Update: 18 October: Okay, I’ve now actually installed Snow Leopard, and it most definitely is not a train smash; I have a much faster, leaner, machine in front of me. One on which I can select a single column in a pdf (funny how much the “small things” count). The Finder, especially as it emerges from the Dock is a dramatic improvement. Oh, and something I’ve not seen noted anywhere else: Help, which has been a lumbering dysfunctional disgrace through several versions of the OS, has finally been tuned up and responds quickly and smoothly to what’s asked of it.

Problems noted so far: A disappearing cursor in Word. Corrupted iCal calendars, duplicated events and birthdays. And an unwanted “feature” in Mail: notes turning up in the Inbox. (Go into Mail Preferences, and de-select “Show notes in Inbox”, in the Mailbox behaviours section of ALL your Accounts, to get rid of this.)

Original post: A year ago I wrote a post entitled, “The Leopard downgrade”, expressing my disgust with OS 10.5 Leopard. (Principally, the Cupertino weasels ripped out Address Book’s Bluetooth support, and the OS was forever dysfunctional on a iBook G4, on which its installation should never have been recommended.)

That post has, since the release of Snow Leopard, started pulling more hits than any other on my blog. Not surprising when you read, for example, that David Pogue’s notably enthusiastic New York Times review (which has now prompted commentary from the NYT readers’ editor) had omitted to mention that Snow Leopard was constantly crashing MS Word and Photoshop on his Mac!! Which it seems it is doing for many others.

If you are one of the unfortunates having this experience, Word crashing, a comment on the same post on Venture Beat recommends trashing your Word preferences to get it working properly and describes how to do this. It’s not clear yet how reliable a fix this is.

I have always enjoyed Pogue’s reviews. But it does seem in this instance he omitted some vital information fromunderstated some vital information in his review, and owes his readers an apology. Completing an upgrade to discover that mission-critical apps like Word are no longer fully functional is extraordinarily stressful.

But the real blame, lest we forget, must lie with Apple itself – this is spectacular incompetence, and demonstrates extraordinary contempt for its users.

And me? I’ve had enough pain from Leopard (it does work rather better on my newer Macbook than it did on the iBook) to last me a lifetime. Snow Leopard appears to have many appealing features. But I think I’ll wait for 10.6.5 at the very least before nervously “upgrading”.

Update 9/9/09: Pogue has commented on this post, saying he “ABSOLUTELY mentioned the Word problems (and others)” in his review. Which he had, saying he “experienced frustrating glitches in various programs, including Microsoft Word, Flip4Mac, Photoshop CS3 ...”

I’m not sure though, that “frustrating glitches” really does justice to Word crashes.

His comment (but not the review or his email to Venture Beat, though perhaps/probably he has mentioned it elsewhere) offers an important clarification: “As it turns out, by the way, my Word crashes were unrelated to Snow Leopard. I had a corrupted Normal.dot file. Once I replaced that, Word became steady as a rock!”

My original characterisation of his review as having “omitted” this information was unfair. Apologies on that score, David.

The futility of deleting recurring events in iCal

I’ve charted my contempt and loathing for Mac OS X 10.5 Loathsome Leopard elsewhere, so won’t go into that again in too much detail, other than to note that I could probably double my original list of gripes. One of the problems it has caused me is that I’ve been unable to permanently delete recurring events in iCal. Sure, I’ve been able to delete them while iCal is open — but when I relaunched iCal again, those damned recurring events had … recurred.

One fix I saw on the Apple forums was to right-click the event in question, select ’stop recurrence’ and then delete the event. This didn’t work for me, though.

I even tried exporting the relevant calendar to Mozilla Sunbird, deleting the recurring events there, and reimporting into iCal — but amazingly, yet again, the recurring events pop up on relaunching iCal.

Have you had features that worked perfectly in Tiger break in Leopard? Has the ‘world’s most advanced operating system’ got you feeling you’re encountering that ol’ Windows blue screen of death, in spirit if not in actual form? My brother, a reasonably contented Leopard user, suspects my problems relate to running it on an iBook, and not on an Intel machine: thoughts? I have seen a number of hits land on my blog from search queries like “Leopard downgrade” and “restore Tiger” — so clearly I’m not alone in this experience — and only the hassle of reverting to Tiger has stopped me doing so. I might yet.