Beat Box: It's All Good Under the Hood With Mac OS X Snow Leopard

Generally when Apple releases a new and improved operating system to the public I feel both excitement and skepticism over running right out and getting my Mac updated. When Apple released it’s last major OS, Leopard, two years ago, installation did not go smoothly for a lot of people even though it boasted over 100 major additions. I’ll honestly admit I had a nightmare trying to get it to run on my 2006 iMac, and although Time Machine, Stacks, and the updated preview feature in the Finder were awesome, I think Leopard’s overall sluggishness compared to Tiger overshadowed it’s benefits.

Enter Snow Leopard. Apple began spreading word about this operating system over a year ago, announcing right off the bat that performance and stability were going to be the focus of Snow Leopard (OS 10.6); new features were going to take a backseat for this inception. While many people are probably going to be disappointed with 10.6’s lack of major features and interface enhancements, I know that many power users are going to love Snow Leopard’s performance improvements.

With my iMac being two years older and “more mature” (read: obsolete) in late 2009, I had a good feeling that it would benefit from the Snow Leopard upgrade and that it would bring back a little bit the mojo it seemed to lose when going from Tiger (10.4) to Leopard (10.5) last year.

Snow Leopard is available as an upgrade on Apple’s store for $30. However, Amazon is already undercutting this (already inexpensive) price and selling for $25- see for yourself! There has been a bit of talk on the message boards about how Apple is only “officially” supporting this upgrade for those with Leopard/10.5 installed, recommending that Tiger/10.4 users purchase a combo pack for $160. The combo pack includes the iLife and iWork ‘09 bundle along with the updated OS. However, there are now reports saying that Tiger users are purchasing Snow Leopard (bypassing Leopard altogether), and not encountering any problems. So it is possible to skip Leopard all together, just do it at your own risk as it is not officially supported by Apple.

OK, so on to the OS itself. This is the first time I have ever purchased an OS upgrade on it’s release date (which was yesterday, August 28th); for the most part it appears that users have undergone very smooth installations. The only problems encountered by most is incompatibility with a few applications, which software manufacturers are working hard to address. Installation for me went very smoothly and it took about an hour to get Snow Leopard up and running. 

First off, let’s talk about the installer. When you are installing Snow Leopard, one of the things I like right off the bat is when clicking on “custom install”, Apple notices which printers are hooked up or networked to your machine. This allows you to only install necessary drivers without having to guess which ones you need or taking the “safe” route by installing all of them and wasting gigs of hard drive space. 

Oh yeah, let’s talk a bit more about wasted hard drive space. Apple claims that Snow Leopard is supposed to save around 5-10 gigs of space with it’s smaller and more efficient footprint, but users (myself included) are turning out to be pleasantly surprised when they find that number is actually something more like 20-30 gigs, depending on hard drive size. Without getting too technical here, this is because Snow Leopard now addresses byte prefixes on files as decimals, which makes every file saved on your drive take up slightly less space. Nice!

One thing I dig is that when booting into Snow Leopard for the first time, all of my system preferences and applications/shortcuts in the dock were exactly the same as before in Leopard. The update did not restore any of my settings to the system default, so I wasn’t wasting any time trying to drag my old application shortcuts back into my dock again.


After installing, the first thing I did was frantically rush to my applications folder to see which programs worked and which didn’t. Although I only attempted to launch many of my major applications, EVERYTHING seemed to launch and function like normal! Ableton Live 8, ReCycle, Reason 4, Photoshop and Bridge CS3, SoundStudio 3, Celemony Melodyne, iLife ‘09, Final Cut Express, and Native Instruments Massive not only fired right up, but each seems to be a bit more responsive, especially Photoshop. Taking things a step further, I found that Adobe Illustrator 10 (which came out in 2000 and still use as I haven’t found the need to upgrade) even works! Additionally, my NI Audio Kontrol audio interface was instantly recognized. Although results are going to be mixed for many, and not everything is officially supported as of yet, check http://snowleopard.wikidot.com/ for a comprehensive list of what is and is not compatible with Snow Leopard.

Just make sure you install Rosetta, which by default is disabled, when upgrading. This allows support for non-Intel based applications to run under 10.6. You need to click on the checkbox when running the Snow Leopard installer, which you will find under the customize option at the beginning. 

I found that everything appeared to be snappier and runs sightly quicker under Snow Leopard. The live previews in Finder (when clicking the space bar on an icon) as well as cover flow rendered images very quickly. I love being able to press the space bar to preview an icon, however one thing I find annoying is that when previewing sound and movies the preview is disabled when you switch applications. I also wish you could copy and paste content out of text files through the OS preview. Ah well, maybe in the next incarnation.

