SA3.5 and Snow Leopard

So John, How does SA3.5 react with Snow Leopard. I heard that Rosetta is not a part of Snow Leopard. So can this stop SA3.5 from working if I upgrade? Am I going to have to bite the bullet and move to SA4, if I upgrade to Snow Leopard? Thanks for your feedback.

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  • Like every other apple developer, we're still waiting to get access to the final release version of snow leopard. So i can't make any absolute comments on Studio Artist and the official Snow Leopard release until we get that official release version installed on a machine here. Hopefully apple will post the 10.6 release disc image on the developer server tomorrow on aug 28th so i can run that final test. I don't anticipate any problems.

    If you have an older PPC computer you can't run 10.6. If you have an intel computer you can run 10.6. Rosetta is available on 10.6, you need to select it in the custom install options when you install 10.6.

    Here's an excerpt from a snow leopard review that discusses rosetta support.

    There are some other notable options in the customized installation window. Rosetta, the technology that enables code compiled for PowerPC chips to run on Intel chips, is available--but is not installed by default. Rosetta only takes up a few megabytes of drive space, and without it older programs simply won't run, so if you have such programs, that option is worth checking. To find out if an App is PowerPC only, select an old app and choose Get Info; if its Kind is listed as Application (PowerPC), it needs Rosetta.

    If you don't, and if you later try to launch a PowerPC app, Snow Leopard will pop up a window to explain that you need Rosetta and offer to install it for you (via Apple's Software Update utility). I can only assume that making Rosetta optional is an attempt by Apple to goad users to upgrade their apps and to shame developers who still haven't recompiled their apps to run on Intel chips. But given that most everyday users have no idea which of their apps are Intel-native and which are PowerPC, this seems unnecessarily harsh.


    Studio Artist 4 runs native on intel machines, so you don't need rosetta to run version 4.
  • I know a lot of people here on the forum use Quicktime Player for casual movie editing, so i thought i'd pass along this part of Jason Snell's Snow Leopard review since there are some changes to quicktime in osx 10.6. You will apparently still want to use the old QuickTime 7 Player for editing tasks based on this review.

    Another technology making a surprise appearance in the installation-options list is QuickTime. No, QuickTime hasn't suddenly become optional in Snow Leopard. But Snow Leopard's new QuickTime Player is as radical a departure from the old model as iMovie '08 was from iMovie HD: it's a complete reimagining of the app, one that strips away many features that many of us find useful. If the Mac you're upgrading to Snow Leopard includes a QuickTime Pro key, you'll find that QuickTime Player 7 is still on your Mac, but has been moved to the/Applications/Utilities folder. If you don't have a QuickTime Pro key but still want access to the classic QuickTime 7 player, you'll need to do a custom install in order to get it.

    Apple's QuickTime Player, long a stalwart tool for playing back audio and video, has been completely revamped for Snow Leopard. As I mentioned earlier, this new QuickTime Player X app lacks so many of the features of the previous version that Apple has made QuickTime Player 7 optionally available as a separate installation.

    Apple says the new QuickTime Player is focused on media playback, and it boasts about the new interface. That interface is actually almost nonexistent: Open a movie and you'll see it appear all by itself, with only a small black window bar at the top to indicate its name. When you play the video, the interface fades completely away, leaving you with a movie playing all by itself on your screen. All the playback controls--volume, forward, play, reverse, full screen, and a scrubbing bar--are located in a floating palette within the movie itself.

    It's a nice interface if you're running in full-screen mode, but it's an utter disaster otherwise. Any alteration to your settings, including a slight increase or decrease in volume, makes that floating palette and the window bar appear, obscuring some of your video. (And on small movies, it obscures a lot of your video.) Every time I wanted to make my video louder or quieter, even via a keyboard shortcut, that floater appeared--and then remained for a second or two until finally fading away. Contrast this to the old QuickTime player, which (when not in full-screen mode) placed all of your controls right below the video, where you could get at them without actually obscuring what you were watching.

    I don't think the fade-away interface really works. When you're playing a movie, even the movie's title bar disappears, at least until you move your mouse over it. Over the years, I've become trained to identify every single window on my Mac by the window bar at the top, which tells me the name of what I'm looking at. Now here comes this strange QuickTime window, unbounded by any sort of frame, playing off on its own. It looks, quite frankly, like a mistake. I'm all for getting the controls out of a user's way when you're viewing something in full-screen mode. But when I'm watching something that's mixed in with all of my other Mac's windows, I'd rather the movie look like a window, not some anonymous video escapee with no window bar to call its own.

    Despite its focus on playback, QuickTime Player X does offer some editing tools. There's trimming, but it's extremely basic, no more complicated than what you'll find on the iPhone, where you can set start and end points. QuickTime X's Sharing feature is also far more limited than what you used to get with QuickTime Pro: you can choose from three video-export presets, or share files with MobileMe or YouTube. In general, if you've ever used QuickTime Pro to cut up, export, or massage media, you'll be disappointed by QuickTime X.

    QuickTime X also includes new recording features, letting you grab the contents of your computer screen and save it to a QuickTime movie. QuickTime X failed completely when I tried to capture my MacBook Air screen, despite the fact that I've successfully captured video on this same system using both Ambrosia Software's Snapz Pro X and Telestream's ScreenFlow.
    • Yuck. I'm sure the bugs will be fixed given enough time, but the missing functionalities are worrying. I suppose this announces the eventual disappearance of QuickTime Pro. This is bad, as it's a cheap and easy to use encoding tool. Thanks for the info John.
    • After running snow leopard i have to agree with this negative review of the new osx 10.6 Quicktime Player. Having the transport controls float on top of the movie you are trying to watch is particularly annoying. As is the missing functionality.

      Fortunately if you had a Quicktime Pro key for 10.5 you still have the old QuickTime Player 7 application in the Utility folder in the main Applications folder. I moved that to the 10.6 dock to replace the new Quicktime Player for my daily use.
  • I just ran some tests with the official osx 10.6 snow leopard release and Studio Artist 3.5 and MSG Evolver. As i expected i haven't uncovered any problems in my initial testing. Same goes for Studio Artist 4.

    If you don't add the custom option to install Rosetta when you instal 10.6 snow leopard on your mac (it's easy to do this), then the first time you try to run Studio Artist 3.5 or MSG Evolver your mac will tell you that you need Rosetta to run the programs and do you want to install it. You want to say yes, and will then need to wait a few minutes until Rosetta is installed on your 10.6 machine. Double clicking on the Studio Artist icon in the finder as opposed to using an old 3.5 dock icon is the best way to do this.

    Studio Artist 4 is intel native so none of this Rosetta discussion applies if you are running version 4 of Studio Artist on a 10.6 machine.
    • Terrific, John. Thanks for updating this information. Now all I have to decide is whether I want to update to SA4 now or keep having you hold my hand. You do have soft fingers!!
      • After running 3.5 today and then moving back to version 4 my personal opinion is that you should probably seriously consider updating to version 4. There's a huge increase in the drawing speed in v4 as compared to 3.5 in addition to the ton of new features.
    • After some more testing we did discover there is a slight cosmetic issue associated with the display of the tops and bottoms of popup menus that can appear in version 4 when running on osx 10.6. It's a minor cosmetic bug that doesn't affect the usability of the program at all, but is something we would like to see addressed as soon as possible. It's a bug in the cross platform framework we use as opposed to something in Synthetik's code, which means we have to report it and wait for it to be fixed as opposed to something we can dive in and fix quickly.
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