So Snow Leopard, otherwise known as Mac OS X 10.6, is released tomorrow and needless to say I’ll have it installed by the end of the day. The downside of a brand new OS is losing all the little hacks I’ve accumulated over the past 18 months with Leopard: Plex; Perian; a minimalist Dock; Google Quick Search Box; Expandrive; and finally Caffeine, the latest install.
There is a lot to look forward to with Snow Leopard as well. Most of the core applications have been re-written in Cocoa and they’re all 64-bit as well. In short it means, Go Faster Pussycat! Kill! Kill!
If you’d like to check wether your favourite application works with 10.6, here’s a quite extensive and informative wiki site and most of the apps I mentioned earlier either work perfectly or need updating. I prefer a clean install with a new OS and then gradually adding extensions.
Gentlemen, rev up those Time Machine backup drives.
Here’s a quick tip on how to make the dock in Leopard look less garish. First, switch off the 3D effect by typing the following into a terminal:
defaults write com.apple.dock no-glass -boolean YES; killall Dock
When the dock relaunches it should look nice and minimalist. I also like to use Dock Dividers to group my applications. As Brandon Kelly, the creator of Dock Dividers, explains: Dock Dividers are little do-nothing apps that you can place in your Mac’s dock to visually separate your apps into groups.
Since you can only have user-generated content on the right side of the Dock, I copied the icon from the application and pasted it onto folders. I named the new “document dividers” with spaces to help me separate folders and documents I like to have there.
And here’s a quick before and after comparison. Enjoy!
Since I bought my first MacBook three years ago, I’ve migrated my applications and data across to every upgraded laptop. I suspect my MacBook Pro isn’t working as efficiently as it would after a clean system install. Would re-installing Leopard and the applications stop those random beachballs spinning? At the risk of making a rod for my own back, I’ve decided to do just that. I’ll update this post when it’s all done.
See you on the other side.
Monday, May 4th:
In between birthday parties, visitors, cooking, tidying up, the gym and various other distractions, I managed to resist the surprisingly strong impluse just to restore everything from the Time Machine backup and forget about doing a spring clean. I managed to keep the momentum going though and so far, the system feels snappier. Powering up or rebooting takes a lot less time and applications like Photoshop now launch in one bounce.
I’ll do a final update when everything’s back. Stay tuned.
Monday, May 4th, 9pm:
All done! All apps installed, as you can see from the dock above. I’ll run the Mac through it’s paces this week and see how Photoshop and Illustrator (the main beachball culprits) perform. So far the experiment went smoothly and the system feels faster, as mentioned before. I wouldn’t rush to do this again and I doubt installing Snow Leopard will force me to. Would it?
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