This is Garrett Murray's Maniacal Rage

Snow Leopard is here. As Shawn pointed out, it was a long wait for a barely-noticeable upgrade. That being said, it’s definitely snappier and a much better step in the right direction than it looks on the UI side. I’ve been using 10.6 since Sunday night. Here’s a roundup of thoughts on the subject.

Favorite new features:

• The updates to Exposé are nice. Especially the windows accepting drag-and-drop and being spring-loaded. Feels much more natural to interact with them now.
• In theory, the idea of Safari running its plugins in a different memory space so that a Flash crash won’t bring down the whole app sounds fantastic. I’ve yet to see this happen (which is also a good thing) but hope it works when it does. In the mean time, I use ClickToFlash anyway, so I minimize my Flash-related interaction.
• As posted earlier, the addition of an icon for the character palette and keyboard viewer that doesn’t require a flag in the menubar is fantastic.
• In addition to sleep/wake being faster (it really is—things like internet access are immediately on, rather than delayed as in 10.5 and below), Apple finally added a keyboard shortcut for sleeping your computer (⌥⌘⏏, which you’ll note is the same as Force Quit, except the last key is on the opposite side of the keyboard). It’s silly to say, but this is a really nice touch which I’ve already gotten into the habit of using.
• Date & Time finally allows you to show the date in the menubar. It only took 8 years for this feature.

Honestly, there aren’t a lot of new features in Snow Leopard (purposefully so), so having a list of favorites seems a bit silly. That said, Apple did make a good deal of effort touching every corner of the OS with little changes that make using the OS even easier.

Software I’ve had issues with since upgrading:

• Initially I was back to using the system’s mouse settings but people have posted a way to get around the Logitech Control Center software not working. Of course, this kext runs in 32-bit mode, which means you can’t run the kernel in 64-bit. However, since Snow Leopard ships in 32-bit kernel mode in default, and since only certain machines can even run in 64-bit mode, it doesn’t seem like a bit deal. Logitech says they’ll have a new version with “complete” Snow Leopard support soon—I can only imagine they mean it will be 64-bit.
• GrabUp doesn’t work, due to the change in how Snow Leopard names screenshots (a good, useful change). I use GrabUp all the time, every day, so that’s unfortunate. Nothing on the market provides as simple a solution as GrabUp did (snap a shot, it automatically uploads and copies the URL to the clipboard nearly instantly). Unfortunately, the developers have been MIA for a long while, even before Snow Leopard came out, so I doubt we’ll see an update any time soon. In the mean time, I’ve switched to Skitch and tried to set it up to mimic GrabUp, but it requires many more clicks and such.
• Dropbox works, but there are a few issues with icon overlays. Luckily, the Dropbox team is always releasing new experimental builds so it should be 100% shortly.
• Bowtie doesn’t work for me. Well, it works intially, but once you sleep/wake your computer, the app gets messed up. It will show the bowlet, but it doesn’t update correctly (would sit on the same song for a while, etc). I’ve switched back to CoverSutra in the mean time, although I miss having the title of the current song being always visible. Much like GrabUp, the Bowtie devs haven’t updated in a very long time so this seems unlikely to be fixed soon.
• Chax is now a stand-alone application, which you launch instead of iChat. I don’t know how comfortable I feel about that, but I couldn’t live with iChat without a setting to automatically accept messages before I cave. That’s SUCH an annoying feature of iChat. I also missed Chax’s auto-resize contact list feature.
• WideMail doesn’t work. This is probably the most consistent pain I’m having in Snow Leopard right now, since Mail without it is a space-wasting jerk. Why Apple has yet to understand that the messages-above-viewing-pane design is impractical and stupid is beyond me, especially since all the displays they sell are wider than they are tall. Anyway, none of the widescreen plugins work for Mail currently, and while all the developers are working on new versions, every moment I use Mail is terrible in the meantime.
• When you upgrade Xcode via the Snow Leopard CD, you lose all of your iPhone SDK stuff. You need to go into the iPhone Dev Center and download the Snow Leopard build of the iPhone SDK and reinstall it. This will restore all of the SDKs, but for some reason from 10.6 on, you can’t select any OS version earlier than 3.0 in Xcode. So you have to set the base SDK to 3.0 and then change your target OS version to whatever you want (I’m still building against 2.2 for people who haven’t upgraded to 3.0).

Miscellaneous thoughts:

• Apple went around and added fades to a lot of interactions. For instance, when you drag a selection on the Desktop and release the mouse, the selection box fades out rather than disappears. The Spaces indicator also fades out (in addition to having an animation when switching Spaces now). These little additions are nice when they’re simple, but there are cases where it was taken too far—try renaming a file on the Desktop and watch as the new title disappears so the old title can fade into the new title. Even worse is if there’s a file extension, because you’ll see that fade in and out and it just becomes a bunch of useless animations.
• The spot most users will see the effect of 64-bit is when using System Preferences, since nearly all third-party prefPanes are 32-bit, which means System Preferences will prompt you to restart the app in 32-bit mode before loading a pane. Oy.
• I’m not a huge fan of the new Gamma point, but I’ll get used to it. When my MBP first rebooted after installing Snow Leopard it felt like someone had put sunglasses on my display.
• There were tweaks to some of the GUI elements, including the gumdrops (the red, yellow and green buttons on all windows), which makes me think Apple had started implementing the much rumored new UI design but stopped and reverted so as to get Snow Leopard done this year. Because of this (or what I assume is this) there are some odd elements in various parts of the interface now, including what look like fake checkboxes in Finder and some third-party applications have visual issues with their toolbars.
• I’m looking forward to iTunes being 64-bit and Cocoa. I’m sure Apple is working on this, but I don’t envy them having to do it. Since it’s one of the few built-in apps that isn’t available in 64-bit, I can only assume Apple wants to get this done as soon as possible. Perhaps we’ll see it at the media event in September?
• Will I ever use the new Exposé features built directly into the Dock? Chances are no. I’m a keyboard person, so I don’t see why I would hold-click on a Dock icon when I could hit the key to access Exposé for the current application. I guess it saves you having to switch to an app before showing its windows, but it still seems slower to me than command-tab+Exposé.
• Unfortunately there is no longer a way to make text in Safari appear thinner and nicer using text-shadow. This is a problem that started with the public beta of Safari 4, but we found work-arounds. Unfortunately, there is no work-around in 10.6. If you’re reading this in Safari 4 in 10.6 right now, you’ll know how painful it is. The text is thick and clunky.
• The new menu design used only in the Dock is weird. It’s nice, but why not just port that to all menus system-wide? Seems odd to have it only in that one place. Also, why are the right-click menus using a standard font size but the Exposé menus aren’t? Come on, Dock, make up your mind.
• Emptying the trash takes longer. Wonder why this is? The good news, though, is that the empty trash confirmation dialogue pops instantly to the front in 10.6 so you can click empty and immediately hit enter rather than in 10.5 where there was a lag.