I recently updated to OS X 10.6, Snow Leopard. I’m liking it—most things feel a little bit snappier. I also prefer the tweaks to editing events in iCal (which didn’t go far enough; 10.4 was better), and the changes to Exposé.

However, several apps (or “hacks,” if you prefer) broke with the update:

• WindowShadeX, a better minimizer. Unsanity isn’t talking, so no one knows whether this will ever be fixed.
• Megazoomer, because I use a laptop (with a small screen) and the full-screen functionality in Preview.app just doesn’t cut it. (And OS X’s default “Zoom” behavior—the green button—is downright silly in Preview.app.) Actually, Megazoomer still works, just not in 64-bit applications like Safari and Preview, my two most common use cases. The SIMBL library Megazoomer uses has been updated for Snow Leopard, so I wonder whether re-compiling Megazoomer in 64-bit might solve the problem.
• DeliciousSafari. The developer is working on a fix.
• SafariBlock. I was missing this one (partial functionality is restored by setting Safari to run in 32-bit), but I found GlimmerBlocker, and prefer it so far. Instead of working as a plugin, it intercedes itself as a proxy server, so it works for all browsers and is unaffected by browser updates. GlimmerBlocker can URL rewrite, and can also modify incoming HTML, Javascript, and CSS (and thus was the solution to an unrelated problem I was working on).
• Visor. The suggested workaround is to modify the application settings to run Terminal.app in 32-bit.

And most surprising of all (not a hack!):

• Parallels 3.0. If I had known about this one, I might not have upgraded. I’m not terribly pleased with Parallels (sloooow), but switching now would require re-installing Windows and dealing with the registration—which won’t work automatically because I’ve reinstalled it on the same machine a couple of times, so the license key is reported as “already in use.” If I decide switching is worth the trouble, I’m tempted to try the free VirtualBox.

UPDATE (12 Sep):The developer of DeliciousSafari has just sent me a beta of his newest Snow Leopard compatible version. Seems to be working well so far.

UPDATE (13 Sep): A Snow Leopard compatible version of DeliciousSafari has been released.

Posted in Computers