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- Life With Snow Leopard: One Month Later
Installing a new operating system on Day One is often a foolish undertaking. Yet, there I was, installing Snow Leopard the night of the 28th.
I took the plunge day one for two reasons: as a tech journalist specializing in the Mac, I felt I owed it to our readers to offer timely insight on Snow Leopard from the perspective of one who has actually used it. After all, someone needs to be able to report back if it’s a smart idea to strap a jet engine to a Ford Pinto. The other reason was timing. I knew I wanted to install it. I was going away the weekend after, and my night classes started a week later and I wanted to be able to allow a couple of weeks to smooth out any issues.
Leaving plenty of time to resolve any issues appeased the karma gods and my installation went very smoothly with no issues. Another friend of mine angered the gods by installing Snow Leopard at 1 am the night before a business trip — ask her how her Snow Leopard install went.
I’ve been very happy with SL over the last month. After I installed Leopard before the first patch, I quickly realized it was bad news. My gaming performance — admittedly meager on a Macbook with a GMA 950 chipset — took a nose dive. I had odd crashes, application incompatibility, and a nightmare getting my printers working again that was reminiscent of Vista’s printer issues.
Snow Leopard has been a joy and I have zero regrets about upgrading. I’m going to break down my experiences in terms of positive and negative experiences.
Positives
My Snow Leopard install has “just worked.” All my printers work, even our ancient HP Color Laser at work. The only major incompatibility issues I had were with Launchbar, but upgrading to the latest version and waiting for it to index cleared the problem.
Dock Expose and Minimize to Dock Icon have become Features I Wonder How I Was Able to Get Through the Day Before™. It’s so intuitive and so hard to believe it’s taken Apple this long to implement it.
The new Automator is really amazing. I wrote about it already, and I stand by that article. Automator alone has been worth the upgrade fee for me.
Being able to drag off selected pages of PDF file in Preview is proving to be godsend. Every now and then, I’ll need to grab a few sections from 200+ page PDFs, and dragging them from the sidebar to my desktop is very efficient.
As an aside, while this isn’t really a Snow Leopard feature, a week ago I upgraded my aging 2006-era Macbook to a new Macbook Pro. I was able to just swap out the hard drives with no reinstallation needed. I’ve heard conflicting reports on how this worked in Leopard, but the only painful — and I use that term loosely — part of the hardware swap was re-pairing my Bluetooth devices and resetting up Time Machine.
While there’s been much wailing and gnashing of teeth over the Photoshop compatibility issue, my ancient copy of — wait for it — CS1 is working fine. I really should get around to upgrading that one of these days, but I’ve moved most of my image editing needs over to Pixelmator. The only thing I really use Photoshop for these days is cutting masks with the pen tool, so it’s possible other features aren’t SL happy.
Negatives
I haven’t really had any negatives. I’ve been giving it a lot of thought while composing this article to make sure I’m not being a total fan boy, but the only negative I have is Microsoft Word crashes a lot on exit. It’s not affecting any data. It’s not crashing while I’m using it; just when I quit. According to this tweet by David Pogue, reinstalling Office solved that problem. When I went to reinstall it, I was having media issues with my internal drive so I can’t test the validity of his statement.
As I mentioned in my Automator piece, Word 2008 isn’t context services aware, but that’s not really a Snow Leopard problem; Word is still a Carbon app.
I guess if I wanted to, I could complain that items in stacks aren’t context sensitive…but that’s reaching.
Would I recommend upgrading?
After my glowing words of praise, you’d probably expect me to join the chorus of pundits proclaiming, “It’s a no brainer! Make haste to the Apple Store!” but my verdict is instead one based on reason. Therefore, I can definitively answer this thusly: kinda, sorta, maybe. I know, it’s hard to get people to make a stand for their beliefs; I’m glad I could fall on that sword for you.
The Word crash on exit issue is enough for me to tell heavy Office users to hold off. It may well be that a reinstall fixes it, and I’ve had no issues with Word other than the exit crash, but apps that crash quitting don’t fill me with confidence, even if it’s just cosmetic.
If you work in the design business, I’d definitely say let others test the waters and wait a few app upgrades before upgrading the OS. Actually, that statement works for anyone who considers their Mac to be mission critical. If it’s working just fine now, and you rely on it working just fine, don’t upgrade.
One of the problems with Snow Leopard is while I can come up with reasons like these not to upgrade, until applications are updated — and in some cases rewritten — to take advantage of Snow Leopard, you’re likely to not see a big upgrade.
Sure, the new cat is faster than the old one. Even on my old 2006 MacBook I could tell they patched in more snappy. While I love the new Expose and Stacks, and would miss them if I had to go back to Leopard, right now I’m still having a hard time recommending people make a change for the sake of change.
