Shion & Snow Leopard

After a long day of backups and upgrades, I finally was able to test Shion on Snow Leopard last night. A few observations:

1. Nothing in the UI is broken and the application behaves as expected.

2. The USB system in Snow Leopard is quite a bit faster than those in Leopard and Tiger, so communication with the INSTEON powerline controller proceeds at a brisk pace. The pace is so brisk that the unit can become overloaded and internal firmware crashes. This can be fixed by resetting the unit, but the PLC will freeze again within a couple of hours. This is a known problem and is easily solved by having Shion better moderate the communication between the computer and the powerline controller.

3. Because of the timing issue above, you will notice some odd behavior if you’re using the latest beta – continuous device state report will fluctuate (“100%, 10%, 100%, 10%, …”). This is the result of an interaction between the USB code and new ramp rate code.

This is just a preliminary report and I’ll have some more details and updates available as I spend more time with the app under Snow Leopard. If you are using Shion for anything important, please hold off on running it under 10.6 until I release a compatibility update in the next couple of days.