What is so significant about Snow Leopard?
Last week saw the term ‘Snow Leopard’ flood the online world with discussions surrounding the new Mac operating system’s pricing and availability.
This has left many questioning what is so significant about the upgrade.
Although Apple has been marketing the OS X as an upgrade rather than a total rethink, Snow Leopard features a number of upgrades which build upon previous systems.
Speed and Stability
What is arguably the most significant change is that Snow Leopard is a 64-bit operating system. This allows applications to harness more RAM and as a result run smoother and faster.
A number of OS X applications including the Finder have been rewritten in Cocoa and can now fully utilise the power of 64-bit performance. In addition, most new Mac technology features 64-bit CPUs and large RAM packages, a combination that can only be taken advantage of with a 64-bit operating system.
The addition of Grand Central Dispatch to Snow Leopard also enables applications to harness multi-core processors. This allows users to spread resource hungry workloads more evenly over a number of cores rather than allowing them to remain dormant. Although this may not yield a significant increase to the average user now, the number of applications which support Grand Central Dispatch is increasing.
Apple also announced that another new feature, aptly called Time Machine, will make the backup process 80% quicker. Decreases in wake up and shut down time of up to 80% have also been reported.
Finally Snow Leopard features installation times which are up to 50% faster than previous systems, promises Apple.
The most common cause of crashes in Leopard, says Apple, is due to browser plug ins. As a result the development team has rewritten them to run independently of each other, which means that if one fails the rest will continue to function unaffected – allowing the user to continue browsing.
Unfortunately this means that a number of previous browser and mail plug ins, specifically those using Input Managers, will no longer function in Snow Leopard.
User Interface and Apps
A number of enhancements have been added to the Mac OS X user interface.
These include refinements on the stacks feature, which now allows users to scroll through items and also integrates with the Finder window.
Another addition is Dock Expose, which links the Expose feature to the dock, allows an application’s window to appear by clicking down on the icon and also provides for more seamless dragging and dropping into applications. It enables icons to be tiled in a grid format and allows users to access files without having to open folders.
An old favourite Quicktime, which is now Quicktime X, features an updated interface as well as a number of new options including a quick-trim and a file format conversion feature.
Safari 4 now features 64-bit support, which allows for better performance in Javascript. Included, as mentioned before, is a new plug-in architecture which is set to make the browser more stable.
The Finder has also been updated lowering the lag times.. This can be attributed to the Cocoa rewrite which allows a number of applications to utilise 64-bit performance.
Snow Leopard also features out-of-the-box support for Microsoft Exchange Server, so which means users can now easily connect to mail servers that may be shared on other devices.
Despite this development, Microsoft recently announced that it will be bringing Outlook to Mac users in the future.
Thus far, the reviews of Snow Leopard have generally been positive. The coming weeks will probably see a large number of Mac users porting over to this more sturdy, technologically advanced system.
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