I can’t think of many reasons for you not to upgrade. However, unless you want the new UI improvements, until we see apps take advantage of Grand Central and Open CL, I can’t really think of many reasons you should upgrade.
Переслать - The Greenest Apple Yet
In the latest example of Apple going green, the technology company has launched a revised and expanded web site, Apple and the Environment.
While the company, to date, has largely focused on reporting the environmental impact of its manufacturing processes, the updated site also examines Apple products over their entire life cycle, including consumer usage. In conjunction with the site launch, Peter Burrows of BusinessWeek reports on Apple’s effort to change the “terms of debate” over the environment.
For Apple, that debate has often been with Greenpeace. The environmental organization’s periodic reports on the green efforts of technology companies have often graded Apple poorly. In the BusinessWeek article, Steve Jobs was his usual candid and caustic self, saying that “I thought Greenpeace was being very unfair with us at the beginning, and that they were using us to get visibility.” While that may be true (I think it is), more objectively, one of the many problems with the methodology Greenpeace uses in its reports is that it takes into account future commitments as well as actions in the present.
Another issue Apple has with some green rankings is the exclusive focus on the operations of a company, often without even taking into account the environmental impact of the products. Jobs likened this to “asking a cigarette company how green their office is.” To that end, Apple is coming clean on its true carbon footprint, and it’s a big one.
For Apple, that’s 10.2 million tons of carbon emissions annually, more than half the the company’s total output. In contrast, HP and Dell, both far larger companies in terms of manufacturing and numbers of products sold, report smaller emissions totals. For HP, that’s 8.4 million tons annually, while Dell reports a seemingly miraculous 471,000 tons. Of course, neither company counts the emissions totals of products in the hands of consumers, and that is a big deal. Apple’s decision to report those totals “could completely change how companies are evaluated,” according to Alexandra McPherson of the environmental group Clean Production Action.
Of course, it remains to be seen whether Greenpeace will give Apple credit where credit is due. After all, how much publicity can Greenpeace get from badgering a beleaguered company like Dell?
Read our latest analysis piece, "Will Apps.gov Raise the Bar for Cloud Providers?" Only on GigaOM Pro.Переслать - AT&T iPhone MMS Launches Today
According to the Twittersphere, AT&T has begun flipping the switch on MMS across the U.S. today. Sources say that AT&T will be sending out text messages, beginning at 10 A.M. EST today, to notify customers when MMS service is available for their use.
Customers and industry watchers alike are waiting anxiously to see how AT&T’s network will cope with the increased demand MMS will cause. AT&T spokesman Seth Bloom doesn’t expect any problems, however, noting in an email that:
SMS and MMS messages are carried differently than other network traffic. This is one of the reasons why when there’s a natural disaster or other large scale emergency situation (e.g., earthquake or something like that) that causes a huge and sudden spike in voice calls, wireless carriers suggest that people send text messages. They’re likely to get through when the voice circuits are busy.
Stacey at GigaOM goes into more detail about how MMS and SMS work compared to regular voice calls. She concludes that the true linchpin factor in today’s launch will be the strength of AT&T’s servers. Clearly, the carrier must be fairly confident in their ability to handle the strain, or we’d likely still be waiting for the company to announce a start date.Some, like Twitter user Connor Stanton, are hoping that AT&T won’t be equal to the task and that its failure to meet the demand will result in a breakdown of the exclusivity deal between the carrier and Apple. Stanton writes, “Come on AT&T. I want to crash your infrastructure when MMS rolls out so Apple will kill iPhone’s exclusivity in US. Kthnxbye.” In theory, if Apple thinks AT&T network woes are having a significant impact on its iPhone sales, we could see it take its business elsewhere.
There’s even a plan circulating on social media networks for AT&T iPhone users to simultaneously send out MMS messages at 5 P.M. EST to attempt to crash the network on purpose. I wonder if AT&T accounted for organized attempts to destabilize its network in preparation for today’s launch.
To activate MMS on your iPhone, plug your device into your computer. Click on it in the source list in iTunes, and then click the “Check for Update” button. You should see a dialog that says, “An update to the carrier settings for your iPhone is available. Would you like to download it now?” Click “Download and Update” and wait for the process to finish. Carrier settings updates are normally very fast. Once it’s finished, the camera icon should appear in your text messaging dialog, and new menu options should open up in your other native apps for sending various types of media.
Once activated, you’ll be able to send photos, video, audio, map locations, and contact information via MMS to other enabled devices. Very handy for making sure the sofa color you’re looking at is OK with your significant other before making a purchase, for example.
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