Snow Leopard: Taming the new cat

Friday 11 September 2009 - Filed under Tech Notes

My first ten days with the new cat has been a bumpy ride with a few scratches here and there along the way. I must say I kind of saw it coming when I was greeted by the grumpy face of the feline on the packaging. This, incidentally, draws a stark contrast with the “happy” cat in the Windows 7 ad.

As I would with any new operating system, I did a clean installation from scratch as opposed to an upgrade. I generally have some reservations about the idea of upgrading to a new operating system while trying to leave all applications intact, particularly from a stability and compatibility standpoint. Anyway, here are my positive and less-than-positive findings of Snow Leopard, the sixth reincarnation of Mac OS X.

Shutdown faster than sleep

I am not sure if Snow Leopard boots up considerably faster than Leopard (some people say that is the case), but from what I have seen it definitely shuts down a lot faster than Leopard. The screen takes about two and a half seconds to go completely dark when I press Control-Option-Command-Eject. Interestingly, this means that it takes less time to shut down the computer than to put it to sleep – especially in my case where Snow Leopard has to dump 6GB worth of memory contents onto the hard disk before it can “safely” go to bed. If you are impatient like me and want to reduce the time it takes to fall asleep, by the way, run this command in Terminal:

sudo pmset -a hibernatemode 0

Intelligent Disk Utility

Disk Utility reports the time left to complete disk permissions repair more accurately than Leopard did. A small usability improvement with a great impact.

Menlo the new charm of Mac OS X

I work with text editors a lot and I like Menlo, the new default text editing font in Snow Leopard. That said, it’s a subtle change whose magnitude is nowhere near that of the transfiguration when Consolas came to Windows to replace Courier New.

Font smoothing issue

As widely reported, the way Snow Leopard does font smoothing is quirky and this is a major problem identified by many laptop users who hook up an external monitor to their computers. To make Snow Leopard behave the way Leopard did, people have to execute this command in Terminal:

defaults -currentHost write -globalDomain AppleFontSmoothing -int 2

And the trick is not to touch the Appearance settings in System Preferences. Don’t go near the checkbox that says “Use LCD font smoothing when available”.

Office 2008 woes

I could not install Office 2008 with the traditional method of double-clicking on the installer icon because it kept asking for Rosetta – what the…? Intel-only OS running on Intel hardware requiring Rosetta? For the first time ever, I had to install Office from Terminal with this command:

sudo installer -package /Volumes/Microsoft\ Office\ 2008/Office\ Installer.mpkg -target /

The part that follows “/Volumes” is the name of the mounted disk or disk image. After executing this command, install all updates and run Word to complete the rest of the installation process.

More Office 2008 woes

The page up/down keys don’t work in Word 2008 (update level 12.2.1). They just don’t. This certainly has potential to grow into a major annoyance. Users don’t care if it’s Apple or Microsoft at fault. All other text-editing applications that I have tested worked just fine.

Is it wrong to say there’s no place like 127.0.0.1?

I installed the latest version of MAMP (1.8.2) on Snow Leopard to run a WordPress blog. And then the blog refused to run, citing a database error. After a few minutes of stabbing in the dark, I learned that any reference to “127.0.0.1″ in the WordPress config file had to be changed to “localhost”. While it certainly is weird, this particular quirk may be the fault of the new MAMP alone and not Snow Leopard.

Focus, Mac OS X

If automatic login is disabled and the login window is set to show both the Name and Password fields, the user must give the Name field a mouse click before they can enter their name. Somebody forgot to put auto-focus on the startup screen. Fix it, Apple. Update: Sometimes the auto-focus is on; other times, it isn’t. Hopefully the 10.6.2 update will make it always on.

Fan noise

Compared to Leopard, Snow Leopard on my early 2009 MacBook is generally noisier. The fan seems to kick in much more frequently even when there is no heavy load on the CPU. I don’t know if this is Grand Central Dispatch in action. Update: On second thought, this seems to be related to my choice of screensaver. I have switched to a plain picture slideshow to see if it makes a difference. Update 2: Yes, that was it. Choose the Beach screensaver and everything will be fine.

Browser font going bold

In Safari and OmniWeb, certain portions of text on certain Web pages (such as the front door of Google) come out bold when they should be regular. This is a moderate annoyance that may be related to the font smoothing issue. There doesn’t seem to be a magic Terminal command to fix this just yet. Solution found: For some strange reason, the new Snow Leopard installation was missing some of the must-have regular-weight fonts plus some others. In my case, they were: Arial, Georgia, Verdana, Arial Black, and Arial Rounded Bold. To restore these fonts, log on to another computer and locate the .ttf files and copy them over to /Library/Fonts of your Snow Leopard system.

Application compatibility

I have had to replace a large portion of the applications I use daily with fresh releases compatible with Snow Leopard. The rule of thumb is to go to versiontracker.com and check for a Snow Leopard-compatible update before installing an application. Alternatively, refer to the community-driven Snow Leopard Compatibility List wiki. As of 11 September 2009, I am eagerly waiting for Snow Leopard-compatible versions of TrueCrypt and Onyx.

I am generally happy with Snow Leopard, although some of the issues mentioned above remain unresolved after the release of the first update (10.6.1).

2009-09-11  »  JK