So, I'm running the Mac OS X 10.6 Snow Leopard developer preview on my Mac mini.  It's speedy, so far, but that's one of the few good things I have to say about it.  There are a number of annoying features I've discovered.

The "lock screen" option of the keychain access menu doesn't just show the screensaver, now, it immediately shuts off the display.  Not a big deal, but if I want the display to stay on and just see the screensaver - looks like I'm out of luck.  Haven't found an option to get the old behavior back.

I've crashed Dock.app a few times so far when using Spaces and multiple Terminal.app windows.  If I open two Terminal.app windows in space 1, then drag one to space 2, the whole screen locks for a bit, and the dock reloads.  I'm assuming it's crashing, and restarting, but I don't know enough about the internals to really tell.

Speaking of Spaces, whenever I do a software update and reboot, the hotkeys for spaces are unmapped.  I have to go into system preferences and remap them again.  10.5 had this problem, too.

Safari 4.0 sucks.  Okay, it's not 100% suck - the HTML 5.0 video works well (http://www.youtube.com/html5).  Everything else about it is a bit disappointing.  The "top sites" is a nice idea, but it just seems too slow and laggy on the Mac mini.  The autocomplete in the address bar doesn't wait for a pause before trying to autocomplete, and results in a flickering effect as the URL is being typed.  I think it's the autocomplete that sometimes chops off the last character of the URL typed, but maybe that's some other bug.  Also, repeatedly hitting command+l to move focus to the address bar sometimes results in the address bar not being able to receive focus at all - requiring a restart of the browser.  Sorry Apple - Safari 4.0 just isn't too nice.

MacPorts doesn't build some things correctly.  Specifically, MPlayer won't build due to some problem with libmad:

fixed.c:1: error: CPU you selected does not support x86-64 instruction set

Not really a Snow Leopard problem, but still an annoyance (might have something to do with the -march=i486 being passed to gcc - hmm!).  I'm sure the MacPorts folks will have it fixed in no time, though.  At least coreutils builds.

64-bit.  I'm not sure of the details, but it seems that most things, including the kernel, are still 32-bit:

(fuzzball:21:43)% uname -m
i386

And the compilers that Xcode (3.2) installs only seem to support i386 (i686) and ppc:

% ls -la /usr/bin/*gcc*
lrwxr-xr-x 1 root wheel      7 Jun 16 19:10 /usr/bin/gcc -> gcc-4.2
-rwxr-xr-x 1 root wheel  97392 May 18 13:27 /usr/bin/gcc-4.0
-rwxr-xr-x 1 root wheel 166128 May 18 14:13 /usr/bin/gcc-4.2
-rwxr-xr-x 1 root wheel 369696 May 18 13:27 /usr/bin/i686-apple-darwin10-gcc-4.0.1
-rwxr-xr-x 1 root wheel 816560 May 18 14:13 /usr/bin/i686-apple-darwin10-gcc-4.2.1
-rwxr-xr-x 1 root wheel 373792 May 18 13:27 /usr/bin/powerpc-apple-darwin10-gcc-4.0.1
-rwxr-xr-x 1 root wheel 820496 May 18 14:13 /usr/bin/powerpc-apple-darwin10-gcc-4.2.1

Not sure what's going on with that.. it seems that all binaries on the system are universal with i386 and x86-64, though.

The desktop icons are completely gone, now.  With 10.4, in addition to the HD icon on the desktop, I would usually get an icon for my NFS volume that I usually mount on login.  With 10.5, Apple ditched the NFS icon on the desktop.  Now, with 10.6, I have no icons on the desktop.  What's going on?

Apple still hasn't fixed the sound issues that were in 10.4 and 10.5.  For example, if I'm in a terminal and do something that generates a system beep, my default sound will play.  However, there's a nice delay often accompanied by a little 'pop' sound before the default sound plays.  If I keep generating the system beep within a couple seconds, there is no delay in the sound, and no pop.  However, if I wait 30 seconds to a minute - and then generate a beep again, the delay and pop is experienced.  This also happens when I adjust the volume control via the keys on the keyboard (my Sun keyboard, but they still work).  It's really annoying.

For the good, now…

It's fast.  Applications seem to start up much faster than on 10.5, and the system seems much more responsive.  I haven't bothered to do any benchmarking, but it certainly seems like an improvement.

I guess the dynamic columns in top(1) are nice.  Depending on the $COLUMNS of the terminal, top will display more and more detail about the processes in the form of additional columns.  Not bad.

I don't recall if 10.5 had this, but there is a nice GUI (wow, usually I don't say nice when using GUI in the same sentence) SSH agent password prompt.  Looks like I can now unlock my private key, keep it in memory, and allow multiple applications access to it.  I wonder if there's a similar one for GPG.. I am betting not.

Ok, I think that's it… maybe these things will be fixed by the time it's officially released!

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