Snow Leopard Out Now!

Ordered it Thursday, yet to arrive, but cant wait!!!

Purchased Snow Leopard early last week and received Friday Aug. 29 as promised by Apple.

Installation and Initial Thoughts: First off I am a professional graphic designer so I rely heavily on my 24″ iMac at the office and my 17″ MacBook Pro at the home office, day in and day out. As soon as I received SL I immediately backed up all my project folders to my external HDD. As soon as my backups were finished I cracked open the seal and out came Snow Leopard – IMO I did not get as excited for the SL packaging as I did when Leopard was released in ’07 – I love the space theme of Leopard and was hoping to see this theme continue with SL, but who really cares, right?!

After I put the install disc into the drive the typical Apple installation prompt began it’s routine. Make sure all of your apps are closed before continuing if you choose to install with the simple upgrade instead of a disc sweep / reformat.

Installation begins quite fast and the only prompt I received was for restarting the iMac to continue the install process. Once the computer restarts installation continues after the Apple boot screen in a truly non-eventful fashion. With my particular iMac configuration (24″, 3.06Ghz, 4GB RAM, 500GB HDD) Snow Leopard installation took appr. 25-35 min.

Completion – after the installation completed the iMac restarted one more time and once the boot process completed and back on the desktop the familiar Welcome movie played. Installation complete – and without a hitch!

Screwups?? – the only gripe I have, and it is minor, has to do with my GUI hacks being over written by the ew OS – for instance, Candybar changes had been reset – I have my system icons using a white folder theme instead of the hideous blue folder theme. Also, I had mixed results with other GUI changes I made to system icons, interestingly, for the icons I’ve changed with the info window>copy>paste icon trick – those icons remained unchanged, gladly since that would have taken forever to reinstate. Also, Menu Meters does not work with Snow Leopard – I rely heavily on Menu Meters for hard drive activity monitoring, especially when rendering large Photoshop or InDesign files.

Adobe CS3 Suite – does it work with Snow Leopard?? There has been great talk debating whether CS3 would work under Snow Leopard. Well, this was one of the first things I needed to find out, because I use the CS3 Suite for work more than any other set of applications on a daily basis, I average 9-12 hrs a day in CS3. I am happy to report that InDesign, Photoshop, Illustrator, and Bridge all worked flawlessly. I ran into zero ( yes 0) problems. I am working on a 120 page catalog in InDesign right now and this file would be the “test” – again I am happy to report in my own situation that InDesign worked flawlessly – in fact, the Adobe CS3 apps seems to be much “snappier” – application load times are noticeably faster as well as overall application performance.

Conclusion – I give Snow Leopard a 9.5 out of 10 rating (10 being perfect) for ease of installation and overall experience in general use. The OS is definitely quicker (Finder is absolutely faster) as well as consistent with Apple standards. Aside from a few applications that do not work (menu meters (a finder bar app) and a few icon reversions, the OS seems to be in perfect working order.

Note – Installation time comparison – **I can’t really argue this was a huge difference from when I installed Leopard when it first came out in ’07 – that install took about the same time (25-35 min), upgrading in the same manner on my 17″ 2.16Ghz, 2GB RAM, 500GB 7200RPM HDD MacBook Pro (at that time I had the stock HDD which was a 120GB 5400 RPM)