The one application in Snow Leopard that received a much needed update is the Quicktime player. The screenshot above shows it in action; not only has the interface been revamped but it also adds the ability to record your screen (great if you’re giving tutorials or if you want to capture motion and animation in web graphics). Quicktime now also allows you to trim the start and end points of video, as well as upload to YouTube (results for this have been mixed thus far) and MobilMe. Quicktime Pro 7 users take note, make sure to specifically install this from the OS installer if you still want to have it’s capabilities, as the new Quicktime does not yet allow you the same functionality that the Pro version has and is merely a video player. More on this here.

 
The finder has been re-written to support the 64-bit Cocoa and address more amounts of memory than ever before, so to the average user like myself, this means more speed and efficiency. A few words on the finder: Stacks, introduced in Leopard, has been overhauled a little bit, allowing you to now scroll within files if viewed in grid view (pictured above). Browsing in column view on the finder now allows you to customize how items are viewed (by date modified, file size, alphabetically, etc). Each application also has it’s own miniaturized version of Expose; if you click and hold an application icon in the dock, all of the open windows specific to just that program are previewed on your desktop.


A VERY welcome feature is that when ejecting a volume (jump drive, external hard drive, etc.) from the desktop, Mac OS now alerts you to which specific applications are still using files from it, so you no longer have to guess and quit out of everything just to flippin’ eject it. This is awesome!

Cover Flow seems to be far snappier than in regular Leopard, and I really like how you can now play movies and scroll through pages of text documents and PDF’s while in this mode. I think many of cover flow’s benefits were available in Leopard, but appear to be even more tightly optimized in Snow Leopard.

 
Spotlight indexing was also a snap, although I encountered one problem: it did not immediately index my external drive; I had to unhook it and re-mount it for it to be indexed. However even with well beyond 500 gigs of content across both of my drives, Snow Leopard indexed it in minutes. The results box now allows you to preview files as well just like in cover flow, and you can now change the size of the icons; obviously not a big deal but still pretty cool.


Another cool trick I discovered (which I’m not even sure was included in Leopard or not) is when I am in another application or a web browser and am opening up a file through the standard Mac OS dialog box. When I am navigating through the contents of my hard drive in this box, you’ll notice that if you select an image there will be a little preview thumbnail in the rightmost column in the window. However, if you Apple + select more than one item you will not be able to use that column to preview your contents, which can be a hassle. However if you hit the space bar over the LAST item you selected, a preview window with it’s contents pops up. A practical use for this is that it saved me a ton of time trying to pick pictures on my hard drive in various folders to upload to my Flickr account!

Tiger (10.4) introduced the widgets feature, but in my personal experience the biggest thing that plagued it’s usefulness was the fact that when I would hit F12 on the keyboard to bring them up, it would sometimes take up to 10 seconds for them to start working as normal. The weather widget was always inaccurate and nothing was more frustrating than trying to use the calculator only to find out that it practically took just as long to access it as it does to launch Photoshop. In Leopard, the widgets seemed to run even slower. However, the widgets popped up after hitting F12 in Snow Leopard in a split second, the weather widget now works, and now I can re-claim some desk space now that I’m able to finally make my physical calculator redundant.

Two more small overhauls: contextual menus in the dock now use a translucent black background (instead of white) and are more flexible, and screen grabs now add time/date stamps to the file name (no more “are you sure you want to overwrite Picture 01” error messages ever again!)

Safari performance is now extremely snappy (probably with some overhauls to provide faster Javascript) and, although I don’t use it so can’t comment on it, skin tight support of Microsoft Exchange 2007 built into iCal, Mail, and Address Book. Probably Snow Leopard’s biggest improvement is it’s support for OpenCL, which is a language designed to help developers take advantage of graphic processing units when programming software, which you can find out more about here. 

There is probably way more to Snow Leopard than meets the eye, but overall I can honestly say that it is akin to a car tune-up: pretty much the same features are there as before, but everything is optimized and now running to it’s full potential. I would have been weary of purchasing had it been sold for $130 similar to Apple’s previous OS upgrades, so I think the far less expensive price is a good move. Especially considering the fact that it’s very difficult to convince the general public that upgrading to an OS without any major goodies added to it (aside from snappier performance) would be worth the investment. 

So overall, I am impressed not only by Snow Leopard’s performance and implementation thus far, but also how transparent of an upgrade it is. This is probably the first Mac OS upgrade yet that I haven’t encountered any major problems with whatsoever!

Check the video below for more info/details: