Snow Leopard Rocks

I love Snow Leopard. Well, almost everything. It's very smooth most of the time and there are some very nice features to it. But there are a couple of niggling things that I've sent feedback to Apple about and you might want to as well. Here are some of the things that I hope they fix in an upcoming update:

Default Calenders in iCal

I use Mail, iCal, and Address Book to connect to our company's Exchange Server. However, when a third party application downloads a .ics file you cannot choose which calendar to add it to. When you open the ics file, it adds the event to the Home calendar and then you have to choose which calendar to add it to.

Why not add a dialog box asking you which calendar you want to assign it to if you have more than one or allow you to choose a default calendar when adding events outside of Mail.

No Address Book Respect

Because I use Mail for work, I get emails from new people that I want to add to my Exchange Contacts list. But when you add a contact for Mail, it goes to your All Contacts general category rather than to my Exchange Contacts category. As a result, I have to launch Address Book and manually add it to Exchange and then delete it from the general category.

If Mail is going to be used in the corporate environment, it should respect corporate assets.

VPN Support through Cisco

One of the things that got me excited about Snow Leopard is the ability to use built in VPN to access a Cisco Concentrator so I wouldn't have to use Cisco's client. When you use Cisco's client and you want to reboot your machine, the client will present a dialog box awaiting user input and will cancel any reboot.

Apple's VPN connection does not do that and it is very fast to connect. The problem with Apple's client is that in the first release of Snow Leopard, using the VPN client would allow for the resolution of internal server names at work. However, when 10.6.1 was released, I lost that functionality. Now I have to add our domain extension to server names just so that it would know which server to connect to. Sometimes it works, other times it doesn't.

The funny thing is, when I go back to Cisco's client, I can resolve server names again but it's giving me problems with accessing outside Internet locations.

I think that this would be a small fix on Apple's part that would help a lot of users in the corporate space.

Firmware problems

Quite a few Snow Leopard users have experienced the slowness issue where their Mac will suddenly freeze for 10-30 seconds and then become responsive again. QuickTime movies will often stutter or suddenly stop for a few seconds. It's frustrating for sure. A PRAM reset helped (search Apple's online support for what that means) but a number of users of newer Macs reported that performing an EFI Firmware downgrade helped.

Well I tried it and it worked. No more pauses. Apple then released a new version of the EFI firmware which I tried. Pauses came back. I downgraded again and the pauses have all but literally disappeared. If you have to know, my brand new 15.4" aluminum core MacBook Pro is running version 1.6 and all seems to be fine.

But overall, I still love Snow Leopard. The fan rarely comes on. It just seems so powerful that it brushes off whatever I throw at it. Even launching a virtual machine while watching a movie didn't even cause a hiccup. And this is while driving a second external monitor.

I'm sure that the coming patches will eliminate these few pesky problems and make the Mac experience so much better.

iPhone for Business and Microsoft Exchange

I'm sitting down to catch a few rays from the tube last night and an iPhone ad comes on. Nothing unusual there. But what caught my attention was that the content being showed on the iPhone was directed at business users, not the consumer. I believe it was the "All These Years" ad but after seeing it today, somehow it looked different to me.

But in any case - I was struck at how this ad was really directed at the suits and how much of the recent iPhone developments are a perfect trifecta pointing at exactly that.

First, you have AT&T creating a new iPhone add-on service plan for corporate accounts. 

Second, the impending release of the SDK has business written all over it. In my mind, Apple would want to release the SDK with a lot of fanfare. Not fanfare in touting all the technical details but by trotting out new applications that they or third parties have developed. I'm betting that Microsoft Exchange connectivity will be one of them (and no Ethel, using IMAP is not an option for far too many users so let's not get into that argument). IBM is not hiding the fact that it's working on a Lotus Notes client for the iPhone and there have been others who are chomping at the bit to do the same.

Third, in preparation for the onslaught, Apple releases a premium model that business users with a lot of disposable income or flush expense accounts will pick up. That extra storage space is not only good for all those movie rentals from iTunes, but forms a great sandbox spot for third-party applications and user storage space to reside. It also makes a great profit generating machine when the 8 GB models are sold out and some buyers will willingly pony up an additional $100 even though they hadn't planned on doing so.

If this is truly the case, and that before the end of February we will see this kind of business connectivity, I would surmise that Apple has way underestimated it's next quarter results. No wonder the iPhone supply is considered volatile right now.

I know a lot of salespeople in the company I work for would gladly front the cash to buy their own iPhone if true Exchange capability (ok, at least email and events) were part of the package. I did without Exchange support. But I wanted to buy before the rush.

For the record, I have no insider information and everything concerning knowledge of Apple's and other entities' activities are freely available on the Internet or pure speculation on my part. I do own stocks in APPL so I prefer to be bullish.