There was a knock on the door at 10 past 8 this morning – it was the Snow Leopard delivery man. I live in Dubbo, NSW, 6 hours drive from Sydney. Snow Leopard arrived on my doorstep at 10 past 8! I can’t believe Apple’s efficiency!

Install was a breeze, took 45 minutes. I did the default install which installed it over my existing system – 10.5.8.

Computer restarted and I was greeted with the Welcome to Macintosh screen.

Everything seemed quite similar, except one of my two monitors was brighter – the gamma settings must have changed.

Some observations:

When I launched Photoshop CS I was presented with a dialog box saying I needed to install rosetta:

Rosetta is a program that allows the new Snow Leopard on an Intel Macintosh to run old programs. I installed it and and my old Photoshop CS works. So does my old copy of Microsoft Office 2004. Happy about that.

When I first opened mail it asked if I wanted to update/import my existing mail accounts. My heart sank for a while I thought I’d lost all my mails, but it just did some kind of import that took about 3 seconds and all my emails and settings were there.

The most trouble was with Pages. Opened Pages 08 and all my documents were blank! Same with Keynote 08. O dear…

I rang Apple support, here’s one of the great things about Apple – even though my Mac Pro is out of warranty, I get 90 days of FREE phone support with Snow Leopard – not bad for $39!

Apple took about 5 seconds to answer the phone, and about 5 minutes to diagnose and fix the problem. Apparently my automatic software update was confused and I had an old version of Pages 08 (3.0) still there. Upgraded to 3.03 and it was all fixed.

1Password told me it needed to upgrade itself to work with Snow Leopard. It upgraded itself and it works as promised.

Screen Shots instead of being named ‘Picture 1′, ‘Picture 2′ are now named Screenshot followed by the date and time they were taken.

Quicktime has been updated form 7 to 10. QT10 has the familiar share to menu to share straight to Youtube, iTunes or mobile me. THe bad news is that QT10 can’t cut and paste like Quicktime pro could – good thing I still have QT 7. The good news is that it can trim movies (cut off the front and back) straight out of the box without having to upgrade to QT pro.

The only software I have found that won’t work is Macspeech Dictate – a bit disappointing.

Actually I just upgraded and it works, but the upgrade is almost $100 – a good cashcow for Macspeech. I went to their site but couldn’t see any option apart from a paid upgrade.

Overall Snow Leopard works well and things seem to be a bit zippier in the finder and Safari. I’m not blown away by it yet. My mac pro is not real stable, applications crash a couple of times a day, and Snow Leopard has shown no improvement on that. It used to be pages that was crashing the most, but now it’s Macspeech dictate.

UPDATE: Just noticed that my canon imagerunner IR5000 printer DOES NOT WORK with Snow Leopard – and from what I can see there are no drivers for it at this stage. Very disappointing. This is something to be aware of. Thankfully I have a HP8150 that works fine.

UPDATE: Canon have released drivers that will allow you to print to your Image Runner. Download them from here. When you add the Printer, select IP Printer and LPD Daemon, select GEneric Postscript Printer. It doesn’t see all the options like different trays, but it does print at least.

To make a backup of your computer that is useful if your computer crashes you need to:

1.   1. Buy an external firewire hard drive
2.   2. Format the hard drive
3.   3. Download some backup software
4.   4. Backup your Hard Drive
5.   5. Run the backup software often

Now let me explain those steps in more detail.

2. 1. Buy an external firewire hard drive You need a firewire drive because even though macintosh has USB, you cannot start your computer from a USB drive in an emergency, you can only start it up from a firewire drive.
   You need one at least as big as the hard drive on the computer you are intending to back up. Eg if you have an 200G hard drive on your imac, you should get at least an 200G for your backups. This way you will always fit your backup on the external drive.
4. 2. Format the hard drive
   Plug in your new hard drive. Run Disk Utility (in your Applications/Utilities folder). Select your new Hard Drive in the left pane, and in the Erase tab check it says ‘Mac OS Extended (Journaled)’ as below, type in the name you would like to call it (eg Backup) (here it says Untitled) and press Erase. It will now erase and format your external Hard Drive ready for use and call it Backup. 

   

   If you have a large external drive, and you want to store other things on it apart from the backup, such as movies and pictures, then it is best to ‘partition’ it into two sections, one for your system backup, and one for files. To do this select the disk in the left pane and click on the partition tab. Select ’2 partitions’ and adjust to the size you want. Again, name them, make sure they are both Mac OS Extended (Journaled) and press Partition. In the example below I have partitioned my hard drive into two, one for the backups (80G) and one for the rest.

