I did a clean install of Snow Leopard, after which I installed Aperture 2.1 from the retail DVD. Now at this stage you cannot launch Aperture because versions lower than 2.1.4 are blocked from running on Snow Leopard. So I downloaded the 2.1.4 Aperture Update and tried installing it. The installer gave me the following baffling error message:

“Aperture 2.0 or later is required to install this update”

Next I went to Software Update and tried installing the update from there. However, Software Update didn’t show any updates either.

So I uninstalled Aperture 2.1 from my machine using App Cleaner, downloaded and then installed the full Aperture 2.1.4 30-day trial (sign-up required) and then activated it using my retail key.

Aperture 2.1.4 now works like a charm on my fresh Snow Leopard install.

If you’ve used the Dashboard’s Weather Widget on Mac OS 10.5, you’ve probably noticed that the provider for weather data used to be AccuWeather.com. With Snow Leopard this has changed to a combination of Weather.com and Yahoo. AccuWeather used to have a much bigger collection of cities – including many smaller cities in India that have gone missing with this change. Case in point Leh. Here is the listing of cities from the old widget:

And here is what the Weather Widget in Snow Leopard gives:

Copying the old widget from Mac OS 10.5 doesn’t help because it still ends up fetching the list of cities from the new provider.

VMWare is giving 40% off on our favorite virtualization product for the Mac – VMWare Fusion. You can buy it for $47.99 (the regular price is $79.99). Use DESKTOPSALE promo code at checkout. The offer expires on 10th September 2009.

Start here.

I recently helped my parents move to a Mac Mini. Here are some observations:

1. Power Adapter: The machine was purchased in the US. While Apple’s notebook line comes with univesal adapters that work both in India (220V-240V AC) and the US (100-120V AC), the power adapter that comes with a Mac Mini is geography-specific. Which means that I had to arrange for a 220V to 110V step-down transformer so that I could use the Mac Mini brought in the US in India. Also the adapter is quite big – almost like a brick. You’ll never see it in Apple’s Mac Mini marketing material.

To be fair to Apple, the specs clearly mention the voltage rating – it’s just that given my past experience with several notebooks (Apple and non-Apple) and iMacs, it didn’t occur to me to check if Mac Mini had a US specific voltage rating.

2. Video Adapter: Mac Mini has both Mini-DisplayPort and Mini-DVI video connectors. It comes bundled with a Mini-DVI to DVI convertor. That might be fine if you have a relatively new monitor but if you purchased your monitor 2-3 years ago, there is a good chance that it’ll only support VGA input. Since we had an old Samsung 17″ LCD, we had to buy a Mini-DVI to VGA adapter separately.

3. Keyboard: Microsoft makes and sells PS2 keyboards to date. While their mouse line has moved to USB and comes with a USB to PS2 adapter, that is not the case with a lot of their keyboards that are sold in India. Although we had brought a new Keyboard just last year, it had to be discarded because it only came with a PS2 interface (no PS2 ports exist on the Mac Mini).

4. Ethernet: For some weird reason the Mac Mini’s Ethernet port was incompatible with the old MTNL branded ADSL modem that we had at home. At first I thought that the machine had come with a DOA (dead on arrival) Ethernet port – since the old machine was working fine with this modem. Connecting the Mac Mini to my MacBook over an Ethernet cable quelled that doubt (I am used to using a cross-over cable for connecting two PCs from my PC days, but for some reasons both Macs could “see” each other on a normal Ethernet cable without any issues! See this Apple KB article for more details.) So our modem had to go as well. Its replacement – a relatively recent, Beetel ADSL2 modem, worked like a charm.

All of these things meant that the slender price advantage of getting the machine from the US ($599 = Rs. 29,950 @ Rs. 50 to 1 US$ vs. Rs. 33,530 – the retail price in India) came to nought. Not to mention a day spent troubleshooting/acquiring the various pieces.

Moral of the story – if you are thinking of moving to a Mac Mini, do your research. If the reason behind your move to a Mac Mini has anything to do with the squirrel’s nest of wires behind your desktop, seriously consider an iMac.

Mac OS 10.6 aka Snow Leopard will be available in India in another 2-4 weeks. It’ll be priced at Rs. 1,800 for existing Mac OS 10.5 users. Tiger users can buy the Mac Box Set which includes iLife’09, iWork’09 and Snow Leopard, for Rs. 10,000. As far as we can tell, Apple is not selling a “standalone” Snow Leopard SKU in India or in the US.

You can also buy the Snow Leopard Family Pack for Rs. 2,900 or the Mac Box Set Family Pack for Rs. 13,500.

Snow Leopard Server Edition will retail for Rs. 28,100.

Update (10 Sep, 5:30 PM IST) – Snow Leopard is now available across Imagine stores in Bangalore