[Updated at end]

I hadn’t actually planned to take two days off work so I’d be off for the day of release of Snow Leopard. It just happened that way. I’d booked the time off in order to spend a little time with Sam’s mum (quack, quack). Then, it just happened that the second day I’d booked was the day of release.

So, it would have seemed rude not to go to Exeter, pop into the Apple Store, and pick up a copy of Snow Leopard Family Pack.

So we did.

It was packed. Really, amazingly busy. There were a few people buying Snow Leopard, but most of the crowds were there for Macs, accessories, iPods, support, training, etc. The staff were doing their best, and were doing a nice job of occasionally hurrying down the lines of people, apologising for the delays, and promising to get to everyone soon. I joined a queue after a while, and paid for Snow Leopard. I also had a mouse to sort out, but that’s another story.

I tried to convince myself that I wasn’t in a desperate hurry when we got home, but the pressure was too much. I soon gave in, and stuck the DVD in the drive. I made sure that Time Machine had backed up recently enough, then ploughed in to the upgrade. In a disaster, I figured I could always install again from the original Leopard CD that came with my Mac, and migrate the data and apps from the Time Machine backup.

There was no disaster.

It took around an hour in total, and I was left with a system that worked pretty much the same as it did before, with a few nice little tweaks. Purely subjectively, things feel nice and snappy – I think it’s faster in quite a few places. It’s always difficult to be sure with such things, though, without any real testing.

So far, the only app that didn’t work was CyberDuck, but a quick check for the latest version showed a new beta that worked fine. It turned out, that was the final anti-straw to get me to make a little donation to the developer. It’s a free app, and works really well.

All told, there isn’t a huge amount to get excited about in Snow Leopard, but for the small cost, it seems well worth it. An cheap, easy upgrade that made the OS smaller and faster, whilst polishing a few features.

Surely that shouldn’t seem as strange as it does?

I’m left with just a couple of oddities. Video is jerky in QuickTime, though it may only be when using Perian codexes. Hopefully an update to one or the other will sort it out soon. Also, when I close iTunes, it immediately restarts itself, and hides the window.

Neither are major problems for me, so I’ll just Google them occasionally – answers usually take a little while to appear for a new product.

Update: Found the solution to the iTunes problem. I was running a little app called I Love Stars, which put a control to rate tracks into the menu, hiding itself unless an unrated track was playing. Getting rid if it removed the problem. It wasn’t causing the problem until Snow Leopard, so either something changed, or it was quite a coincidence.

The jerkiness may be more widespread than I’d thought – some YouTube videos seem jerky now, and some animations, too. Aperture’s keyword controls are supposed to slide neatly into view, but actually appeared in a series of jumps, taking a long time to fully display. Right-clicking seems to take a very long time in a few places, too, including iTunes.

[Updated at end] I hadn’t actually planned to take two days off work so I’d be off for the day of release of Snow Leopard. It just happened that way....