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Snow Leopard
Who has it? I just finished installing it only to find that the text in Firefox is randomly a fancy-looking italicized font.
Comments
I've not noticed any random italics in Firefox yet.
Dock is far better.
Expose is far, far better.
Services seem to have gone! No matter where I am, it says "No services apply." I guess I need to look into this more.
The kind of things I'm talking about are keyboard shortcuts with ctrl vs command, 256 color terminal support, no refresh command in finder, etc. OSX has always, and presumably always will, be missing all of these incredibly tiny things that I don't understand how technically competent people get by on it.
Also, macports works, but only barely. It's definitely below a level I would call satisfactory.
I'm not quite sure how I feel about this, but not owning a Mac, I suppose I just don't care.
/fanboy
The interesting/twitch-inducing thing is that technically, this is against the EULA for the software. The relevant bit reads: "If you have purchased an Upgrade for Mac OS X Leopard license, then subject to the terms and conditions of this License, you are granted a limited non-exclusive license to install, use and run one (1) copy of the Apple Software on a single Apple-branded computer as long as that computer has a properly licensed copy of Mac OS X Leopard already installed on it." Despite this, Apple doesn't really go out of their way to stop Tiger users from making this upgrade. If they really wanted consumers not to do this, would it really have been so hard for Apple to make the stand-alone Snow Leopard disk stop installing upon detection of 10.4? They don't even bill Snow Leopard as an "upgrade" on the packaging - it's just sold as just an operating system, plain and simple. I only know that making this upgrade is against the EULA because I read an article about it. If I had simply gone to the store and picked up the OS based on the packaging alone (without doing the research beforehand) and found that the upgrade worked just fine, I would have assumed that this was all fine and dandy without ever realizing that I had done something wrong.
The way that Apple encourages Tiger users to actually make the switch is by buying Snow Leopard as part of a stupid "box set" with iLife '09 and iWork '09 for about $169 US ($149 US on Amazon). First off, that's bull right there; what if I don't want either of those program suites (I do want iLife, but for the sake of argument, pretend I don't)? Shouldn't there be a way I can legitimately get my upgrade without having to buy those things that isn't just buying Leopard (which I wouldn't be using) and then Snow Leopard? Second, the Snow Leopard disk that comes with this set isn't any different from the stand-alone disk; the only reason that this box set is specifically for Tiger is that it makes sure that Tiger users pay the extra money for the OS that they didn't pay back when Leopard came out. Again, I say: if Apple really wanted to make sure that paying money for this set was the only method that would work for upgrading Tiger, why not make the stand-alone disk just not work upon detecting Tiger, with only the box set version of the disk working properly? Is this a programming impossibility and I'm not aware of it? It doesn't seem like it'd be that hard to me, but I'm not an expert.
Anyway, grrgh. I'm glad that my machine is upgraded, and I'm happy with what I have so far. I'm just mad that Apple would allow it to be so easy and cheap for us Tiger users to upgrade to Snow Leopard and then scold us for taking advantage of this blatant allowance for arbitrary reasons. ><
I especially hate those that go out of their way to be elitist yet having no computer knowledge whatsoever, struggling to the point of not being able to open Office documents or set up a wi-fi connection and then blaming all the PCs for it.
My personal favourite was at my last place of work, where one person bought an iPhone and two others bought an iPod Touch each. They all gave up on connecting to the Wi-Fi network, while my crap Windows Mobile did it within 30 seconds.
All power to those who actually know how to use their Apple products, just know that the reason many have switched to the platform is for reasons of fashion and elitism with very little understanding.
However, the only places I use OSX are at work (not by choice) and in the living room. The improvements in Snow Leopard actually make a big difference for me at work. Exchange support in Mail and integrated Cisco VPN are going to help me out a lot. Thus, it's totally worth it.
In the living room we have Tiger. So even though Snow Leopard specifically only offers a few tiny improvements to the living room experience, it's basically a free upgrade to Leopard plus Snow Leopard for $30. So that is also a no-brainer.
As for 256 color terminals, vim is the primary culprit. Pretty much all I do is SSH to Linux servers that do not have X-Windows. Working on local files, I can use MacVim/GVim. Without X-Forwarding, I have to use terminal vim. Terminal vim will work in 16-color mode, but that is horribly inconsistent and painful. The 16 colors you get are different from system to system to system. It's really just unusable if you are doing more than simple config file edits. I tried using SSHFS to mount the remote server localy and use MacVim, it barely works. Doesn't work well enough to be my primary workflow.
Every other terminal application supports 256 color mode except the Mac Terminal.App. iTerm supports it, but it has a million other problems that make it unusable. This is the kind of thing that makes my life miserable on a Mac that 99.9% of people never notice.
Another example of something like this, Mac font rendering. Macs render fonts very nicely. However, have you tried to get Proggy programming fonts to render? Try to use that as your terminal font in OSX, or in any other app for that matter, see what happens. It's a nightmare. I even tried to turn fancy rendering off. No Dice. If anyone can figure out how to make that workable, let me know.
With a Mac it's Steve Job's way or the highway. Any reasonably proficient user who tries to do things their own way hits these kinds of roadblocks almost immediately. OSX is a pile of shiny on top of a pile of poop. For the most part it is no different than Windows or Linux for most users. But personally, I will never elect to use it as my desktop OS.
It was all about smoothness of the transition. Motivated individuals who do not need third-party drivers can easily update their boot.plist to boot into 64-bit mode by default, but the rest of us who do need 32-bit kexts really wouldn't have appreciated installing Snow Leopard then discovering our filesystems and input devices no longer work.
1.) Virtualbox does have 64-bit natively supported, even on a 32-bit platform.
2.) Apple gives fuck all about Virtualbox.
Turns out all MacBooks are locked out of the 64-bit kernel. Guess who's running a 13" MacBook5,2? I know it doesn't affect me in a super-serious way, but the idea really burns my ass.
Glad everything worked out for you.