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Mel Martin's Friday with Snow Leopard: few glitches, much joy

by Mel Martin Aug 28th 2009 at 6:00PM

It was pretty quiet at the ole' Apple Store here in Tucson. I got there just at ten, and while there were stanchions to organize the crowd, they weren't needed and just sat off to the side looking lonely. There were plenty of people in the store, and about half were buying Snow Leopard. Supplies were plentiful, but I was there early.

Installing on both a MacBook Pro and a Mac Pro were two different stories. On the laptop, things were ducky. Everything worked, mail accounts were there, bookmarks, the usual.

On my desktop it was not so pretty. I kept getting messages that I needed to add a password for my MobileMe account, which I dutifully did. Problem was it kept asking. Then I saw some messages about the keychain. Whoops. Not a good message to see.


Well, the short version is that somehow my keychain was hosed. I tried to repair, but that didn't stop the problems. I finally threw away my keychain data and started again, re-entering my email passwords and a few other things. All is back to normal. I also saw a strange message about my iDisk, but I followed the directions and threw a rather large file away. It appeared to be a copy of my idisk for local use.

Other things pretty much work. My Sonos audio system is fine, Photoshop CS3 seems OK, and while it didn't get a heavy duty run through, it opens images, applies filters, runs actions, and saves properly.
Shut down is almost instantaneous, and I noticed I'd saved 14GB after the upgrade.

I'm seeing lots of little niceties. When I take a screen shot, it has a name that includes the date and time instead of 'picture 1'.

All in all, not too painful, but not completely trouble free. With keychain passwords gone I may wind up doing some extra typing for awhile on web sites where I have an account, but that's not too horrible.

Snow Leopard is clearly faster, trimmer, and a bit more fun to use. A good use of $30.00 and just a little bit more time than I planned in getting over a couple of glitches.



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It was pretty quiet at the ole' Apple Store here in Tucson. I got there just at ten, and while there were stanchions to organize the crowd,...
 

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Stuart

One fairly significant problem is publishing iCals to the web from 10.6. If you calendar has an all day event then it will not publish to the internet. This problem is affecting quite a few people. Let's hope Apple can fix it pretty soon.

September 02 2009 at 6:39 AM Report abuse rate up rate down Reply
Tim

Why don't you sync your keychains with MobileMe?

August 29 2009 at 2:08 AM Report abuse rate up rate down Reply
zmitchell

So just installed Snow Leopard - yah. BUT I had a couple of subscribed address books in my Address Book and some how in the install process all those contacts in the subscribed address books merged with MY address book. Now all those subscribed contacts are in my contacts and my contacts list has gone from 400 to 1900...

August 29 2009 at 12:10 AM Report abuse rate up rate down Reply
kinto

i just put 10.6 onto my guinea pig black macbook (after backups to my primary mac of course...)

and the install went super smooth... but the first thing i did was drop QT7 back onto my dock... *sigh*

i'm sure the new QT will be a nice-n-pretty interface for WATCHING videos... i love a slick candy GUI as much as the next person... and the video trimming on the iphone is fantastic FOR A PHONE...

but seriously... considering i have to fire up the g4 in the basement to actually CREATE a video with some down-n-dirty cuts/FX and need to use imovie '06 to do that... ummm...

i'm a koolaid drinker, but fuck... it's disheartening.

August 29 2009 at 12:03 AM Report abuse rate up rate down Reply
~~PaulB

Turns out that you don't have to scrap your whole keychain.
I had this same issue on my macbookpro.

I ran the keychain access application and selected "first aid" from the main menu. This showed that there was one corrupt record in the chain. I asked it to repair the problem... and "hey, presto" everything is back and working again.

Hurrah!

Thanks for starting this thread as I thought I couldn't believe that I was the only person experiencing this problem.

August 28 2009 at 10:31 PM Report abuse rate up rate down Reply
Aaron

I got the fix. Go to Keychain Access Preferences and click "Reset Keychain Syncing".

August 28 2009 at 8:54 PM Report abuse rate up rate down Reply
LarryM

I had to take out GrowliChat after I installed Snow Leopard because it started popping up Growl Notices that never went away for iChat. That was my first big bug of the day.

August 28 2009 at 8:36 PM Report abuse rate up rate down Reply
gittenlucky

Just updated my 4,1 MBP. No problems. Parallels 3.0 is dead, but I think that it is a good time to abandon windows entirely. That is just the push I needed :) Nice little features though out. I like it so far.

August 28 2009 at 8:34 PM Report abuse rate up rate down Reply
Just Cause

Anyone seeing a networking bug in Snow Leopard, two MacBook Pros connected via Linksys router 100Mb take forever (minutes) to connect for screen sharing or AFP? Same two systems and cables under 10.5.8 it works fine or direct connect the two under 10.6 and it's fast.

August 28 2009 at 8:25 PM Report abuse rate up rate down Reply
1 reply to Just Cause's comment
Just Cause

Actually with a Linksys switch model SD2005 between the two I can't connect at all :-(

August 28 2009 at 8:28 PM Report abuse rate up rate down Reply
Elvis G

I went to Best Buy to buy my copy after seeing they were selling Snow Leopard for $24.99, which was sweet! I know apple said that if upgrading from Tiger I would need the Mac Box Set, but I also read somewhere else it really was not necessary, so I gave it a shot. And it worked flawlessly! I backed up everything just in case, but everything was there. Mail. Files. Preferences. Everything! What I noticed most is Safari. I was using Safari 4 before and was a little disappointed by the load times and found myself going back to Firefox. After the upgrade Safari is incredibly fast! I couldn't be happier. Go Apple!

August 28 2009 at 8:09 PM Report abuse rate up rate down Reply
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