Adventures with Snow Leopard

Based on my experience, businesses should not be afraid to upgrade to Snow Leopard. But they should be prepared to deal with a few cleanup tasks, so they shouldn't do it on deadline and should work out any kinks on a non-mission-critical machine first.I finally (it's been out for a week already!) upgraded my black plastic MacBook to Snow Leopard over the weekend, and so far the experience has been pretty smooth. I waited because my backup hard disk died a few weeks ago, and I wanted to make sure I had a good backup before starting the upgrade (always a good policy).

When my new disk from Amazon arrived, I created a partition for a bootable clone of my existing hard disk. I copied my disk with Bombich Software's Carbon Copy Cloner -- free, straightforward, and effective.

I then ran my system from the clone for a day to confirm that I could boot and work from it. My original plan was to upgrade the cloned disk and run from that for a week or so to work out any bugs before committing my main drive. But I started to worry about all the files that were ending up on the clone disk -- Mail attachments, revisions to articles I was working on, and so on. Would I remember where they all were when I switched back to my internal disk? I decided instead to treat the clone as an emergency replacement and go ahead and upgrade my internal disk.

The upgrade took a little over an hour. I put in the Snow Leopard disk, set a couple of options (for example, I chose to install Rosetta, the PowerPC emulator, because I still use an old version of Adobe CS), and clicked the button. It took about 15 minutes to scan my disks and then reboot from the install DVD, and then about another hour to complete the upgrade.

So what have I noticed? It's definitely faster -- Safari blazes. The speed bump is harder to perceive elsewhere -- for example, Apple claims the Finder redraws icons up to 1.5 times as fast as it did before. But in practice, that means a new window is populated in something like 0.5 seconds rather than 0.75 seconds -- not really perceptible, though something that would add up.

I'm also happy to get back an extra 15 GB or so of disk space. Before the upgrade, I had 23 GB of free space on my 150 GB hard disk; now I have 38 GB. For someone like me, whose first hard disk held a whopping 40 MB, getting an extra 15 GB -- a third of my iTunes music library -- feels like a serious gift.

Now, for the glitches: I use a font manager (the old, free version of Linotype FontExplorer X) because I like to have a large font collection, but I don't want them all loaded all the time. Snow Leopard replaces the Mac's .dfont system fonts with .ttc (TrueType Collection) versions. It doesn't make any difference to the system's operation, but FontExplorer now listed all the old fonts as missing. I just had to go through and point all the old entries to the new .ttc fonts.

Don't Miss: Apple Identifies Snow Leopard Incompatibilities

Then I discovered that MailTags 2, a plug-in for Mail that lets you add project names, keywords, colors, and other identifying tags to messages, was not supported. Version 3 is expected by the end of the year, bringing new features and full Snow Leopard compatibility, but in the meantime, the developer has released a temporary compatibility upgrade to version 2. Downloaded, installed, done.

Similarly, another of my must-have utilities, 1Password, a password generator and manager that integrates into your browsers, didn't connect with Safari any more. (The program still worked, but the button in Safari didn't load.) I could get it to work by forcing Safari to load in 32-bit mode, but that would lose some of the speed improvements. Rather than that, I signed up to be a beta tester of the new version. Downloaded, installed, done.

And that's it. I've launched two word processors, Word and Bean; Photoshop; the Flock browser; Skype; and Adium, in addition to the various Apple apps. And I'm still loading the BlogAssist, You Control:Tunes, iAntiVirus, Evernote, and MagiCal extensions on startup. With the exceptions I mentioned, everything still "just works." I know others have had more difficulties, e.g. with VPN and remote logins; but on the other hand, they may not have had mine. So expect some glitches, don't upgrade a mission-critical machine until you've tested Snow Leopard elsewhere if possible, and have a bailout strategy if you need one. But judging from my experience, on the whole the upgrade seems like a no-brainer.