My usual practice with Mac OS X updates is to wait a week or so (or
maybe a bit longer) to see how the proverbial dust settles and whether
some serious bug crops up for early adopters.
However, in the case of last week's Mac OS X 10.6.5 update, I have not
been Snow Leopard's biggest
fan, and while version 10.6.4 was an improvement over previous builds,
I've still found it as buggy as a flophouse mattress, so I was very
eager to see if the version 10.6.5 update, released last Wednesday,
would fix several Snow Leopard problems that have been driving me
nuts.
Some of My Issues with 10.6.4
Spaces Craps Out
Spaces support that kept crapping out, taking keyboard response with it,
requiring endless Dock quit and restart cycles - sometimes half a dozen
or more in the span of an hour in order to keep things working. Without
a little AppleScript hack called
Quitdock, this one would have kept me in good old stable OS X 10.5 Leopard.
Keyboard Input Dies
Less relentless, but still tedious even once in a while, I've found
that keyboard input would also sometimes die randomly independent of
the Spaces switching issue, and in those instances it wouldn't respond
to quitting and restarting the Dock, leaving me with just the trackpad
or mouse to shut things down in a reasonably civilized manner and
reboot the system.
Spontaneous Wake from Sleep
My MacBook would
also randomly wake up from sleep unbidden when booted in Snow Leopard.
I found that turning off AirPort before I put the computer to sleep
helped to some degree, but spontaneous wake-ups also happen with
AirPort disabled.
Weird Transcriptions with MacSpeech Dictate
MacSpeech Dictate
1.5 running in OS X 10.6.4 peppers your transcribed text with
transposed letters and/or punctuation at the ends of words or phrases
(concededly a MacSpeech compatibility problem, but still maddeningly
frustrating). Running in Leopard, the same version of Dictate does not
do this, nor, for that matter, do any of the other bugs cited here
manifest in OS X 10.5 on the same computer using the same suite of
applications.
This is less of an issue with the recent Dragon Dictate 2.0
successor to MacSpeech Dictate, which requires OS X 10.6, and
which is pretty much the main reason I've been using Snow Leopard on
the MacBook since Dragon Dictate arrived. Unfortunately, I'm still
getting scrambled letters at the ends of words and phrases when using
Dictate in some applications directly rather than in the Dictate
notepad.
My MacBook Runs Hotter
Adding insult to injury, my 2.0 GHz MacBook with 4 GB RAM runs some
15° to 20°C hotter in Snow Leopard than it does in Leopard with
the same suite of applications in play. I absolutely hate fan noise,
but it's a nearly constant background accompaniment in Snow
Leopard.
Problems Don't Exist in 10.5.8
None of these issues are evident when booted from Mac OS X 10.5.8
running on a different partition on the same machine and using
essentially the same suite of applications and utilities.
Hoping for the Best
So I was hoping for better things in OS X 10.6.5, so last Wednesday
evening I downloaded the humongous 977.21 MB Combo updater. After a couple
of days scanning reports of others' experiences and finding nothing
dire chronicled, on Friday evening I set about installing the update so
I could try it over the weekend.
One of the reasons I prefer going with a freestanding update
installer, as opposed to using Software Update, is that one can do some
prudent preparation before running the update, such as a file backup.
I'd just done a global backup on Tuesday, so I was able to skip that
and move on to the next step in my customary update sequence, which is
to quit all running applications and run a slate of system maintenance
routines - repairing permissions, running the cron maintenance scripts,
cleaning system caches, etc., from the Automation tab in the great
little freeware system maintenance utility OnyX.
MacFixIt has long advised booting into Safe Boot mode (hold down the
Shift key during a reboot) before running the installer, which I
confess I usually don't bother with, since starting up in Safe Boot
mode takes a long time, because it runs a media scan during the bootup
process. If you go that route, be prepared to wait about five minutes
or so before the login screen appears (which it will in Safe Boot even
if you have automatic login configured).
I was only moving up from 10.6.4 to 10.6.5, so I could have gotten
away with the incremental
"Delta" version of the standalone installer, which is "only" a
607.21 MB download, or even just let Software Update do its thing, but
I prefer to use the Combo version, even if I'm only moving up one
version number. Historically, many users have anecdotally reported that
they encounter fewer issues when using the Mac OS X Combo updaters than
with the incremental Deltas or Software Update. With rare exceptions
I've always gone with the Combos and have never experienced any
problems.
Nor did I this time. Everything went very smoothly, with the entire
update process (not counting the file download) taking about half an
hour.
Bugs Are Worse in 10.6.5
Unfortunately, I'm obliged to report that that most or all of the
Snow Leopard bug issues described above seem to be still with us in
version 10.6.5, and in most instances are actually worse. The Spaces
hang is even more frequent, and Dock quit is getting a real workout.
The MacBook seems to run maybe a couple of degrees hotter in 10.6.5
than it did in even 10.6.4, with the fan running most of the time
again.
The spontaneous wake-up problem is still a problem, indeed even
worse than it was in 10.6.4, with the MacBook waking up seemingly at
random at any time with no evident external stimulus. And Dragon
Dictate still transposes the last two letters of words when dictating
into Tex-Edit Plus, although, as I
noted above, that's probably a Dictate problem.
And a New Problem
But there's also something new. OS X 10.6.5 broke my keystroke
triggers for
TypeIt4Me macros, which I am totally addicted to and lost without.
This one was weird, as the keyboard triggers seemed to work fine for a
day or so and then crapped out for no apparent reason although the
macros were still accessible from the pulldown menulet.
I had to reboot the system in order to restore proper TypeIt4Me
function. It's too early to know as yet, but I hope this was just a
transient anomaly that won't be a persistent plague, and I'm a bit more
optimistic after a reinstall of the utility and three days of TypeIt4Me
working fine.
Looking Toward 10.6.6
However, one impression that's impossible to objectively quantify is
that notwithstanding these frustrating issues, 10.6.5 seems to have
more of the polished, mature software "feel" I liked so much in later
builds of OS X 10.5. Now it needs the objective stability to go
along with the "feel." It leaves me back in the mode of waiting for OS
10.6.6 in hope of some improvement, but it's not a very lively hope.
