Keynote

Following up on my previous post, I'm having more problems with Snow Leopard. Here's the story.... I created a slideshow (for DrupalCon Paris 2009) that was to autoplay on a hi-def monitor. Aside from crashing issues I mentioned before, I was able to create the slideshow and export it to an autoplaying Quicktime movie. Only the Mac's own Quicktime 10 would not play it past 4 seconds. So I installed the optional Quicktime 7. It was able to play the video for about 25 seconds or so, and then stop. In both cases, if I set the video to loop, it would loop only the few seconds that it would play. The same file on a Windows machine had no problems. So Quicktime on Snow Leopard has issues, at least with the files that Keynote on Snow Leopard generates. Joys on the bleeding edge.

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.