Is it a service pack or is it a full trail-blazing upgrade? The answer to that questions is an unequivocal Yes! It’s going to be different things to different people. Let me quickly give you my recommendation on whether to upgrade now, today, September 2, 2009. If things are working for you in Leopard, there is no reason to upgrade to Snow Leopard now. That, however, is a really simple answer and doesn’t take into account the simple fact that every person is different (Stop the Presses!). I mentioned my reasons for excitement before I upgraded. That excitement has been somewhat muted by reality.

I am writing this in a program, Blogo, that initially did not work when I upgraded. An update was on its way even before Snow Leopard shipped. The program was crashing either immediately or after a few seconds. The discussion indicated that the fix was coming. The fix arrived a day after Snow Leopard arrived. One wrench that Apple threw at the developers of Mac programs was that they released it earlier than expected. A September release was what was announced in June.

My personal experience has been relatively positive. However, I was ready to blame my Ethernet problems on the upgrade. When I did the troubleshooting to figure out why my wireless was working and my wired connection wasn’t, it turned out to be a stray DNS entry screwing things up. When I eradicated the DNS entry, my problems were solved. Another problem that I haven’t solved is with the new Apple Exchange support in Mail. Everything worked fine, though I did need to know some very specific information about my Exchange server (and it only works with Exchange Server 2007, and not previous versions). Once it was all set up, things worked great. Except, I couldn’t delete email. This problem still stumps me and I have since reverted back to using IMAP. Mail now works just like it did in Leopard, but I’ll continue to investigate (aka Google) why Exchange doesn’t fully work on my machine.

What is working? Well for me, plenty. I recently started to use Spaces, and it has been updated to work even better in Snow Leopard. It’s a pretty esoteric change and would be hard to describe, but it just works better. Things are definitely zippier. I notice stuff opening quicker, from images to applications (especially Apple apps). The Stacks feature has been improved as has Expose, albeit minors changes. Overall things just work a little better. Except for those other people who are experiencing the opposite.

Going forward, the Mac OS is supposedly going to be an even better platform to write programs for. Even greater things will be developed and even more cool stuff will be coming. Though with expectations being what they are, for some people they won’t be cool enough. I thought QuickTime X would be REALLY cool. As it turns out it is only moderately cool. There is no Preference menu for the new player and other features are missing. This may need to be the subject of another post, but the point is, I had expectations for QuickTime X that it didn’t live up to. For the average consumer though, it’s probably a wonderful improvement.

I guess that is the take away from all of this. In a few months or a year down the road, people will be saying that Snow Leopard is the best Mac OS ever.

Except for those who don’t think Snow Leopard is the best Mac OS ever.

Unless I’m wrong.

Or both.

For an insanely detailed review of Snow Leopard, check out this 23 page article at Ars Technica.

Update: Also check out the wiki for programs that are supported (or not) under Snow Leopard.

I’m developing some pretty thick skin after returning to the Apple platform. My DTLT colleagues who had been using Macs, continue to chide me for not using them sooner. Believe me, I will always keep my guard up when it comes to Apple. However, as many have said about democracy, it isn’t perfect, but it’s better than everything else. The same applies to Mac OS X.

I do get excited about new gadgets, gizmos, and software, so I am very excited about the new Snow Leopard (Mac OS version 10.6) operating system. Two very specific reasons come to mind. The first reason makes the upgrade a “when can I give my credit card number to someone” type of decision. QuickTime X. It is essentially QuickTime Pro, which let’s you edit and export video to all kinds of formats, but especially to h.264. QuickTime Pro has also always been a $29 upgrade, so now that the upgrade to Snow Leopard is $29, it’s like you’re upgrading to QuickTime Pro and getting a free operating system update.

The other reason to upgrade is one that is specific to UMW and that is our recent upgrade to a Microsoft Exchange Server. The new Mail client that will ship with Snow Leopard will directly support Exchange. In addition, the iCal and Address Book apps will sync as well.

Now let the snide comments from my colleagues begin

Now that I’m on the Mac I have found Blogo. It allows me to do many, if not all of the things that WLW allowed, and does it in the Mac drag-and-drop way. The best feature by far is the support for sites such as YouTube and Flickr. Simply go to the site page that your video or image is on and click the “Send to Blogo” bookmarklet in Safari or Firefox (instructions on how to create the bookmarklet are simple and available from the Help menu). A placeholder image appears in the editor window. You can preview how the video or image will look by using the Preview button. You can then see exactly how things will look in your blog, and then you can make any changes before you publish.

