Snow Leopard
I haven't been this nervous upgrading an OS since going to 10.1. Snow Leopard cleans up a lot of the underlying architecture of the OS -- but sometimes that comes at the expense of older applications, or those not written to exacting standards.
I understand why they did Snow Leopard, and I dutifully shelled out my $35.99 CDN, but I wasn't surprised when a few of my apps didn't work after the upgrade:
- AutoMount Maker didn't work right away, but after I installed Rosetta (via an in-OS download) and rebooted it came back to life. Likely its a PowerPC compiled binary.
- Google Reader Notifier didn't work, apparently due to some uninitialized variables in the code. A patch has been posted in the comments of the author's website, and it works great.
- Windows Live Sync is the biggest casualty. It won't sign in once you go to 10.6. This is frustrating, since I'm quite dependent on it. Microsoft has acknowledged the problem, but there's no ETA on the fix. I may have to switch to DropBox.
I also have an older version of Photoshop (CS2) that I haven't tried yet, but expect it won't work. Additionally, if you (like me) keep your apps organized into folders, all the Apple apps' new versions will be put in the root of the Applications folder again. If you're Dock items link to the organized executable, you may find that they don't work. Simply over-write them with the new versions.
Its nice to have native Google Calendar syncing, but the way it handles calendars other than your main one (it calls them delegates and puts each calendar under its own header) is ugly and annoying.
Over-all, I'm sure this is an important release, and I know Apple did a lot of work with 3rd party developers to get them ready for this -- app breakage, at this point, is the fault of the application creators. But still, without much new eye candy, this was a pretty annoying upgrade, with not much apparent user benefit. Good thing it was so cheap.