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.