Problems with Snow Leopard
I installed Snow Leopard the day after it came out like so many others. It was a smooth installation for me with only Dropbox breaking, however this was soon fixed by installing the latest beta and I’ve not had a problem since.
Apple have been pushing Snow Leopard as giving a significant improvement on speed, which to be honest I haven’t really noticed. In fact the only real obvious difference I’ve noticed between using Snow Leopard on my MacBook and Leopard on my iMac is spaces and expose which feel more refined in Snow Leopard.
There area a few annoying issues that I have found with Snow Leopard however, and these may just be specific to my situation.
My setup at home is a MacBook connected to the Apple 24” Cinema Display and here’s a list of the problems I’ve been having.
Desktop icons become un-clickable
If my MacBook is in stand by and I connect it to my cinema display, the desktop extends fine, however any icons/files I have on the desktop become un-selectable or clickable. I can’t even drag a selection around the icons. It’s as if the selectable area of the cinema display is now the same size as that of the MacBook.
Cursor goes weird when waking from sleep
I’ve noticed the spinning beach ball cursor glitching when coming out of standby. It kind of breaks in half and pixellates.
Trackpad gestures behave differently/weirdly
This one is difficult to explain. On the trackpad of my MacBook the four finger gesture down performs expose and the four finger gesture up reveals the desktop. On Leopard, if you dragged four fingers down to activate expose and lifted your fingers off it would sit there. Then you could either drag your fingers up or down to revert back. This behavior was the same for dragging up to reveal the desktop.
However in Snow Leopard, if you drag four fingers down to activate expose, you have to drag four fingers up to revert back. If you drag four fingers down again, it reverts then activates expose again. It’s weird, try it yourself!
iTunes auto-launches when using the play/pause keyboard shortcut
This is extremely annoying, and I don’t know if you can turn it of?
If I’m listening to Spotify, and click the play/pause shortcut on the keyboard, iTunes auto-launches and plays over the top!
iChat video quality is appalling due to port restrictions
Apple boasted that iChat video conversation quality had improved in Snow Leopard. However, I’ve not found this to be the case. Under Connection Doctor it has a new network status report that checks your connectivity. On mine it says port restricted. However, after searching Apples forums (with no joy) and opening my router to the world I still can’t get this message to disappear and it appears to be having an effect on the video quality that I’m getting, which isn’t good when you record a video podcast over iChat!
iChat record format is different and doesn’t work with iMovie
Just to top off the iChat annoyance of bad video quality, after recording an interview, iChat outputs the recording in a different format to what Leopard was using, which is fine, however iMovie won’t import and thumbnail this new format, which means I have to decompress the video using Quicktime before I can start editing it in iMovie!
Conclusion
All in all Snow Leopard seems to have caused more problems that it’s solved, in fact Leopard feels much more stable to me and seen as I’m still using Leopard on my iMac at work the differences are noticeable. What have your experiences with Snow Leopard been like? Do you regret the upgrade?
14 Comments
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Yaili 22nd, September 2009 at 11:02 am
I don't regret upgrading because I haven't upgraded! I guess that's enough proof that I'm not an Apple fan girl, right?
That iTunes issue seems to be the most annoying to me. Do you know anyone who's had the same problem before? I'd go mental!
I've been told that with Snow Leopard you can see THE WHOLE DATE on the menu bar?! WOW! I'm impressed with that! :P
Tor Løvskogen Bollingmo 22nd, September 2009 at 11:03 am
"iTunes auto-launches when using the play/pause keyboard shortcut"
A hack to 'fix' this, have Quicktime Player running in the background, so it catches the media buttons - but doesn't launch anything.
slee 22nd, September 2009 at 11:12 am
i'm glad i am not the only one with the issue with itunes/spotify it drives me up the wall!
Also the trackpad isue youa re having i have noticed a bug unfortunately i can't figure out a sure way to get it to display again. basically if i use the four fingers up to move everything off the desktop then four fingers down to bring it all back occasionally it bounces the content in and out so i then have to do four fingers up again to stop it then four fingers down to bring my content back.
Richard 22nd, September 2009 at 11:14 am
Had a few niggles but none that you mention. Firefox crashed every 10 minutes until I reinstalled it. Preview also broke every time I resized a photo, but that seems to have sorted itself out now.
