My Snow Leopard Experience
Updating a Mac OS has never been a challenge. Tiger took some time, but went flawlessly. Leopard was a breeze. And all of my reading on Snow Leopard had me ready for a 45 minute non-event.
Needless to say, my experience was not a smooth one. It took me two installs and hours of troubleshooting before I had Snow Leopard running properly on my 13″ Unibody MacBook.
After the first install, I had the following problems:
No sound. Checking under the Sound menu in System Preferences, Snow Leopard could not find my speakers.
Apps would not launch. After using the system for 20 or 30 minutes, apps refused to launch. Those already open worked just fine. Noting else would open — not utilities, apps or even System Preferences.
Keychain went crazy. kSync repeatedly wanted to know my 1Password password and the password to login to another computer connected to me via MobileMe.
A second install corrected the sound problem, but the other two problems remained.
Solving the Keychain problem was easy. I’ve run into it before. Simply open Keychain Access, find all MobileMe (or .Mac) passwords and delete. Problem solved.
Apps not launching, however, was a different story. I use a couple of plugins that I know do not behave perfectly under Snow Leopard: Glims and Evernote clipper for Safari. I killed both of those from my system. (In fact, I uninstalled Evernote all together, something I’ve been threatening to do for some time.)
I also killed off my DevonThink Pro Office sorter, which does not properly behave in Snow Leopard, and all DevonThink scripts for Safari.
After removing all of this, I tested for an hour. Everything worked perfectly. This morning, Snow Leopard is still going strong.
Granted, I miss my DevonThink add-ons and especially Glims. But I’m sure both will soon be updated to work properly under Snow Leopard. When they are, I’ll add them back.
As for Snow Leopard itself, color me impressed. The speed boost alone is worth it. Snow Leopard is snappy fast.
Other subtle changes that have impressed me are:
- Being able to minimize into apps instead of the Dock.
- New stack actions. They are now scrollable. Plus you can drill down into folders.
- Expose is grid-based and shows minimized windows.
- Scalable Services menu on an app-by-app basis.
- Better control over assigning keyboard shortcuts
- Adding Automator actions to the contextual menu
Before I close, I have to say a word about Apple Support. I could not have asked for better assistance. They were patient and thorough. And I was also impressed that Apple extended their customer support hours from 8 p.m. CST to midnight CST. (Maybe they have done this in the past, but I’ve never needed it.)
Despite the troubles upgrading, I’m a Snow Leopard fan. I’ve got three more computers to upgrade. Here’s hoping for a smoother experience with them.
I’ve actually found that if you uninstall all of the devonthink addon’s you can in fact still run devonthink. This isn’t the greatest of fixes but it is the closes we have until Devon-Technologies releases an update that is compatible with snow leopard. These guys are usually pretty fast and I know that they have been working on it.
Chris
I still have DevonThink running, sans add-ons. Works fine for me. I know they have said in forums (and I believe on their blog) that they will release a Snow Leopard-compatable version within a week or two.
My DevonThink is running fine; I don’t really use the sorter – I typically either print to PDF and straight to DevonThink (which works REALLY well), or I scan in documents and then import them into DevonThink.
Here’s hoping the guys at DevonThink get the scanning routines working again – I have an HP 6500, and lost my scanning setup when I upgraded. DevonThink is supposed to now pull scans in via ImageCapture, but it never finds my scanner! I have to fire up ImageCapture separately, scan all the files into a directory, then import that directory into Devonthink and run my sorting. A bit of a pain.
Bill
I go back and forth between copying, pasting and cleaning up a text note to printing straight to pdf, which does work well. I just like getting rid of the distractions from the rest of the page.
I’m hoping they release an update this week that fixes all/most of their Snow Leopard-related bugs.