Okay, in general I really like Snow Leopard. Love QuickTime 10, the improved Cocoa-licious Finder and so on. But - aside from how the text system seems to have become even slower yet again (why oh why do they keep adding candy such as auto-correct when we have a poorly-implemented tables and bullets system and everything is so poorly optimised?), here are my two biggest 10.6 annoyances. If anyone knows of a fix, please let me know!
Spotlight. What happened? I used to use Spotlight for opening applications - click on Spotlight, type the application name, wait a second, then hit enter and bam, the program is opened. But now Spotlight seems to be really hit and miss. Often when I type the name of a program installed on my system into Spotlight now, it doesn’t appear in the list at all, and I end up having to open it via the Finder after all. Maybe it’s because the Finder has been rewritten in Cocoa and so there are some lingering bugs, but has anyone else experienced this? Maybe I just need to re-build the Spotlight indices…
Mail’s new copy address behaviour. Argh! Now when you click on someone’s address and select “Copy address”, it copies their name, too (e.g. Bob bob@bob.com). Is there any way to change that?
Right, now it’s back to trying to figure out how the hell to speed up the text system…
I always used to use Quicksilver for this, until it seemed to go t*ts up on me just recently. I replaced it with the Google equivalent, which seems to work very well.
Martin.
PS: Sorry – perhaps I should have said “stopped working” rather than “t*ts up” – I was forgetting that not everyone who reads these things is fluent in British slang.
I had problems with Spotlight and Quicksilver on my laptop, but QS seems to work fine on the desktop. I don’t know why. I’ve loaded Butler on the laptop. Not as pretty as QS. Thinking of springing for Launchbar…
I like that I now can choose which quotation marks I want to use (in German you can choose between three sets) but not only is the substitution very slow—it was smooth under Leopard—also the substitution algorithm has become worse than it was. Why the *#!§?
Not to mention Mail which seems to work with an even poorer imitation of the substitution feature that the programs working with the Apple TextEngine have. Sigh.
“Intelligent dashes” are anything but intelligent, it’s just autocorrect, an em-dash for two consecutive hyphens. Which is anyway only useful for languages using em-dashes. But there might be some using en-dashes out here.
Preview: Clicking the Annotation/Hightlight button in the tool bar opens a new set of icons at the bottom of the window that you have to open over and over again when you want to highlight more than just one part of the text. To quote myself: Sigh.
Most annoying so far is everything that has to do with CDs and DVDs. Response when pushing eject takes a really long time. And when you stop a movie in Front Page and continue playing the movie jolts for a few moments. Buffering seems to be working not properly.
Also: There is no sound at all after I had started the Mac, only after I change the volume sound is suddenly on.
Oh, yes, and I forgot to say that Snow Leopard has completely broken DMG creation. I use FileStorm to create the Scrivener.dmg - but on Snow Leopard the background image doesn’t appear, the Finder toolbar isn’t suppressed, and the icon sizes aren’t respected - in other words it looks rubbish and entirely unprofessional. So I downloaded a different DMG creation tool thinking it was just a FileStorm problem, but no - other tools have the same problem. So now just to release Scrivener on DMG I have to boot up a Tiger or Leopard machine. Sigh.
Hmm… Regarding the DMG: I though my DMG backgrounds etc. were fine. They look okay finalized on my machine. Does that mean everyone else is seeing something completely different?
My biggest snow leopard gripe is that my entire system ran like treacle all if last night. If this was meant to be the “make things faster” release, it seemed closer to “make things Vista”.
It was so bad I would immediately downgrade if I didn’t need it for testing. It was almost unusable (long delays where everything freezes for 20 seconds or more… Seemed safari related).
Yes. I just heard back from one of the developers of a DMG creator. It turns out that the .DS_STORE file format has been changed on Snow Leopard. As 10.6 is backwards-compatible, this means that DMG files created on 10.4 or 10.5 will look fine on Snow Leopard. However, because earlier systems know nothing of 10.6’s file format, any DMG with a background etc created on 10.6 won’t show up correctly on earlier systems - although it will of course look fine on Snow Leopard. So if you create a DMG on Snow Leopard using FileStorm, DMG Canvas or anything else, it will just appear as a regular Finder window on Leopard and Tiger. The only way around it is to create DMGs on an earlier system for now. As the .DS_STORE file format is private, it’s not going to be easy for DMG makers to fix, either. Thanks Apple!
Safari related freezes seem to be Flash related freezes.
Yesterday I could not open the youtube start page with neither Safari, Firefox, Camino, or Opera because it had an auto-play flash ad on it.
I have the latest Flash player but that didn’t help.
What’s really bad about it is the fact that exactly this kind was promised not to happen anymore—“sandboxed” is the magic word. Well, okay, Safari did not crash as it had happened under Snow Leopard with flash pages sometimes. But a freeze for how ever long (I aborted after a while) is not a real improvement.
Actually, that’s not strictly true. A lot of hobbyists and small development houses use Visual Studio Express which is free. You only really need the expensive versions for team working, remote debugging and mobile development.
Everything I’ve heard so far about Snow Leopard makes me more reluctant to upgrade, I must say. I still have to find an argument why I should. I’d loose more than I’d gain, that’s my impression.
Here are the biggest reasons that cause me to consider upgrading:
You will gain a bit of disk space back. Quite a bit.
Optimization of “intel only”
Improvement large scale computing due to 64bit support.
My big reasons not to upgrade:
If you are on a core duo you are stuck in 32bit which limits the value of #2 and #3.
Most big issues aren’t really addressed until minor 2/3 is released.
Data migrations is a PITA and since clean install is always the best option…
But there are other, better reasons for not upgrading, but I only care about the ones listed. Haven’t really listened to them enough to give an opinion about the legitimacy of the arguments. Wock and the gamma thing is an example of one that I don’t really give a vic-k’s backside† about.
'Fraid not. The slower text system is a hangover from Leopard. There are a couple of things that Scrivener does to make it worse - it forces more drawing more often - which I am working on right now to optimise for 2.0. From what I can discern, though, Leopard started doing a lot more drawing for every letter you typed. On Tiger, there was a bug whereby if you were typing fast and the text spilled onto a newline, in some situations if there was text beneath the line you were on, the drawing wouldn’t update beneath so that it would look as though were completely overwriting the line beneath until drawing was updated again. I reported this bug to Apple, as did the Blue-Tec guys, I believe, and others, and I guess their fix was to do more drawing. But the fix has created a substantially slower text system. I don’t suppose Apple are too bothered, given that none of their major text apps use the standard text system (Mail and Pages, for instance, are built on the WebKit, I believe, using a completely custom text system).
Is anyone having issues with the “Grid” view on their macBooks? I have a macBook (mid-2007) and for larger folders, the stack (when in “Grid” view) goes underneath the menu bar… video of problem
