Snow Leopard Continued

Ok, so I've been on the 10.6.2 update for a while now (think they're even starting development on 10.6.3, hopefully a good release) and I think I have a good picture on some of the pros and cons of snow leopard as of now. First I'll start with the cons (hey we all want to feel good afterward, right?). Regarding the iTunes problem, I still experience it but it's not as bad as it was when I just installed 10.6.2. Not really sure why, but that issue seems to have subsided. Though another new issue that has been popping up was that once in a while when I go into snow leopard the whole system lags up and slows down. When I would go to spaces the system would lag even though according to the activity monitor I have a lot of free ram (500 MB or more), which perplexes me. The only remedy to that problem from what I've seen is to restart the computer, and then it runs smoothly again. I also installed iLife '09 and installed the latest updates, but the first few times I've been running it iMovie has been particularly slow, but that seems to have passed as well.

Also, one nasty bug that I have encountered continuously was with pdfs, and one problem I've really been annoyed about was the continuous crashing of skim, a pdf annotation tool. When I open pdfs from one specific class the app crashes, and I haven't found a way around it. However, it doesn't crash in preview. I went to the app's forums and asked about it, but the developres said it was an apple bug and that they reported it to apple. I surely hope that with 10.6.3 it is fixed, because preview isn't even close when it comes to annotation when compared to skim. Also, finder has its own problems. For one thing, you can't default your view options anymore. I set the icon size and spacing that I want, but when I press set as defaults it doesn't do anything. Nothing. When I go to another folder the spacing is different yet again, which I am not very happy about. Also, the sidebar for finder keeps shifting, depending on the longest name you have (for me it's one of my external drives that have the longest name) and it increases the width of the sidebar to match the name's length. I find that very annoying because it messes up my spacing when I'm using icon view. I hope there's a fix for this.

Now for the pros, even though snow leopard uses more RAM than leopard (from what I see in the activity monitor), it is pretty smooth. One feature that I really like about it is the incredible shutdown time. It's pretty much like going to sleep. It takes pretty much five seconds for the computer to shut down, which is amazing especially when you compare it to windows. The compatibility problems seem to have subsided as app developers have updated their software. One app I find that was pretty useful when I first wanted to see what apps I had that were incompatible with snow leopard was Snow Checker which goes through all the applications that you have and checks for compatibility. Pretty useful I would say.

In the end I would say that snow leopard is good. Not great, it has its bugs and stability issues but it's usable. I hope that as apple continues to update it so that snow leopard will get better and better. Signing off.