Snow Leopard: What to expect

Jul 21, 2009 by Dan Taylor    No Comments    Posted under: Productivity, Technology

When the news of an OS update for Mac users hit the streets, many users (myself included) got pretty jazzed – only to find out that we were going to have to wait quite a while to get our hands on Apple’s newest creation. Dubbed Snow Leopard, a clear indication that this is more of an expansion pack for Leopard, rather than a whole new version, this OS upgrade release date is set for September. Planned improvements include speed and performance, as well as improvements to the architecture our beloved Mac apps run on, and improved Exchange support (I can haz Mac now, boss?).

Again, as this is more of an expansion pack rather than a completely new OS, Snow Leopard will be Apple’s cheapest OS upgrade to date – priced at around $29. And frankly, at that price, I’d be hard pressed to see why anyone wouldn’t want this update. The exhaustive list of planned features is available from Apple, but for this article, I’d like to present the highlights that do it for me.

Dock Exposé

I arrived to the Mac world with a fresh copy of Leopard in my hands, but I have worked on Tiger, and rapidly discovered the benefits of Exposé. Spaces, I’m not that much of a fan of, but Exposé provides a number of productivity benefits, as well as the occasional…wait, which window was that yadda yadda in, answer. Snow Leopard is bringing exposé to a dock near you. Personally, I use hot corners and mouse shortcuts to access my exposé goodies, but Snow Leopard will now offer users the option to place an icon on the dock. Clicking and holding this dock icon will arrange all open windows in a far more organized manner, aligning themselves to a grid.

QuickTime X

Oh QuickTime, how I love to hate you most times. I’m pretty certain I’m not the only one on this trip (think VLC development community), and it looks like Apple’s noticed. Other than the addition of the H.264 codec in Leopard, not much has changed with QuickTime for quite a while. In addition to a new icon to be used, QuickTime X includes a number of interface enhancements including improved streaming video ability, speed increases, and last but not least, a gorgeous border-less display window (finally!). Oh, and did I mention screen recording? Seeya iShowU.

Stacks

Stick ‘em up buddy! Stacks first appeared in the Mac catalogue with Leopard, and personally, I love them. The idea is simple enough, one way to navigate through entire folder contents directly from the dock. And while highly functional, one of my major gripes is that you only were able to access the top level of this folder structure. Snow Leopard addresses this and allows you to drill down through folders while still in stack mode. Sft+cmd+a is looking further and further away.

Install Speed and Space

If the niceties above didn’t make you smile, perhaps improved system speed, and a bit more HDD real estate will. According to Apple, Snow Leopard will reduce the time spent installing the OS by up to 45%! Granted, this is a (hopefully) one time only deal, but shaving the install time in half? Well done Cupertino. And how about some extra storage space? Snow Leopard is touted to free up to 6GB of space!!! Granted, both of these claims come with fine print, but heck…even if I got only 3GB back, my iTunes collection would be mighty thankful.

The Architecture

If you’re a developer, Snow Leopard is either going to cause you a bushel full of woes, or make your life much easier. Either way you look at it, Apple is fundamentally changing the way things work under the hood. If you’re not a dev (I assume a majority of my readers full into this category), you’ll probably only notice the changes via improved speed, security, and system stability/reliability.

64 Bit Speed

All the latest Intel Macs ship with 64 Bit processors and are capable of performing at much higher speeds. Leopard has taken advantage of this technology, to an extent, but Snow Leopard will really saddle this pony and take it out for a ride. The OS update includes a number of re-writes for system applications that should make things noticeably faster.

These re-writes will also reduce the amount of memory that can be handled by any given application, thereby (theoretically) allowing for a maximum of 16 billion gigabytes of memory!

These leaps in speed aren’t going to melt your face off, but they should provide a noticeable snappier Mac (provided you’re running on a 64 bit system).

Do More with Core Duo

If you’re running a Mac with Intel Core Duo technology, Snow Leopard’s addition of Grand Central Dispatch will offer even more speed. Preliminary research of how GCD works caused a mild headache, so I’ll leave it at this: It makes things go faster.

OpenCL

Chances are the graphics on your Mac are already pretty darn impressive. With the addition of the new OpenCL architecture, your graphics processor will be able to handle a wider range of tasks. Hailing from the gaming world, this new technology will stand by waiting to assist and increase the speed of your every day use tasks.

Exchange Support

Even the most die-hard Mac offices have to interface with the outside world, and their non-Mac toting counterparts. To this end, Snow Leopard represents Apple’s first steps in making Macs better suited to the suited world. The new Exchange support features will integrate MS features into local OSX applications including Mail, iCal, and Address Book.

Again, a full list of Snow Leopard’s features are available directly from Apple, and I’d suggest you take a look at it to get the full lowdown. The above represent the ones that get me jazzed, but there are sections I didn’t even get to (i.e. if you’re using a Time Capsule for Time Machine backups, you’ll be delighted to discover the process should be up to 50 percent faster).

With that said, my top 5 reasons for upgrading ASAP are:

• Price – $29? Seriously? For that price, heck, I’d buy two if it’d quadruple my speed increases.
• Speed – anytime someone says to me, “Hey, I’ve got something here that’ll make your machine run faster” I’m generally all ears. Knowing that it’s coming out of Cupertino directly from Mac engineers, call me sold.
• 6GB of free space – for $29 and most probably half an hour of my time to install the upgrade, and I get speed and space? Hmmm…what to do with 6 extra GB? iTunes what?
• 64 Bit optimization – perhaps falling under the speed category, but re-writing how the OS accesses and handles key hardware components is nothing short of brilliant.
• The Future – Obviously any time Apple makes a significant OS change, application developers scramble to get the very best out of their current product to take advantage of these features. I’m quite excited to see what type of updates/changes some of my favorites make to meet the new limitations of OS X Snow Leopard

So from where I’m sitting, September looks only a mere 41 days away. Apple’s not given a definitive date for release, but chances are, I’ll be lined up at 9am at the shop to get my hands on Snow Leopard. Will you be upgrading? Leave a comment below.