Hello, all. Much is going on with law school starting back up, and I hope to talk about it soon, but that will probably take a bit more brainpower than I honestly have at this moment. Suffice it for the moment to say things are going well, but they’re pretty intense.
As I previously mentioned when it became available for pre-order, the Snow Leopard is nearly upon us. Now, it’s been confirmed to be launching this Friday, September 28. Exciting!
… Well, I’m excited, at any rate.
Apple’s Knowledge Base has an article on known incompatible software that should be your first stop. They’ve also got a page on compatibility of printer and scanner software. A huge wealth of anecdotal compatibility information is available at the Snow Leopard Compatibility wiki on WikiDot, but it’s by no means complete. It doesn’t have DevonThink, for instance. Hopefully, if I have time this weekend I can help update it. Also, it looks to rely on user reports, whereas the list I’m compiling is based on official compatibility statements. Given that I need certain applications to work reliably and be supported, I find official statements much more useful than anecdotal reports, which may give a false sense of security. For sake of completeness, doesitworkonsnowleopard.com provides a similar service, with a much nicer UI, IMHO.
That brings me to my current point. Whenever a major new OS gets released from Apple, or Microsoft, or anywhere else, as much fun as it’d be just to go buy the thing and slap it on your PC and get all the newest bling, a certain amount of caution must be taken in making sure the software and hardware you need to actually use your computer to, you know, do things, will still work. To that end, I’m going to use this post as running tally of what I know about my production-critical stuff. Hopefully it’ll be useful to someone else besides me.
I’m certainly not the only one doing this.
These are presented in no particular order. Bold items are fully compatible. If Anyone reading this knows the compatibility status of an item I’m currently listing as “unknown,” please let me know. Thanks!
I’ve placed the table under the following cut. Also, for reasons beyond me, the table wrecks the layout of the blog. I’ll try to fix this this weekend, if I can. The table is still perfectly legible. Sorry for the inconvenience.
Edit: Added XSlimmer info.
Edit (27 August 2009 1028 CDT): Added (1) DevonThink Pro Office info, (2) stub for OfficeJet D135 multifunction office bonanza (doesn’t that sound more fun than printer/scanner/fax/copier?).
Edit (27 August 2009 1255 CDT): Added Mail Attachments Iconizer stub.
Edit (27 August 2009 2250 CDT): (1) Added information about the Snow Leopard wiki at Wikidot and Apple’s incompatibility KB articles; (2) added info about Pixma iP5200R; (3) updated info about Epson Perfection 4490 Office; (4) added info for Things.
Edit (28 August 2009 1025 CDT): Added info for HP OfficeJet D135.
Edit (28 August 2009 1031 CDT): (1) Added info for Newsfire; (2) moved Changelog above cut.
Edit (28 August 2009 1734 CDT): (1) Added updated info on Office 2008 compatibility; (2) changed link for VMWare Fusion to Team Fusion blogpost; (3) added info for Mail Attachments Iconizer; (4) info added for SuperDuper!; (5) fixed table width.
Edit (9 September 2009 1034 CDT): Canon Pixma iP5200R information updated (new drivers available!).
Edit (10 September 2009 2222 CDT): (1) On the Job information added; (2) doesitworkonsnowleopard.com link added; (3) HP OfficeJet D135 info updated; (4) Carbonite information updated; (5) updated to account for 10.6.1’s release.
| Item | Compatibility Status |
|---|---|
| DevonThink Pro Office | Partially Compatible: Some known minor glitches in current version, but nothing making the app unusable. New SL-compatible version expected in September.
Link goes to a post from Devon Technologies with more details about what does and doesn’t work. As a side-note, a bit of love for Twitter. I couldn’t find this information on their website, I guess because I was failing at Google, but a quick @reply to the President of DT got me a quick response with a link to the information I was looking for. Awesome. |
| Microsoft Office 2008 | Fully Compatible
Interestingly, MS is also claiming to have finally fixed “most” of the lingering, maddening bugs some of experience when trying to use Office 2008 with the Spaces virtual desktop feature built into Mac OS. I find it interesting that they say they had/needed Apple’s collaboration to finally fix this. I can’t quite understand what made Office so special that it couldn’t be made to work with a standard system feature that hundreds (thousands?) of other applications work with just fine. Strange. |
| Epson Perfection 4490 Office (Scanner) | Official Epson Statement: Partially Compatible: Rosetta Required. Click Here to check Epson’s site for 10.6 compatibility for all its products. For the Perfection 4490 Office, they’re not fully compatible yet, but say they’re working on it, and kindly suggest installing Rosetta and their Rosetta driver in the meantime, as detailed here. Personally, I’m gonna try to wait, if I can. I’d rather not have to install Rosetta if I can avoid it. I fear I’m not going to be able to hold out, as I’ve come to rely on it for my (ever more) paperless office. Drat. Apple KB Statement: Drivers included; feature completeness of drivers unknown. So, Epson says it only works under Rosetta emulation (ick) with drivers you need to download from them, but Apple seems to think it’s got working drivers included. That’s … not confusing at all. Either Apple’s KB article assumes you install Rosetta to get the “included drivers” or something else strange is going on here. At any rate, still not feeling very comfortable about my scanner under 10.6. |
| Canon Pixma IP5200R (Printer) | Driver software included with Snow Leopard.
Though this is excellent news and means the printer will at least work (theoretically), I’m waiting to see how feature-complete these drivers are before saying the OS is fully compatible out of the box. HP just posted new drivers on September 7 2009. Looking at the release notes, Bluetooth printing is not supported (I didn’t even know this printer did that), and using ColorSync for color matching doesn’t seem to work yet. Interesting. At least it’ll print. Still not ready to mark this one as fully compatible. Sigh. |
| MarsEdit | Fully Compatible |
| VMWare Fusion | Version 2.0.5 (Current): Experimental Support only.
For the moment, they provide only experimental support for hosting images off a 10.6 install, or running 10.6 as a guest virtual machine. For those who rely on being able to virtualize another OS, I’d see this as a major showstopper, unless booting into that OS via BootCamp is acceptable. |
| Samsung MagicTune | Unknown |
| Carbonite Online Backup | Support scheduled for October. |
| SuperDuper! Backup | Fully Compatible |
| Things (Task Manager) | Fully Compatible |
| NewsFire | Fully Compatible |
| Gutenprint Drivers Included with 10.6 (Printer Support Only); no official support. |
|
| XSlimmer | Fully Compatible |
| Mail Attachments Iconizer | Compatibility update pending. |
| On the Job | Fully Compatible. as of version 3.0.2. |
samsung magic tune is NOT working on 10.6.2
it opens up, but wont access to any of the options
Good to know, thanks. I’ll update the post as soon as possible.
That’s really unfortunate, too. MagicTune is required to calibrate the monitor’s color. … Guess I’ll be booting into Windows to calibrate after I update to Snow Leopard.