You can also drag-and-drop text from a text editor into Blogo, and you can even add blockquotes easily by highlighting text in a web page and clicking the Send to Blogo bookmarklet (it even includes a link to the source automatically).

Blogo’s interface is designed to let you take your mind off the details and just write.

link: Blogo: The blog editor for your Mac

You can enter tags and/or categories in a post. They are entered into a single field in the editor window, and you distinguish categories from tags by using a hashtag before the category name (ex. #newmedia). It will even pick up your categories from your blog and offer them in a drop down menu.

It can publish to many platforms including Blogger and WordPress, and you can set up multiple accounts to post to. It’s not free like Windows Live Writer ($25 US), but I think it’s quicker and easier, and it produces cleaner code in WordPress. One less reason to miss Windows (that was for the Bava).

This post finds me answering the question of what have I been up to lately. Well, I’m trying to find easy ways to edit and produce video for as close to zero expense as possible. So I find myself on the Mac and on the PC side of this MacBook Pro working with Windows Movie Maker for Vista and iMovie’08 for Mac. Now I’m going to jump straight to the ending and say that I don’t recommend you use either one of them, at least not for start to finish video editing projects.

What I will recommend that you do is go download the previous version of the editors and use them instead. So, if you use a Mac, go download iMovie HD. If you are using Windows XP, you’re OK, but make sure you have at least version 2.1. If you have Windows Vista Home Premium or Ultimate, go download Movie Maker 2.6 for Vista. If you have Vista Home Basic, or Vista Enterprise/Business, it looks like you’re out of luck because version 2.6 seems to require that you have the original Vista Movie Maker program. Home Basic and Enterprise versions don’t come with Movie Maker so it looks like a non-starter.

Another caveat, the download page for Movie Maker 2.6 for Vista says to test if you can run the original version of Movie Maker. They say “If Movie Maker launches, you should not download version 2.6”. I have not discovered any incompatibilities with having both versions on my computer. As a matter of fact, I’m seeing that the original version of Movie Maker runs better once you install the old version. By better I mean that the original version has big problems with frame accuracy, in other words finding the exact point where one scene ends and the other begins. Still, Movie Maker 2.6 is more frame accurate.

Also, when you import video into the original Vista Movie maker, it does not detect scenes correctly. However, here is a truly weird situation. If I open a movie in 2.6 it does the scene detection correctly, and then if I open up the original Movie Maker with the same video all the scenes are now there as if it detected those scenes all along. Here’s a screencast of the phenomenon:

Expect more from me soon, regarding Windows Movie Maker and iMovie. Here’s a teaser for a large project I’m working on.

Even with Apple’s Leopard and its more then 300(!) new features, Blu-ray playback isn’t one of them. Yet. Macworld is this week and rumors are starting about Apple launching into the high-definition disc fray. Will it be Blu-ray only? Apple is firmly in the blue camp. Will the combo drive now be a Blu-ray reader and the super drive be a Blu-ray reader/writer? Will HD-DVD be added for compatibility or will Apple ignore it in light of the beating the reds are taking recently? Am I going to answer any of these questions?

Well, I’m at the point of being totally unimpressed by speculation or even actual product announcements, whether it’s at Macworld or CES. Tell me when products are shipping first of all. As I mentioned previously, it was announced at least year’s CES that HD-DVD burners would be available in early 2007. So how many can I buy now at the beginning of 2008? Still ZERO!

P.T. Barnum, I mean Steve Jobs, will take the stage on January 15th and whoop the Apple fanboys faithful into a frenzy with something that is over-hyped and over-priced. I think it borders on criminal that a DVD burner is not standard equipment on all Macs at all price points. Now will we just have the Blu-ray version of this scenario? I’m trying to remember the last magic gizmo that Apple announced that was reasonably priced.

UPDATE: And the answer is . . . nope! Though Apple did update the Apple TV, and in doing so lowered the price ($299 to $239) and offered to current owners a free upgrade to the new features. Who says they’re not about value It looks to me as though Apple feels the future is in HD downloads and not Hi-Def on physical media. Though it appears that there are more restrictions than discount airfare tickets.

Photo by ::stromberg