Snow Leopard

With the release of the App Store I decided it was time to finally fork out for the upgrade to Snow Leopard. I ordered it on Friday night so I had to wait until Monday before it was shipped but it arrived promptly on Saturday morning (so glad Apple changed to TNT overnight shipping; it used to take a week to get stuff shipped from the Apple Store).

The install was all very straightforward. I'd read some horror stories on the internet so I was a little bit worried but it all turned out fine. The upgrade cleared out about 6gb on my harddrive, which I was very happy about since I'm constantly running low. My only real complaint was that the version on the DVD was 10.6.3 so I had to use Software Update to upgrade to 10.6.6, which involved a 1gb download. Not too bad with our current internet setup but a few months ago it could have been an overnight job.

I was still running iLife '08 so I upgraded iPhoto using the App Store as I was eager to finally try out Faces. While not as accurate as I'd hoped it would be, it's still pretty awesome. I will probably upgrade iMovie as well at some point, but I finished off making a DVD of last year's holiday to Brunei before I did the Snow Leopard install so there's no rush. I haven't used Garageband for ages so I'm not sure if I'll make that upgrade or not. Even if I do end up upgrading all three apps, it still saves me a few bucks over buying the DVD, plus it comes off my iTunes balance so it becomes part of my Christmas present rather than coming out of my savings.

I haven't noticed any speed changes with Snow Leopard; there hasn't been an improvement but it doesn't seem to have any trouble running with the minimum 1gb of memory. I did have a vague hope that it might help my problems with Firefox freezing up while playing Lord of Ultima, but I think that has more to do with the game itself than anything on my end.

I still need to install and try out Facetime, and fiddle around with the other changes that come with an OS upgrade, but so far I'm happy with my upgrade-to-Snow-Leopard experience.

Happy New Year!

So it's been even longer since I last posted than I thought it had been. I decided that in the new year I'd make an effort to post more, but it's been too hot to do much at all (it's still hot, but I've run out of low-hanging fruit so I'm revisiting my todo list looking for things that I can at least do without moving around or thinking too much).

The traditional topic of the first post of the year is to talk about New Year's Resolutions. I haven't made any specific resolutions for this year but in general I'm working on improving/managing my CFS, getting a job, and writing more regularly.

The stuff I still have to post about our trip to America is now a bit out-of-date, I guess, but I'll make an effort to post it soon anyway. After that I'm thinking about using Plinky to get some inspiration to post a bit more.

Hopefully my next post will be in the next few days (maybe if I promise that I'll be more likely to do it...)