nEvill

If you’re like me you frequently merge pdfs in OS X preview.  Moving to Snow Leopard caused me a few minutes grief as dragging and dropping one pdf into the sidebar of another pdf didn’t merge the two… it simply opened both in the same preview window.

To achieve the merge in Snow Leopard you now have to drag the 2nd pdf onto the pdf icon on the sidebar.  This merges the 2nd pdf into the 1st one and you can then save the original with the added content.  Easy, if a little less obvious than before.

So I bought Snow Leopard and went through the upgrade process in under an hour… it took the following steps 1) insert disc 2) click install 3) confirm…   job done.  So far so good as I now have Exchange integration into mail, ical etc.  Good by and good riddance to Entourage!

So the fiirst 2 macs upgraded without a hitch, my macbook and my father’s mac mini.

Mac number 3 didn’t however… The upgrade portion went fine but when it rebooted it appeared to pause with a blue screen with a cursor.  A quick google returned a couple of forum postings and an official Apple help page suggesting a full  ‘Archive and Install’ or a quick dip into the command line and the removal of a few dodgy APE files.  I went for the second option and this resolved the issue, with a reboot presenting Leopard in all it’s glory.

The dodgy files were related to a preference pane utility which I must have put on there over the years… I guess it would have been nice for the install to warn about them but it was only a matter of minutes to retrofix the problem so no real harm.

One thing to note is that the Apple help page suggests the rm -rf followed by the long fullname of the files… I would recommend actually browsing to the file locations first before deleting them from their parent directories.  This just reduces the risk of you nailing the wrong files if you mistype the rm command.

First impressions of Leopard are great, love the stacks and the improved finder.  Coverflow is also a great way to work out what docs contain and I like the easier to navigate tree views.. Are the folders bigger? Maybe they just seam easier to click.

Other than that I’ll be looking forward to finding out the other bits as I use it… wonder how

As I’m working in central Bristol at the moment I was able to walk to the local Apple specialist Western Computers to buy my copy of Leopard freshly launched that evening. Once I had backed up my data I cleared 5gb of working space off of the MacBook and followed the almost non-existant instructions on upgrading my laptop to Leopard.  The process was a) stick the disk in b) click on the button to install c) confirm the drive to install to d) click again to go for it!That was it, I went for a walk, watched a bit of tv and it was done… all installed, no user interaction needed.  Just what I needed after a fiddly day of Visual Studio 2005 development.Hats off to Apple, I have a new upgraded OS with all the spangly features with zero hassle… love that file coverflow.