   

6. 3. Download some backup software
   Go to http://www.shirt-pocket.com/SuperDuper/SuperDuperDescription.html and download the latest version of SuperSooper. It’s free to be able to do a basic backup, or you can pay if you want extra features such as incremental backup (it’s faster, but the end result is the same). Copy Superdooper to your macintosh applications folder.
8. 4. Backup your Hard Drive
   Select your Macintosh HD in the left menu, select your new firewire drive in the right one, select ‘backup – all files’. Press copy now, go and have a cup of coffee while you wait a long time for it to copy all your files, perhaps up to an hour or so. 

   

   It’s good to select ‘Repair permissions before copying in the options tab, see below. This makes sure your OS X is functioning well before you back it up, otherwise there can be some problems.

   

9. 5. Run the backup software often
   The most important thing about backing up is to do it regularly, I do it once a week. it’s good to do a backup before you install any new software – especially system modifications or large software, in case something goes wrong in the installation so you can go back to what it was when you backed up.

How do I use the backup in an emergency?

1. Go to System Preferences, select ‘Startup Disk’, select your external Backup, press Restart.
2. OR in a real emergency when you can’t boot onto your normal OS X…
3. Press Option-Command-Shift-Delete during startup. This will bypass the primary startup volume and seek a different startup volume such as the external one.
4. You are now running from your backup, and you just repeat the sections called Format the hard drive and Backup your Hard Drive but treat your Backup as the main one and the main one as your backup. In other words, run Disk Utility and erase your Macintosh HD, then run Superdooper and backup from your Backup to Macintosh HD. When the backup is finished, select Machintosh HD, and restart. You will now be running from your main computer again.
5. You might want to print these instructions out, so they are handy in an emergency. It’s no use having the instructions on how to boot in an emergency on your computer – you won’t be able to read them. Don’t laugh, I’ve done it!

   Stay tuned for an update on how to use time-machine. 

This one is quite an advanced tip.
If you right-click on a file you get a little menu, and if you select ‘open with’ you get a list of all the programs you can open a file with.
After a while of installing new versions of programs, this list can become quite long!
To reset it open up a Terminal window. (from Applications/Utilities) and paste the following line:

/System/Library/Frameworks/ApplicationServices.framework/Frameworks/LaunchServices.framework/Support/lsregister -kill -r -domain local -domain system -domain user

press return wait about 20 seconds, and your open with menu will be fixed.

I think this only works on 10.4 and it may reset some other things to, like what applications open certain files.

1. Download and run this driver from here.
2. Put a memory card in the phone.
3. Plug in the phone and post a comment here if it works, or if you have to change some settings on the phone. (I have not tested on the bird phone).

Well it seems that OSX won’t recognise any Samsung phones. A bit disappointing given their TV adds on how Macintosh is friendly with everything! I rang Samsung and they said ‘we don’t support macintosh’

So to get my samsung D900i working on OSX I had to do this: (I’m not suggesting you do it for whatever reasons like you might sue me if it doesn’t work, but it worked for me).

1. Download this file: D900iUSB.pkg.zip

2. Run it

3. Put some memory in the mobile phone miniSD slot because it is only the external memory that the phone uses as a USB drive. (I got 2G for $25 so it’s pretty cheap)

4. Go into the USB settings on the phone and set it to USB mass media, not USB modem.

3. Plug in your Samsung D900i and wow, it mounts AND itunes now recognises it and imports the photos automatically!

Note: if you want to SYNC your samsung D900i that is a separate issue, look here.

With OSX apple has re-worked everything from the ground up, so there are a lot of old “features” lacking. For example, lots of features of the good old appleworks did not make it to iwork.

I think it’s not that Apple decided to take the features out of appleworks, but they have just written iwork from scratch and are slowly getting round to putting them in.Lots of times I think to myself ‘why does this not do this’ but then apple bring it out.
For example, Mail merge and formulas in spreadsheets just got added with the iwork 2006 release. We still don’t have a thesaurus, and there is no way to print a booklet from iworks yet.

There will be lots of things after having a PC with office and publisher where you will think “How can I do this?”, but you can’t. So mentally it’s better to think, “this is new, let’s learn from scratch” rather than thinking of “changing” from PC to mac.

Try to resist the disappointment of lack of features, and enjoy the simplicity and integration OS X offers.

Despite the similarities between OSX and XP/ME etc, they are quite different.

Even I took while a while to get used to iwork when I already had a mac.

Avoid the temptation of computer people to put things in your own choice of directories. OSX likes you to leave things where it puts them. Eg if you put all your photos in iphoto, they will be available to iwork, idvd, imovie etc. If you decide to put your photos in your own spot, they won’t. It’s very integrated, but likes you to put photos in iphoto, music in itunes folder, addresses in address book, calendar in ical etc. It’s best to just jump in boots and all and to it the OS X way.

Don’t be tempted to use office for email and a PIM like I did it for 6 months, you lose the simplicity of the OS X integration if you do this. Certainly don’t do things like partition a part of hard drive for all your data.

Basically don’t fight against OSX, run with it. Enjoy what it can do, try not to be frustrated by what it can’t do.