Snow Leopard

So I've upgraded to Snow Leopard on two machine (my latest generation work Macbook Pro and my home, slightly older iMac). The upgrade process itself was very smooth: the installer does all the work, reboots the machine a few times, and freed about 20 gigs of space on my boot disk. Can't remember ever seeing that any software upgrade.

Only a few things changed, none of them dramatic but all of them useful in their own way. It boots, sleeps, and resumes even faster than before. Day-to-day use feels marginally speedier -- mostly because it the Finder and Safari are both faster. I have not encountered any apps that won't launch or devices that don't work. I was a little worried about the scanner in my Canon Pixma MP500 because the Apple site reported it did not ship with Canon scanner drivers baked into Leopard, but the Canon software worked just fine.

On the flip side:

• iPhoto 08 won't play videos anymore. This one makes me mad, because Apple should have caught this trivial-to-fix bug in their own product family.
• Symptom: If you find the files in the iPhoto library from the Finder, they'll fire up just fine. But if you double click on videos in iPhoto, nothing happens.
• I'm surprised they didn't fix this in 10.6.1. I hope they fix this in the next week or two. Handling photos and videos is one of the reasons I switched to a Mac in the first place.
• My Logitech mouse's special buttons don't work. The Logitech forums speculate that an updated version of Logitech Control Center is coming soon.
• Suggested workarounds seemed to work for me the first few days but have since quit working (the Control Center stopped recognizing my MX700 mouse).

Other than that, I'm pleased overall. It does seem a little lame that Apple is charging as if this was an upgrade rather than a dot release. But I guess by comparison, it seems like way smaller a rip off than what Microsoft is charging for Vista Service Pack 2, er, Windows 7.

Also, not looking to the complete re-install Microsoft is going to force me to do to upgrade from my Windows 7 Release Candidate.

Update on 9/15/09: For some reason, the Logitech workarounds worked the 2nd or 3rd time around. I ran the installer from inside the Logitech Control Center 3.0 package, rebooted, and it recognized my MX700 mouse. Then copying Expose from the /Applications/Utilities folder to /Applications got the Expose mouse button shortcut working. OK, Apple, it's all you now: get your own products to work with your own operating system, please.