It took me a week, but I was finally able to rummage up enough scratch ($29) to upgrade my MacBook Pro running OS X 10.5 Leopard to OS X 10.6 Snow Leopard. The first question I was asked was, “was it worth it?” As I am quickly becoming a Mac fanboy I have to admit that just the warm feeling of having the latest version of OS X on my MBP makes its worth it, but in reality I do really like the few visible refinements of Snow Leopard.
A couple of the nicest refinements for my purposes are found the Dock. First, you can now minimize your windows into the application icon instead of them adding another item to the dock when minimized as is the case in Leopard. Secondly, and really the coolest feature, is the addition of application specific Expose being accessible via each application’s icon. This is all the more cool for users of Logos Bible Software or other apps that tend to generate lots of windows in a typical session.
There are lots more of these little tweaks included in Snow Leopard, and you can find them easily by visiting the Apple web site or doing a quick Google search. In addition there were some fairly significant changes to what goes on behind the scenes in OS X that will mostly effect developers for the time being and users in the future.
How about problems? The upgrade process was quick and painless. I lost a handful of screen savers, but was able to recover them in less than 60 seconds via Time Machine. My custom login background has been replaced with the default background which I haven’t taken the time to change again. When I launched Mail.app I was shown an error about a ProxiMail plug-in (whose origin I am still in the dark about). I deleted the offending plug-in and all is well. Finally, OnyX quit working, but the developer tells me a Snow Leopard version is on the way.
Would I recommend upgrading to Snow Leopard? Of course I would, but I always seem willing to be an early adopter. Now I can’t help but wonder what the next OS will bring!
