Snow Leopard Problems

I installed Snow Leopard less than 48 hours ago. So far, these are the ostensible bugs which I have bumped into:

  • Upon installation, my system hung on first boot-up. A hard reset took care of that.
  • Once or twice, my desktop icons were nowhere to be found.
  • Google Gears doesn't work in Safari all of a sudden. I had to Google how to uninstall it before Gmail would load.

  • (Update: Not a Snow Leopard bug, more in a bit.) The top half of my (laptop's built in, not external) monitor occasionally flashes black for a millisecond. This occurs at seemingly arbitrary times and blackness lasts just long enough to be noticeable and annoying. (I like to imagine that it contains a subliminal message -- "IGNORE THIS FLASH" -- and I am immune to its effects.)

    Update (2009-10-31): It turns out that my MacBook Pro, which has two video cards, has a problem with one of them. (Apple will probably fix this when I ask them to.) Installing Snow Leopard must have switched my setting to use the problematic low-power card. Switching to the beefier card (via System Preferences) has resolved this issue for now.

  • Spotlight sporadically won't find the application I was searching for, such as iChat, Keychain Access, or System Preferences. This is important because Spotlight is my app launcher, and now it's not reliable for that task. Not fixed in 10.6.1. Update (2009-10-31): This problem hasn't happened for a while. My Spotlight index was rebuilt, so if you have this issue, try rebuilding your Spotlight index.

  • The "Calculate All Sizes" option fails on some folders of a network drive of mine -- even on folders with no more than 8 files. (Added 2009-09-07)
  • I realize it was not officially supported, but it was possible to back up to a network drive (without an AirPort Base Station) via Time Machine in 10.5 Leopard, but now on Snow Leopard, backups have been hanging indefinitely. (Added 2009-09-07)
  • Sometimes switching Spaces via the keyboard has left the spaces indicator on my screen after I let go of all the keys, and then I could not use my (MacBook Pro's built-in) keyboard until I logged out and then back in. (Added 2009-09-08) Update This is still a problem, as of 10.6.2.

You can imagine that some of these quirks are damned annoying.

Still, there have been some really nice little improvements, like the dock & Exposé integration. I think the net change is positive, but boy am I ready for Apple to release 10.6.1 with a few bug fixes! Update, September 11, 2009: I just upgraded to 10.6.1, and some of these issues are still not resolved. I am updating the list above when I know for sure that an issue has or has not been resolved.

Finally, I'd like to note that some of these things could well be caused by third-party apps. That said, it's clearly the OS upgrade that triggered these problems. Apple, you've let me down.

Written: September 3rd, 2009. (Updated: October 31, 2009 at 6:10pm.)
Author: Alan Hogan (@alanhogan_com).  Contact · About