Least it wasn't as bad as my Tiger to Leopard upgrade which completely beachballed my Finder - until I found out some command line wizardry that fixed it!
Andreas Varro 22nd, September 2009 at 11:48 am
I installed snow a few days ago, and i haven't had any bugs/problems with it yet. I use it on my MacPro.
The only thing is that itunes launches when pressing play, tho i listen to spotify on my iMac :D.
Allot of people think that snow will give your mac a big boost (thats how mac have merchandised Snow Leopard) but its hard to notice any big performance change.
So far its working fine for me.
Ryan Taylor 22nd, September 2009 at 1:47 pm
@Yaili It's extremely annoying.
@Tor That fix is almost as annoying as the problem!
@slee That's the exact problem I was trying to describe above. Weird isn't it?
@Richard I never used Tiger. Didn't get a Mac until Leopard came out. I think I had to reinstall Firefox as well you know...
@Andreas Glad someone is running it ok.
Varun Pramanik 8th, October 2009 at 6:27 am
The issues must be specific to you. I have a MacBook Pro 13" [5,5] which came pre-installed with Leopard. I just upgraded to Mac OS X Snow Leopard and I am experiencing no issue, other than having Symantec AntiVirus for Mac not work correctly and I don't need it anyway now that Snow Leopard has built in malware detection abilities. Microsoft Office 2008, Mozilla Firefox 3.5.3 and Dropbox 0.6.567 work perfectly fine. I don't have any issues with the multitouch gestures either.
Overall, I'm very satisfied with Snow Leopard. Visually, it's not different from Leopard [save for the new features in Expose, jump lists, QuickTime, Finder and the new way certain components like Airport notify you]. Most of the changes are under the hood. It's definitely zippier than Leopard. Everything is much more responsive and fast. Plus, I gained 15GB on my hard drive [Kickass!!!].
I'd definitely recommend the upgrade to all Leopard and Tiger users who can upgrade. The only thing I did after upgrading was to start my Mac in "Safe Boot" mode because Mozilla recommended doing that to reset the font caches after the upgrade [http://support.mozilla.com/en-US/kb/Will+Firefox+work+on+Snow+Leopard]. I'd just recommend checking your computer to ensure the applications you depend on work fine in Snow Leopard [I had heard of people having problems with Microsoft Office and that had delayed my decision to upgrade, but I didn't have any issues with it (possibly because of the reset font cache thing, but I can't confidently say that's why because I didn't test it before resetting the font cache)].
Varun Pramanik
Adam Pieniazek 8th, October 2009 at 9:12 pm
Got the same problem with iTunes auto-launching itself. Sometimes it does it without me even clicking the play/pause button. Super annoying.
Brett 13th, October 2009 at 4:12 am
I've had that same issue with iChat. The video quality is horrible. It says Port Restricted. I've tried a few things and nothing seems to return the quality like Leopard.
Michael Stalcup 30th, October 2009 at 7:03 pm
I have tested every behavior listed above on my 15" MacBook Pro unibody running Snow Leopard.
Each of these undesirable behaviors, without exception, occurs on my Mac. Also, I want to add that the scroll wheel button on my mouse usually launches Spaces as I've set it up, but sometimes it launches Spaces and a split second later, Exposé launches and overrides Spaces. I then have to use four fingers on the trackpad to get out of Exposé which causes the scroll wheel button to revert to its assigned behavior.
Michael Stalcup 30th, October 2009 at 7:14 pm
One more thing... When the functionality of my scroll button's launching of Spaces is restored, Spaces always launches in a series of jerky movements instead of the smooth motion it usually exhibits. It seems like competing services trying to override one another might be involved.
Ryan Taylor 30th, October 2009 at 7:58 pm
@Michael I've actually re-installed my MacBook from scratch. Previously it had been an upgrade. I dare say Snow Leopard is a bit more stable but a majority of these problems still occur.
Hopefully Apple will release an update soon!
davidavidson 11th, December 2009 at 1:25 am
I've got the same problem with the icons becoming unclickable on my extra display. Massively annoying!!!!
Is there a fix yet?
Ryan Taylor 11th, December 2009 at 9:38 am
The only solution I've found to that problem is to go into System Preferences | Display | Change the resolution, then change it back. This seems to reset the desktop and the icons appear.
Pain in the arse I know!