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Following on from Part 1 of my opportunity to play with Snow Leopard (OS 10.6) I thought I’d give a bit more feedback on the applications I ran under it.

Now, bear in mind that I only had a few hours to play with this machine so my testing was very limited in scope.

Apple iLife 08
I tried out the latest versions of iTunes and iPhoto and they both appeared to work flawlessly. I didn’t have the time to test out iMovie, iDVD, iWeb and Garageband, sorry.

Apple iWork 08
I *briefly* played with Pages and Keynote and I didn’t notice any obvious problems.

Adobe Photoshop CS3
Surprisingly Photoshop, arguably the heavyweight of the applications I tried, seemed perfectly happy on Snow Leopard. My testing was of course fairly limited, but I did edit a high megapixel digital photo with about 40 layers on it, running through various filters and other retouching operations.

Dreamweaver CS3
Dreamweaver CS3 seemed perfectly happy under Snow Leopard.

Epson Scan
I tried using an Epson V200 scanner using the current version of the Epson Scan software but it would simply quit itself every time I tried to run the software.

EyeTV 3
Runs but couldn’t find my EyeTV Hybrid USB TV Tuner dongle…

Firefox
I tried running Firefox 3, a basic installation with no plugins and again, it seems just fine.

Flip4Mac
The basic, free, Flip4Mac codecs for Quicktime seemed to work just fine, playing WMV movies with no problem.

GarageSale
The latest version of this popular eBay auction management software seemed to run just fine.

Google Earth
The latest version of Google Earth seems to run just fine under Snow Leopard.

Google Sketchup
No problems to report here either.

Handbrake
I didn’t have access to any DVDs to rip but the app at least launches. I will see if I can get access to Snow Leopard again so that I can test encoding times.

Opera
The latest version of the Opera browser seems to work fine, I only played with this briefly.

Super Duper
I had a problem with this in that it said it couldn’t take ownership of the OS drive when I tried to clone it.

Skype
No problems to report with the latest version of Skype.

Transmit
This popular FTP package seemed to run with no problems, I made a few successful uploads and downloads.

Twitterific
Seems to work fine.

VLC
No problem playing back several AVI movies

So overall most stuff I tried seemed to work just fine out of the box, although a few apps may need updating.

Now, bear in mind that this is only the first developer preview release. It is by no means complete and you have to expect some bugs and/or performance issues here and there, after all, it’s not finished yet and probably won’t be for the best part of a year!

Filed under: Computing
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