First, I want to say that I love Snow Leopard. This latest OSX (10.6) is wiki-wiki! All the more so on my SSD MacBook Pro. I log in and within 2-3 seconds I have desktop, ready to go.
But to be honest, it has not been a bug-free experience. Which is why I read with amusement in the Ars "review" (which really isn't a review, more of a background piece) that Snow Leopard was a no-new-features/no-new-bugs release. There are new features, which others have covered more than adequately.
There are also new bugs. Or at least the new OS has shifted enough that apps declared stable and supported on Snow Leopard may be supported but certainly are not stable, in my own experience.
And it's only been since Saturday, so my experience is thin. But in that time I have spent a lot of time in Apple's own Keynote app (iWork '09) and Adobe's InDesign CS4.
They both crash. A lot. To provide context, in both apps I am working with modestly large documents. My Keynotes tend to be graphics heavy. Maybe on the high side of normal usage by people in general. But this is Apple's own product. I have resorted to saving after each change I make, knowing that at any moment, anything I do could make the app go poof! and disappear, without even leaving a note.
I have lower expectations regarding Adobe's InDesign. Since Snow Leopard came out ahead of what most developers expected, maybe Adobe got caught off guard. But when it comes to InDesign, I am doing rich document work, not magazine layout. These should not be pushing InDesign anywhere near its limits.
But InDesign has become my fickle friend, collapsing on me when I do something innocuous like a cut/paste.
In both cases, my gut tells me that this could be related to memory management issues of Snow Leopard itself. I have 8GB of RAM, but copying things from Word to put into InDesign would kill InDesign. When it comes to Keynote, however, whether it's the app or the OS, this is on Apple.
I'm going to keep investigating settings, and if I come up with anything I will post an update from the bleeding edge.
Sign up via this link and get extra space!
Comments
"Which is why I read with amusement in the Ars 'review' [...] that Snow Leopard was a no-new-features/no-new-bugs release."
The introduction says that's how Snow Leopard has been *pitched* by Apple, but the conclusion says:
"Though it's obvious that Snow Leopard includes fewer external features than its predecessor, I'd wager that it has just as many, if not more internal changes than Leopard. This, I fear, means that the initial release of Snow Leopard will likely suffer the typical 10.x.0 bugs. There have already been reports of new bugs introduced to existing APIs in Snow Leopard. This is the exact opposite of Snow Leopard's implied promise to users and developers that it would concentrate on making existing features faster and more robust without introducing new functionality and the accompanying new bugs."
Laura, thanks for sharing your experience. I'll probably try not to upgrade my OS on my main Mac until it's more stable.
Regards,
Aaron @ Internet Business