vista had the same issues, but the issues with SL are much less. Most of the software works.

In other news, I've switched back to Safari from Firefox. 1 bump versus 10 on the dock on start-up. I'm so fickle. :klingon:
 
Dr. Horrible said:
In other news, I've switched back to Safari from Firefox. 1 bump versus 10 on the dock on start-up. I'm so fickle. :klingon:
Click to expand...

Yeah, I did the same thing after a few frustrating days of using Firefox 3.5. Logging into my Yahoo! email account caused Firefox to lock up and crash. Even upgrading to 3.5.2 didn't fix the issue, although I've yet to see a support document regarding this issue. So I don't know if it's just me or if others are having this problem too. Anyone on TrekBBS having similar issues? (I'm running Mac OS X 10.5, BTW.)
 
^ You can still install QuickTime 7 if you need the Pro stuff. It's an optional install on the Snow Leopard DVD.
 
So Pro isn't available yet?

I hear X has horrible displays which cover the viewing area?

Just quoting a friend who was less than impressed. :)
 
Candlelight said:
I hear X has horrible displays which cover the viewing area?
Click to expand...

Actually the controls are all hidden, unless you move the mouse pointer into the playing area and then they will briefly appear. If you wait a few seconds (or move the pointer out again), the controls disappear.
 
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Guartho said:
I was expecting that, but Parallels 3 and Photoshop CS3 just aren't that old. and are used by tons of people. I'm not shelling out for CS4 so I guess I'll skip Snow Leopard. It's too bad, I was really looking forward to it.
Click to expand...

yes but you have just as many apps breaking when moving from say XP to Vista so SL is no different.

And both CS3 and Parallels 3 are both the better part of 2 years old and a life cycle of 18 months to 2 years for a software package isn't unheard of.


Lindley said:
Vista both had a lot more dead wood to clean out, and made more radical changes for less effect.

As I read it, most of the under-the-hood changes for Snow Leopard were about leveraging their new technologies like Grand Central Dispatch for better inherent multi-core support. I couldn't even tell you what prompted MS to change the driver model for Vista----I'm sure they had a reason, but it's not something you can point to and nod knowingly.
Click to expand...

Has Apple now dropped support the PowerPC based Macs now? Considering they've been gone for serveral years now and were a completely different processor architecture Apple's been pretty good at supporting people who still used them.

As to the driver model for Vista I gather it was related to sercurity with drivers being one of the weak points in Windows. You wouldn't think a printer driver would be significant enough to cause a system crash when not printing but I've seen it (was a HP driver).

Iirc the new driver model for Vista was brought across from Server 2003.
 
Marc said:
Has Apple now dropped support the PowerPC based Macs now?
Click to expand...

Yep, 10.6 is Intel-only.

Not only that, but Rosetta (the bit of code that allows PPC apps to run on Intel Macs) is an optional install - not part of the stock 10.6. But if you find that you need Rosetta after all, you don't need to stick the DVD in again - the OS will download it for you on the fly.
 
David cgc said:
Rocketman said:
The same goes for reducing the OS size--I imagine dropping support for PowerPC (and therefore reducing binary size) would lead to quite a significant reduction already.
Click to expand...

Actually, that was pretty much averaged out by adding in all the 64 bit code. The space reductions came from general tightening up, better use of compression, and the elimination of all superfluous printer drivers in favor and downloading and installing them on-the-fly when a different printer is connected.
Click to expand...

And, apparently, calculating capacity differently
 
^ The choice is absolutely correct, and hard to find fault with. It may also cause a greater increase in the reported "free capacity" of a drive than is actually justified.
 
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