Snow Leopard Woes

Today I took out the Snow Leopard upgrade DVD that I've had for several months and installed it. I figured it was time for an upgrade.

Positives, positives... It didn't crash when installing... It probably is faster in some way. Ok, now for the negatives:

First thing I noticed: Had to recompile all the libraries. There was libSDL and libMAD present, but broken; or at least compiled for the wrong processor. Not to mention libFLAC and libMAD didn't recognize the host, so I had to force it to "x86_64-darwin". Other than that, the 4.2.1 gcc seems to be an improvement over 4.0.1 from the XCode that comes with 10.5.

Second thing: The definition of KB/MB/GB. I hate the 1000 bytes = 1 KB definition and the 1024 bytes = 1 KiB definition. I'm quite disappointed 10.6 now uses this definition.

And finally, the biggest problem: QuickTime X. To put it plainly, QuickTime X is complete crap. I can't believe Apple would release something like this. It is total trash. As when testing any video in a video player, I like to start with Myst's (the original!) Cyan logo video. First off, QuickTime X has almost no codec support; it has to call upon QuickTime 7 to play the videos. This already took about 10 seconds to load the video. Next problem: The video played at some ridiculously high resolution and wouldn't let me play it at normal size. In addition, the whole interface was ugly.

So, I'm looking around, and alas! QuickTime 7 has been pushed back to the Utilities folder. Following some other guys' advice in this post (of people who agree with me), I switched all QuickTime related files to be played with QuickTime 7. That's much better...

On a completely unrelated note: Background videos in Riven work now! Go watch the awesomeness that is the Tay linking book videos! So epic!