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Marc's Notes: Comments, Ramblings, Rants & Tips

First Snow in August

While Wisconsin does get honorable mention for notable winters, we usually don't have the bad rap that Minnesota, or Buffalo, New York do when it comes to unreasonable snowfall.

Well, today (August 28) winter struck everywhere as Apple released Max OS X 10.6, Snow Leopard.

10:06 a.m. (time -1:40) — Like a kid looking out the frosty window at the season's first snowfall dreaming of snow forts and snowmen and snowball fights, I looked in the window at my #2 Apple Store this morning (Bayshore, as Mayfair opens tomorrow following a remodel), where I bought my Family Pack of the newest cat from Cupertino.
11:21 a.m. (time -0:25) -— I'm back in my office, running a final clone of my Mac OS X 10.5.8 boot drive with the newest copy of SuperDuper (2.6), followed by a pre-install "backup now" to my TimeMachine drive.
11:46 a.m. (start time) — The pristine DVD with the snow-capped Leopard is in the top bay of my MacPro doing the first phase of the upgrade install - placing all the 10.6 install packages in an installer folder on my boot drive. This is the first major change in OS installs, and verifying that the DVD is good and all the data is readable is absolutely free!
- Here's how a Mac OS X install went prior to 10.6:
  1 - Insert the DVD and launch the installer, which restarts your system from the DVD to run the installer.
  2 - Select the Install options and start the install.
  3 - Wait for 20-30 minutes while the DVD is examined to ensure that everything could be read.
  4 - Install all the goodies from the DVD.
  5 - Restart from your boot drive.
- The 10.6 install process is truly elegant:
  1 - Insert the DVD and run the installer from your running 10.5 system.
  2 - Select the Install options and start the install.
  3 - Wait 10-15 minutes while the necessary components are copied to your boot drive.
  4 - Restart from the DVD to finish the install, which runs faster because all the installs are happening from your faster hard disk.
  5 - Restart from your boot drive.
11:56 a.m. (time +0:10) — My MacPro rebooted from the DVD to perform the second phase of the install.
12:15 a.m. (time +0:29) — My MacPro completed the install, and rebooted from my upgraded boot drive.
12:27 p.m. (time +0:41) — After waiting a more than a few minutes for some "first time in a new room" stuff to happen, I beheld MY login screen sitting nicely on a newer Leopard-esque nebula background image. The 12 minutes of spinning gear on blue was somewhat expected, as I have almost 300 GB of stuff on my boot drive - with some applications dating back to far earlier generations of cats including Cheetah and Jaguar.
- Very important – The blue screen with the tine spinning gear may run for quite some time depending on your system. As Douglas Adams wrote: DON'T PANIC! This is normal, and thinking that you Mac may be hung would be a serious mistake here. Let the spinner spin, and go get a cup of coffee to calm your nerves. (If it does this for more than a half-hour or so, you can begin to panic though.)
12:28 p.m. (time +0:42) — Upon login, the "Welcome to Mac OS X" video played, and my registration info was sent to the bean-counters in Cupertino.

Trying out the new cat

The following will be an updated list over the next several days... stay tuned, as I will be keeping this up-to-date as third-party vendors catch up with Apple's surprise "early release" of 10.6. Note that I did select Rosetta in the install options. Last updated 01-Sep-2009 10:05 CST

Things with "issues" and other wierd stuff...

Apple has been kind enough to post a list of applications with problems in this Apple Knowledge Base article.

AppleTalk — Apple has killed this legacy protocol so now my trusty LaserWriter Pro 630 is only available to 10.6 Macs on my LAN through the graces of Leopard's Printer Sharing on my equally trusty G4 MDD PowerMac.

Onxy (2.05) — Runs but NOT for 10.6
Sonnet SATA E2P_E342P_V2B - installer package for the Sonnet Tempo E2P two port eSATA card "gray screened" my Mac at the end of the install, but the driver loaded and appears to be working.
Split & Concat — DOA - the developer is working on an update.
A bunch of 3rd-party screen savers don't work, and the Security.qtz plug as a screen saver crashed System Preferences. Aplle disabled many but the qtz beast had to be manually removed.

