My Apple Snow Leopard disk came Friday via Fedex, just as Apple promised.

Upon getting home I started the install process.  The quoted time for install was 45 mins, and that was pretty accurate.  I did an install over the top of my existing Leopard 10.5.8 installation on my Aluminum iMac 24 Dual 2.8Ghz with 4GB ram.  All-in-all the installation went 100% perfect.

Here are some observations so far:

• The default desktop background image of the auroa star field is more purple than Leopard’s
• Quicktime icon is new and cool
• Quicktime video playback is borderless
• Observed a bunch of 64-bit apps in Activity Monitor
• Expose has some improvements, click-hold an app icon in the Dock finds the open window
• iTunes appears unchanged

Application Compatibility Notes:

• VMware Fusion 2.0.5 works fine wih Windows 7 RC1
  
• Adobe Lightroom 2.4 works fine
• Photomatix Pro 3.1.3 works fine
• Handbrake 0.9.3 works fine
• Firefox 3.5.2 works fine
• Plants vs. Zombies game works fine
• Drobo Dashboard 1.5.1 with firware 1.3.4 works fine

In part Part 2 I will provide more in depth observations.

iPhone Screen shot

You can take a screen shot of your iPhone screen by pressing the home button at the bottom and the top power button at the same time.

Yes, surprisingly they are the same.  The big difference is how long you hold them both.  Hold the home button down first and then briefly press the top power button.  The iPhone screen should flash and viola!  Look in your photo library and you should see your iPhone screen shot you just shot.  Cool eh?

After updating my 1st gen iPhone to the new 2.0 software I now experience some crashing of my app store downloaded apps.  The apps crash orginally after downloading them, but instead happened after I did my first sync with my Mac with iTunes 7.7.   With this, iTunes proceeded to do a full backup of my phone, which I thought was unusual, but maybe from me purchasing some applications I thought.  After the backup completed 10 minutes later I ejected my phone and started to use some of the apps.  All of my apps that were downloaded from the app store would appear to start then crash out back to the home screen.

I have  various app store applications installed, some paid, and some free: monkey ball, enigmo, ebay, weatherbug, nytimes, airme, ureport, mobilenews, exposure.

To solve this problem I am deleting my applications from the iPhone home screen and then downloading and installing them again.  This appears to fix it.  Also you don’t have to worry about paying for the dowftware again as the app store remembers if you paid for an app already or not and tells you that you will get this as a free download.  Oh, you might want to hold off syncing your iPhone until apple fixes this problem.

Anyone else seeing this problem with the 3G or 1st gen iPhones?

Editorial note:  Here is the latest news that summurizes the various iPhone problems.  http://www.appleinsider.com/articles/08/07/18/iphone_3g_and_2_0_affected_by_buggy_software_sensors_wireless.html

There’s been many noted problems with the latest iPhone 2.0 activation and the 3g iphone activation.  I actually was able to download and install it Friday morning around 7:15am.  In total it took about 45 minutes for the download, iPhone sync, backup, install, validation, activation, and data copy.  The good thing was it was all automated via iTunes.

Once 2.0 was loaded on my first gen iPhone I immediately bought/downloaded and installed Monkey Ball.  Its Sega’s cool new iPhone game that is getting a lot of attention.  Its a pretty fun game, but I haven’t been able to get past the level with no walls yet.  I could be in trouble as this is set to easy….