Mac OS X Snow Leopard - All you need to know

Mac OS X Snow Leopard is Apples latest installment in the immensely popular Mac OS X operating system range. They decided to build upon the successful Leopard platform. Instead of making a completely new operating system they have refined and fine tuned every little aspect of the operating system.

You will now get an overview of the improvements and changes made, and let me tell you ... it is ALOT of new features. I am not sure if I can cover absolutely everything here but I will certainly try.

Ready ?

A "new" Finder - But the same one

So what is so fantastic about this, it is the same one...? Speed, Speed and did I tell you, Speed? Finder have been rewritten to take advantage of some of the new technologies in Mac OS X Snow Leopard (you will read more about that further down on the page). This results in a snappier and higher responsive Finder.

Faster backups with Time Machine

Time Machine is a great way to backup your Mac, I use it myself by the way. But it can be a little bit slow sometimes. If you are going to backup to your time capsule drive the initial backup will be up to 50% faster than before.

Installation of Mac OS X Snow Leopard

Upgrading to Mac OS X Snow Leopard will be about 45% faster. The installation and upgrade is more streamlined and easier than before. It will also check your installed applications to make sure they are compatible. If not it will set them aside if they are known to be incompatible. If you happen to loose power when installing it wont damage anything, it will just continue where it left off without risking any data-loss.

The final installation size will be smaller too, you save around 6GB of disk space compared to just leopard. Giving you room for more stuff!

Quicktime X, Chinese and iChat

Apple includes the updated Quicktime X with a clean and better interface. Better Chinese character input. You can now draw them right on your trackpad and a popup window appears where you can check if it was correct and make appropriate changes. Improved iChat with higher resolution, easier for people with annoying routers to connect with each other.

Printer Driver Heaven !

If you have read About Me you know I am currently working in the printer business. Snow Leopard now have automatic printer driver updating! How cool is that? From time to time it checks to see if it has the newest driver, if not. It search the Internet, download the latest driver and install it for you. I wish more of my customers was using Mac instead of Windows ... Oh well, the time will come ... someday.

PDF, Safari 4, Disk Eject and File Sharing

If you open a PDF file with preview it will be easier to select text and copy it to the clipboard. Especially if the PDF file have multiple columns, it selects the text in just the column you want and not the entire document as before.

Safari 4 have exceptional good support for web-standards and can also execute javascript up to 50% faster. Much thanks to its 64-bit support. Apple also made Safari 4 more resistant to crashes. Turns out that the highest cause for crashes is web-plugins. So they re-made the plugin engine so it runs separately. If a plugin stops responding or crashing Safari 4 will still work. Just reload the page.

Sometimes when you want to eject your external drive or something else by pressing the eject button it could refuse to do that. In Mac OS X Snow Leopard they have improved this reliability. You will also be notified about what application you need to quit in order to eject the device.

Bonjour file sharing saves more energy. If the device you want to send or receive a file to is turned off it will start up automatically. Start the file sharing process then turn off again. This saves some energy.

Nearly everything is now in 64-bit

Mac OS X Snow Leopard takes the plunge and gives us the entire system and almost all applications in 64-bit. This means faster applications, the applications can address more memory. In theory 16 Billion Gigabytes ... that should be enough...or?

With the built in applications in 64-bit everything will be a faster. Finder, Mail, Safari, iCal, and iChat are all built with 64-bit code. This makes the applications able to take full advantage of all your RAM and it boosts the overall performance.

Some applications have not been built with 64-bit code yet and those are the following: DVD Player, Front Row, Grapher, and iTunes. I wonder why iTunes havent been rewritten yet? Isn't that one of the most used applications? I assume it will be, sooner or later.

Grand Central Dispatch

In the older compter days the more GHz the better. Now things have changed. We are already well on the way in the transition to dual-core instead. Or quad core, and even more cores on the horizon. These multi-core processors gives us more performance while keeping the power requirements lower.

However taking full advantage of these cores have been a little slow. You need to develop the applications using something called threads, and that have been a little complicated to do so there are many applications that could have performed better.

Grand Central Dispatch in Mac OS X Snow Leopard will help developers take full advantage of multi core processors, it is built right in the operating system. It will enable the developers to take full advantage of all cores and all the available power without having to code it themselves. When they do we will see applications with much improved performance.

OpenCL

Did you think your graphics chip was only meant for graphics? Not anymore. OpenCL makes developers able to tap into the performance lying inside these graphic processors and use it for general-purpose computing. No longer limited to games and 3D modeling.

Microsoft Exchange Support

We will have full Exchange support in Mac OS X Snow Leopard. You get this support out of the box, you do not have to install any other software to get this working. It is also easy to set up. You just enter your e-mail address and password and everything else will be taken care of automatically.

Mail, iCal, and Address Book will replace Outlook. You will be able to take advantage of Mac features like spotlight and quicklook for viewing attachments without opening them. Even when you are working against an Microsoft environment...

Final Words and pricing

This sums up the most important changes in the new Operating System. A lot of good changes that also will benefit older Macs with Intel processors. The system is targeted for release in September 2009 and to upgrade from Mac OS X Leopard will cost only $29! Apparently Apple wants us all to upgrade.