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Apple Leopard Not As Error Free as It Should Be

Some Leopard early adopters bitten by installation bugs ars technica has a post out on reports of some early Leopard adopters experiencing bugs with the new Mac OS. I haven’t upgraded myself yet. I almost did right at the launch simply because I’m always one to try the new and (hopefully) better, but now I’m glad that I didn’t.

The biggest reason that I’m glad that I didn’t is that apparently Leopard doesn’t work with Adobe Flash — which seems like kind of a big deal to me. Adobe Flash runs Zooomr’s photo uploader and we’ve confirmed that anyone that installs Leopard can no longer upload photos to Zooomr.

Kristopher Tate, our Founder and CTO at Zooomr, blames Adobe for this and has posted a link on our upload page where people can tell Adobe how they feel about this. Apparently Adobe has not yet updated Flash to work with the new Mac OS Leopard. This seems like a pretty large oversight. There is a forum post on this issue here.

As for me, I’m going to wait on upgrading to Leopard for sure at least until this bug with Flash is fixed. I’d hate to not be able to upload my photos to Zooomr. I may even wait a bit more than that just to make sure all the kinks are ironed out. I have heard generally positive reports from people who have upgraded, despite the obvious reason that I can’t upgrade at present.

I still haven’t upgraded my PCs to Vista or even tried Vista. In part this is because I switched my primary computer to a Mac last Fall. Microsoft is sending me a Vista upgrade in the mail though which should arrive any day and I’m looking forward to testing Vista out finally. I still use my Media Center PC in my living room, but my biggest complaint with it is that my music library of over 100,000 mp3s loads so slowly on Media Center and then it frequently stops playing for 20 or 30 seconds at a time while I have my music and photos on. I’m sure I’m putting stress on the system as I’m accessing my music library over a gigabit network from a Drobo on another PC. I’m hoping that Vista will make my MCE experience a bit smoother.

11 Replies to “Apple Leopard Not As Error Free as It Should Be”

  1. Hi Thomas,

    What exactly doesn’t work with Flash? I’m not seeing any Flash issues at all with Leopard on Intel (Pandora, YouTube, etc).

    Tom

  2. Oh wow, talk about overreacting 🙂
    From the page linked to Adobe, the file upload feature does not work properly and it is being worked on.
    You made it sound like all of Flash was disabled, *phew*

    Why use Flash for uploading files btw? not criticizing but I’m curious.
    I agree that the install problems shouldn’t have happened though.

  3. I get a kick out of the compatibility chart adobe has for leapard. http://www.adobe.com/support/products/pdfs/leopardsupport.pdf Apparently you need a special acrobat reader update, too, so it makes brilliant sense to post this chart in pdf format. With the delay of leapard due to iPhone, you would hope that folks would have had time to get things compatible, but perhaps Apple did not leverage this delay with key software companies like Adobe or things weren’t ready for beta (though I’m doubtful).

  4. As a Vista guy I sympathize with Leopard users. When Vista first came out I went through all the same issues like major applications that weren’t upgraded to work with Vista even though the beta had been out for a year.

    I’m sure Leopard’s disappearing volumes, compatibility issues and their own version of the BSOD will be ironed out via a slew of updates, just like they were in Vista. OS software is a complex beast these days and no one is immune from bugs.

    The only people I really feel sorry for are vocal minority of Apple fanboys that live in glass houses, they threw a lot of stones at Vista when it first came out because of issues like this and now they’re getting them chucked back at them twice as hard by Karma, and she’s got a pretty good arm.

  5. I think that you’ll be pleasantly surprised with Vista Media Center’s performance with large libraries. It ain’t perfect, but it’s a lot better. It should be able to handle streaming MP3’s from a USB drive over the network no problem. I can’t imagine throughput being so low that MP3 playback would be affected. With an effective rate of about 320Mbps, the USB connection should be your bottleneck. This plenty of bandwidth to move your MP3’s.

    HD video, however, may be another story, though technically it should be able to support multiple HDTV streams simultaneously.

    Good luck with the upgrade.

  6. Wow, Thomas. Someone needs to school Kristopher about Web Accessibility.

    Why he wouldn’t have a non-flash alternative to the upload page is beyond me.

    The number one thing in many web developer’s minds is making sure their site is accessible. That means making sure it’s still functional with JavaScript and plugins turned off.

    Kris is a brilliant developer, but he shouldn’t blame Adobe. Why blame Adobe when this problem could have been prevented months ago by just developing with a view to accessibility?

  8. Thomas, the Adobe issue is minor, especially considering that Apple did not give 3rd party application vendors access to the final build of Leopard until it went on sale last Friday (Gotta love Apple and their openness)

    I’m seeing way too many problems with networking on Leopard right now, I’m getting very frustrated just trying to get it to see the other Macs on my network, and the Apple forums indicate I’m not alone.

    My biggest hope is that the Airport Extreme disk problem will be fixed soon (if your computer goes to sleep it won’t reconnect to the Airport disk until the airport station is restarted, nice)

    I’m putting blame in Apple’s court, not Adobe.

  9. Thomas,

    I _had_ the same problem.

    With MCE 2005 there is a great solution to the large music library SLOWNESS problem….

    Setup a RAM Disk, have your library files stored there, and then either use a windows junction to point to the file, or change the registry to point to the file. I’m fairly sure there is a thread about this at Green Button, but feel free to contact me directly if you need specifics.

    Joelwo

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