Snow Leopard: Applications

By Francine Schwieder

Applications

Of course, the first question everyone asks is whether the application WhatEver, that they absolutely must use, will work in Snow Leopard. There are several places that are compiling lists of tested applications, a very lengthy list is at MacIntouch. Personally I have been amazed at the number of my applications that do work. I put off installing Snow Leopard for two days, because I had a project that required Microsoft Word 2004, which was being done on the drive where I was going to do the install, and I was pessimistic about the likelihood of such an elderly version of Word working. To my surprise, it does work. Furthermore several other PowerPC applications I'm still using also work, the most astounding being Eudora 6.2--so I still don't have to master Apple's Mail program.

If you have PowerPC applications that you are still using, you will need Rosetta, which is not installed by default on an empty drive. It might install if you do an upgade to a drive that has PowerPC applications on it (I'm not sure about that). In any case, be sure to check the Optional installs and make sure that Rosetta is selected.

Another question is which applications are 64-bit. The answer: precious few. I can't think of any third party applications that are, and the only ones from Apple which are 64-bit are those that get installed by the Snow Leopard installer. Here's the list of Apple's 64-bit applications:

• Address Book
• Automator
• Calculator
• Chess
• Dashboard
• Dictionary
• Font Book
• Front Row
• iCal
• iChat
• Image Capture
• iSync
• Mail
• Photo Booth
• Preview
• QuickTime Player
• Safari
• Stickies
• System Preferences
• TextEdit
• Time Machine

You'll probably notice that several applications installed with the system, notably DVD Player, and all the iApps (from both iLife and iWork '09) are NOT on that list. Not to mention Aperture and Final Cut, which are also still 32-bit. Additionally, pretty much all of the Utilities are 64-bit. The only ones that aren't, and that come from Apple on my machine, are Grapher and Podcast Capture.

You may be wondering how you can tell whether your applications are 64-bit or not. If you want to check on this the easiest way is to open the Application folder in either List or Column view, select the first one, then bring up the Inspector window with Command-Option-i and run down the list of apps using the down arrow key. Applications that are 64-bit, such as TextEdit, will have a checkbox in the General section which offers the option to open in 32-bit mode, those that are 32-bit only, such as iMovie, don't have that. Also, some 32-bit applications from third parties may offer the option to open in Rosetta, meaning they are Universal applications, having code for both Intel and PowerPC machines. None of my Apple applications have that option.

If you are wondering why one would ever use either option, the answer is plugins. You may have a Universal application that runs in Intel, but it has a PowerPC plugin that is crucial to your work, and the plugin is PowerPC only. Similarly, you may have a 64-bit application with a 32-bit plugin that you require. The solution is to check the appropriate box, then launch the application.