Leopard,Creative Suite CS2, Cubase SX 3 and Office 2004 compatibility

I thought I'd share some quick thoughts on my upgrade to Leopard. I have read about various problems which put me off installing, and I wish I had just ignored them. I've been using Leopard since 10.5.1.

Installation

I performed an archive and install of Leopard from Tiger 10.4.11 on a 1.67Mhz Powerbook. It was a seemless install. The migration of software and user settings was flawless and more comprehensive than Tiger. I highly recommend this option, having used archive and install since OS 10.1 without problem. Some points to note:

** deactivate Adobe Creative Suite CS2 before beginning the install and reactivate it afterwards**

It is a quick and painless procedure that takes about a minute but will save loads of headaches later on.

I also repaired disk permissions and ran a disk repair using Disk Utility from the Tiger install CD before starting the Leopard installer.

The Good - Compatible software and hardware

Adobe Creative Suite CS2 - General

The only noted problem is shared with CS3 and is an Apple problem, not Adobes: the text input becomes unresponsive after a while and requires restarting the application. Hopefully Apple will fix this soon. For me, this hasn't been too much of a problem because I use the mouse and keyboard short cuts to change values instead of typing in boxes.

Other than that, I have had no problems with Photoshop CS2, Go Live CS2 and Indesign CS2. I've also not encountered any problems with Acrobat 7 although I don't use it much and most of the functinos I did use it for are now in preview anyway. I was also fortunate to get creative suite CS2.3 which has Acrobat 8 should the need arise.

Web Gallery causes photoshop to crash, but a fix is available here:

http://kb.adobe.com/selfservice/viewContent.do?externalId=kb402781&sliceId=2

Cubase SX 3

I have not used Cubase SX 3 extensively yet. However, I have created a few complex MIDI / Sample compositions with lots of equipment connected without problems. The score editor and MIDI editors all seem to be working without problem. All of the VST instruments included appear to work including Halion 2.

I've also had no problems yet with the following: Omnigraffle 3.2.4, Snapz ProX, Bryce 6.1, Omniweb 5.7 (well not related to Leopard nyway), Amadaeus Pro, Microsoft Office 2004, JPeg Deux.

Hardware wise, my Canon LiDE 70 scanner works as does my Canon Pixma 5200 printer.

The Bad

Stacks - You can't click on an icon to bring up the window easily, itis now an option in the stack. Also, the stack icon shows the first icon in the stack which is really confusing and makes finding the correct stack a difficult task. Thankfully this is fixed in 10.5.2 coming January 2008.

Finder - It works in a slightly different, but more annoying, way than in Tiger. The finder now views every folder in your current view setting unless you specify that you always want to view the folder in a particular view. Before it remembered the last setting the folder was viewed in. It is an annoying change, especially as it seems prone to forgeting the settings. Hopefullly this will be fixed in 10.5.2.

The Menubar - Download OpaqueMenuBar and drag the slider to 85% for a reasonable looking menu bar.

Conclusion

I hope this is useful to someone thinking of upgrading. It is worth noting that I'm running all of the software natively on PPC arcitecture and not under Rosetta, which has the potential to introduce problems.

Leopard is excellent, but I recommend waiting until 10.5.2 in January.

I will update as soon as I find any issues.