I'm pretty much sold on the idea of upgrading to Snow Leopard (Mac OS 10.6) The price can't be beat ($35 CDN!), Pogue gives it a thumbs-up, and anecdotal evidence from friends says it's going to be zippier.
That said, the axiom I've always lived by when it comes to software/operating system upgrades is the same axiom my doctor lives by: First, do no harm.
And on that score, I'm still not 100 per cent certain that Snow Leopard is the way to go just yet because of concerns about application compatibility.
Certainly at work (the national newsroom for Canwest News Service), we're sticking with OS 10.5.7. We use Exchange server and MS Entourage on our desktops and love the idea that Snow Leopard is built for a future where Outlook for Mac is on my desktop with an Exchange server in the back office. But on that front: The current version of Snow Leopard assumes that you are running the most recent version of Exchange server. We're not (not sure which product but it might Exchange Server 2003). So on that score alone, no Snow Leopard for Canwest — which, I have been told on occasion, is Apple's single largest customer in Canada.
At work, our IT guys are also worried about application compatability. We have some apps that were designed and built in-house like QuickWire that are absolutely core to our suite of enterprise applications.
At home, my old Cube is never going to run Snow Leopard, of course. But my iMac (2 Ghz Intel Core 2 Duo with 4 GB RAM) is going to get the upgrade as soon as I'm satisfied about Snow Leopard playing nice with the following applications:
–
- Cyberduck 3.2: My fave FTP client – nervous about this one.
- TweetDeck: Twitter is useless without it. Should work.
- BB Edit 8.6 – Works.
- Ecto 3.0 – Works.
- Audacity 1.3.x – Works.
- Acrobat 8 Professional – Kinda works. The app itself is fine but PDF Printer does not.
- EasyWMA
- Himmelbar
- Handbrake – Works
- RipIt – Works
- Microsoft Office X – Rosetta for installer – and some issues on app performance.
- Organized Gourmet
- Toast 8 Titanium – Unknown v 9.0 works / v 7.x does not.
- TubeTV – Does not work reliably.
These are among my “can't live without” apps at home. Some are open source and the developers are volunteers; others (like the Office suite) are old and I'm just not prepared to dish several hundred dollars for the upgrade.
As I do the homework on these apps vs Snow Leopard compatibility, I'll post the results here but, if your system looks like mine or you have the same apps, please comment below as I'd love to benefit from your experience.
First place, I'm off to is a Wiki page with a pretty good list of apps and their issues, if any, with Snow Leopard (toque tip to UTorontoApple, the official Apple campus reps for the University of Toronto) …
Why Office X? Perhaps time for Office 2008?
The other thing to check: will Snow Leopard play nicely with your printer(s). I discovered today my HP laser printer currently doesn't work in 10.6, which put a break on my planned upgrade over the long weekend. And it seems I'm not alone:
http://www.pcworld.com/businesscenter/article/171116/snow_leopard_users_report_hp_printer_incompatibilities.html?tk=rel_news
Mostly cuz I'm a cheap bugger! But also, I've got the latest Apple productivity suite loaded. Pages vs Word — I can live without Word (Pages reads .doc docs and saves as .doc). Powerpoint vs Keynote. Keynote's fine with with. But on Excel vs Numbers, I still need Excel for the database functionality (Call it PivotTable) built into Excel. Numbers just isn't there yet.