My First Imressions of Snow Leopard: Not So Hot

UPDATE: I just spoke to my dad and he said he doesn't have any of the problems I experienced with iPhoto after he upgraded to Snow Leopard. Must be an artifact of the demo software being run at the Apple Store?

I just got back from a quick trip to the Apple Store to check out Snow Leopard. Within about 5 minutes of playing with it, I discovered 3 bugs that may be dealbusters keeping me from getting a Mac in the near-future:

1. Expose doesn't work correctly if you don't take your fingers off of the trackpad at the end of each gesture. I could probably get used to this after awhile, but shouldn't have to. This definitely affects how smoothly the Mac appears to operate. (HT Ali)
   
2. Expose seems significantly slower than before. Not by a huge margin, but enough to be noticeable... and annoying.
3. The biggest issue I found was in iPhoto. If I open a photo, zoom in on it using the multi-touch trackpad, and then try to scroll around it, there is a hideous lag — taking many seconds (up to 20?) to move around the photo where in Leopard it was virtually instantaneous. I take and work with a lot of digital photos so this is a huge deal to me. Granted, there may be a lot of third-party applications I could get to work around this, but I shouldn't have to. Especially with iPhoto being an application bundled with the Mac. Especially with Snow Leopard being marketed as doing things faster. Frankly speaking, I'd prefer working on photos in Picasa on my netbook than deal with this. (One of the employees said it could be because of all the background applications running in the store — has anyone else experienced this?) I was able to replicate this issue on several MacBook Pros in the store, including the 15-inch and 17-inch models.
   

Another change I don't like as well is the new grid pattern in Expose. I much prefer the older view which shows larger views of each window. I wonder why Apple didn't simply make the new grid-view an option?

I also had to force-quit out of Excel when testing out how quickly it shuts down. It took about a minute for the Mac to actually respond to the force-quit.

I was only at the store for about 30 minutes, so didn't have a good chance to fully play around with the new operating system, but my initial impressions are that I like Leopard better. I hope to get in again sometime next week to play with it some more.

If Snow Leopard has these issues that are so easily discoverable, I wonder what other bugs it has lurking beneath the surface? I want to get a Mac because I want to get something that operates more smoothly than my PCs. These changes seem to move Macs in the opposite direction. At this point, I regret not purchasing a Mac with Leopard on it and waiting for Apple to work out the bugs in Snow Leopard.

P.S. -- Here is a roundup of other know Snow Leopard glitches by PC World. (HT Ali)