Bitten By Snow Leopard // Plasticmind Blog

Bitten By Snow Leopard

Snow Leopard Bites

I’m a bleeding edge guy, but sometimes being a first adopter can get you in trouble. Such is the case with the recent Snow Leopard install. The $29 price tag was too good to resist: I pre-ordered it and installed it as soon as it arrived in the mail.

Now, let me start by saying there are several great things about Snow Leopard. I regained 11Gb of space on my hard drive and most of the native apps feel zippier than ever. The new Exposé features are really handy and the ability to navigate Dock stacks makes them somewhat useful.

But there have been far more annoyances—some small, some huge—that leave me wishing I had waited to install Snow Leopard. Here’s a brief overview of my Snow Leopard problems so far:

Snow Leopard screws up my custom modifier keys. This is by far the most tragic flaw (for me anyhow) in that it kills my productivity. As a former PC user, I swapped the CTRL and CMD keys so my shortcut muscle memory would be the same on both machines. Snow Leopard unswapped them. Sadly, changing them back doesn’t seem to have any effect on the system, even after restart. Long and short: I’m going to have to relearn shortcuts for all of my apps. [Demo] Update: Michael Richardson discovered the solution to this problem.
Preview forgets your zoom level when viewing multiple files. Switching from file to file unzooms. [Demo]
The FlickrExporter plugin in iPhoto doesn’t seem to work—won’t log in to Flickr, requires a force/quit. [Demo]
The spinning beach ball in CS4 seems to have been replaced by an eyedropper in Snow Leopard. [Demo]
The Cisco VPN app stopped working. Good news: Snow Leopard has built in Cisco VPN support. Bad news: You can’t import .pcf files so you’ll have to input the settings manually which may mean you’ll have to find a shared secret decryption tool online. This article was particularly helpful. Update: I’ve been told the latest version of the Cisco VPN app actually does work in Snow Leopard.
Camtwist works, but you can’t apply any effects. I think it has to do with the quartz filters. Demo
Snow Leopard wiped my HP PSC 1300 print driver and doesn’t support it natively, so I had to redownload and install the drivers because I couldn’t find the disk. Frustrating.

I’ll be sure to keep this list updated as I come across any more… and please feel free to share your own Snow Leopard problems.

You should also look over the Snow Leopard compatibility list before upgrading.

posted on 31 August 2009
by Jesse

Comments (4)
in the chapter, "Apple"
tagged with apple, osx, snow leopard, upgrade

InterAction:

31 August 20091. Dave S.:

Also a former long-time PC user who made the switch earlier this decade. The Cmd / Ctrl thing bugged me a lot at first too. But give it a week; it's not nearly as hard to break the habit as I thought it was going to be, and in the end using your thumb for Cmd feels a lot more natural than using your pinky for Ctrl.

I've had video problems as well; in my case it's the fact that Quicktime X has deprecated the QT Java library so I can't save video from Java apps, something I just started needing to do. I think it's unrelated to your filter problem, but you may want to try what I did to fix it, though it was unsuccessful in my case. On the Snow Leopard install DVD there’s a folder called “Optional Installs”; run the package in there and select Quicktime 7 from the list to have it and X both on your system.

31 August 20092. Jesse Gardner:

Dave: Yeah, I'm trying to learn (necessity), but I have a shaky thumb and because it's on the thumbnail side, it slips and I frequently don't make the stroke.

In the meantime, however, Michael Richardson discovered the solution.

3 September 20093. alan mcc.:

movingphoto's 3d screensaver doesn't work with snowleopard, author said he is trying to update but he hit some problem's, if you haven't seen moving photo's 3d and haven't upgraded yet, try it you won't be disappointed, combine it with wallsaver to make your desktop just the best.

1 November 20094. Mike:

I’ve heard there are some wildlife groups trying to get Apple to do more stuff with the actual S.L.’s lol. I don’t know- people are saying it’s good PR for Apple- they should jump on that.