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?