Mac OS X 10.6 notes

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Tom Owad's picture
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Mac OS X 10.6 notes

I installed 10.6 last night and figured I'd post a few notes.

First, regarding licensing: I bought the $29 upgrade, but the label says "Mac OS X 10.6 Retail, there's absolutely no mention anywhere in the included literature that this is an upgrade, and it installed on a blank drive without any issue.

Rosetta is an optional install, which you have to manually add.

Once you install 10.6, you cannot launch Parallels 3. But the Parallels 4 installer won't let you install until you launch v3 and shut down your virtual machines...

GPGMail is incompatible with 10.6, and the developer plans no further updates.

The changes to Expose and Stacks are very nice. Stacks are definitely faster than they used to be.

Changes to the Services menu will make it a lot more useable.

Reds look different. I suspect this is a result of the gamma change to 2.2?

The text substitution works nicely. Looks like it supports up to 11,358 characters. Seems like an odd figure.

Text substitution automatically replaces three periods with an ellipsis. Something you might want to look out for if you're presupposing ASCII. However, this shouldn't be an issue, as the only place I've gotten Text Substitution to work is in TextEdit. Not even in Apple's Mail.

QuickTime Player 10 looks nice.

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Hmm...

Definitely an obvious 'upgrade'. I'm going to be getting it for my Macbook soon enough. Got to find out when in June (or July) that I bought my Dad's Mini to see if it qualifies for the $10 upgrade.

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Re: Mac OS X 10.6 notes

Reds look different. I suspect this is a result of the gamma change to 2.2?

I found that the upgrade simply reset my custom monitor calibration profile back to the Apple default. My saved profiles were still there, and I just needed to reselect my preferred one.

I also noticed that 10.6 now lists disk capacities in decimal rather than SI: The internal 500GB hard drive in my aluminum iMac is reported in Disk Utility as 500GB, whereas in 10.5 it was listed as 460-ishGB.

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Interesting notes, guys - tha

Interesting notes, guys - thanks!

On the binary-vs-decimal GB calculation: aha! I immediately noticed I had about 9GB of extra space on my HD after the upgrade. Now I realize that about 1/3 of that is not real, but rather due to the binary/decimal change.

Overall I think Snow Leopard is terrific. Snappier than Leopard, irons out a lot of small kinks, and overall just "feels" much more stable, rock solid.

For $29 you can't beat it.

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Re: Mac OS X 10.6 notes

Reds look different. I suspect this is a result of the gamma change to 2.2?

not a change since snow leopard, earlier recommendation :
Unless you have a color management expert instructing you otherwise, select a 2.2 gamma and a D65 white point.
Last Modified: June 13, 2008 - Old Article: 302827
http://support.apple.com/kb/HT2026?viewlocale=en_US

2004 :
http://www.gballard.net/photoshop/hardware_calibrate_monitor.html

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Re: Mac OS X 10.6 notes

QuickTime Player 10 looks nice.

Quicktime X doesn't even play Apples own QTVR-format
export is too limited, a fraction of the possibilities of Quicktime Pro

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Re: Mac OS X 10.6 notes

Quicktime X doesn't even play Apples own QTVR-format
export is too limited, a fraction of the possibilities of Quicktime Pro

You can still install QuickTime 7 if you need to work with older formats.

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Re: Mac OS X 10.6 notes

not a change since snow leopard, earlier recommendation :
Unless you have a color management expert instructing you otherwise, select a 2.2 gamma and a D65 white point.

As I'm sure you're aware, up until 10.6, the default gamma was 1.8. For most people, 2.2 is going to be a change.

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Licensing

I just read through the software license on the 10.6 DVD. It does stipulate that there is a single-user license, a family pack, and a leopard upgrade, but it doesn't tell you which one you've bought.

I dug out my invoice and it says "Mac OS X 10.6 Snow Leopard Reta..." and there's absolutely nothing anywhere on the packaging to suggest it's anything but "Mac OS X V10.6 Retail", as the box explicitly states. The product # is that of the Leopard upgrade, but if you were to buy it off the shelf at a retail store, you'd never see anything to suggest that it wasn't the full version.

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Re: Licensing

I just read through the software license on the 10.6 DVD. It does stipulate that there is a single-user license, a family pack, and a leopard upgrade, but it doesn't tell you which one you've bought.

I dug out my invoice and it says "Mac OS X 10.6 Snow Leopard Reta..." and there's absolutely nothing anywhere on the packaging to suggest it's anything but "Mac OS X V10.6 Retail", as the box explicitly states. The product # is that of the Leopard upgrade, but if you were to buy it off the shelf at a retail store, you'd never see anything to suggest that it wasn't the full version.

When I picked up my copy at the Apple Store on Friday night, I saw three options on the shelf:

1. Single-version for $29
2. Family pack for $49
3. Mac Box Set (with iLife and iWork)

This suggests to me that, while Apple is touting the first two options as "upgrades", in reality they're the only SKUs for 10.6 that we'll see. The packaging says *nothing* about it being an upgrade -- even the system requirements listed on the side panel of the box make no mention of 10.5 needing to be already installed. So unless Apple kept the price low initially and will jack it back up to the $100 or so that 10.5 went for, it really says a lot about how much value Apple places in the changes from 10.5 to 10.6 -- not much. There weren't even any big launch events at Apple Stores for 10.6 (which is a bummer, because my launch-day 10.5 T-shirt is too big for me now -- I wanted a 10.6 shirt!).

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Looks like all third party sc

Looks like all third party screen savers break with 10.6, including my personal favorite, Heiko Kretschmer's BlankScreen.

As a work-around: create a 320x240 solid black jpeg. Place that jpeg in iPhoto, in its own album. Select that album in the screen savers control panel.

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Snow disguise

Anyone give credence to the idea that with Snow Leopard Apple is giving the wink and the nod to Hackintoshes?:
http://lowendmac.com/ed/fox/09ff/snow-leopard-pounces.html

I brought this up on my OSx86 thread as well:
http://www.applefritter.com/node/24295#comment-59347

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