...and my increasing list of things that work:

0xED
1Password — 3.0 beta test available with free signup.
Age of Empires III — my current time sponge diversion.
AJoiner
AppleWorks 6.2.9 — extremely unsupported legacy for my very old legacy documents... definitely on Rosetta life support.
Adobe Web Design Suite CS4 — Acrobat, Bridge, Contribute, Dreamweaver, Fireworks, Flash Pro, Illustrator, Photoshop, Soundbooth, etc. etc.
Back-In-Time
BackupLoupe
BatChmod
BBEdit
Burn and MenuEdit
BurnX Free
Camino
Canon Poweshot G5 Camera and Lide100 Scanner support utilities — not extensively tested at this point, but they launched.
ClamXav 2.0
ClickToFlash
Cornerstone
CronniX
CSSEdit
CyberDuck — 3.3b1 was released yesterday.
Dial-a-Font X
Disc Cover 2
Disk Inventory X
DiskWarrior — 4.2 was released today.
Drive Genius 2
DropCopy
DVD2oneX2
eBookFaces
Espresso
FairMount
Fetch
Firefox
Flush
FLV Converter
Free Ruler
FontBook
FontDoc
FontParade
Forms To Go
fseventer
GraphicConverter
Grand Perspective
Handbrake
HexEdit
HyperSpaces — 1.0b9 was released today.
iCab
iConStruct
iHID
Image2SWF — had to re-register the product.
iMovie HD — mentioned only because it's a legacy product.

Internet Explorer for Mac v5.2 — don't laugh... while "broken" in ways too numerous to mention, it isn't fully dead, yet I really wish that 10.6 would have finally put this bad dog down.
iPhotoBuddy
IPObserver
iSquint
iWebSites
JumpCut
Kigo Video Converter
Little Snitch — 2.2b1 was released recently.
MAMP — The MacCetera web development sandbox is running just fine!
MacPilot
MacUpdate Desktop
MassReplaceIt
MenuMeters — 1.4b1 released 9/1 works again!
Microsoft Office 2004 — Excel, PowerPoint and Word. I deplore the Entourage user database blob, so that and Messenger is untested. (I seriously recommend iWork instead of the core Office applications, and Address Book, iCal, iChat and Mail for your email and IM needs.)
MPEG Streamclip
Netscape 7.2
Opera
Pacifist
Packet Peeper
Paparazzi!
Prism
R-Name
RemoteBuddy
RipIt
Rulers
Sequel Pro
Sothink SWF Decompiler — had to re-register the product.
Spam Sieve
SRS iWOW — 3.1 ... version 2 is on Apple's official DOA list. Just installed 3.1 and all is well, but I'm not sure if I like the new interface.
Studiometry — 6.1.92 (updated in the wee hours on 8/29). Kudos to Tom at Oranged for heroic work with my Studiometry and Address Book files to nail the root cause of the 6.1.91 breakage and kick out a fix. From a support standpoint, they set the bar for others. If you're a freelancer looking to break away from a dependence on QuickBooks, take a look at this product!
StuffIt Archive Manager — and the related StuffIt applications.
Sunrise
SuperDuper — 2.6 was released today.
Thoth
Tidy Up!
TinkerTool
TM Error Logger
Toast Titanium 10
TriTag
TypeTool 2 — had to re-register the product. TypeTool 3 is the current release and I'll upgrade one of these days.
Validator S.A.C.
Video2SWF — had to re-register the product.
VirtualBox — A free, sane way to run Windows XP and Ubuntu Linux on an Intel Mac.
VLC
Web Snapper — works with Safari in 32bit mode.

More to come...
— Marc

(1) The opinions expressed in Marc's Notes: Comments, Ramblings, Rants & Tips are exclusively those of Marc Wolfgram.
(2) Only one Macintosh™ computer was permanently harmed - link. (3) Any references to real people may be intentional.
(4) Don't try certain things while driving or at home without proper adult supervision. (5) Microsoft Windows—Just say NO!