Snow Leopard: Purring right along with Apple’s OS X 10.6
Have you made the leap to Cupertino’s latest spotted feline festooned operating system? Although I’ve only been using Mac OS X 10.6 for a week, I’m really quite pleased with how it’s running and some of the neat little features I’ve discovered. Click through for some insight, tips and just plain old-fashioned fan boy cup-runneth-over joy.
First off, I’m running an Early 2008 2.1GHz MacBook with 2.5GB connected to the interwebs on a 7Mbps Roadrunner connection. Further, there are a pair of external FireWire hardwares (320GB, 500GB) that are home to my iTunes music, movie, TV and iPhoto libraries, as well as a TimeMachine backup.
Oh, my external TSSTcorp dual-layer DVD burner is on FireWire, too, but more on that later.
If only I were so talented
Multitasking is much, much smoother. For example, running a full-screen slide show in Graphic Convertor and playing a passel of movies in QuickTime 7 — if you haven’t re-installed this yet, you really should — at the same time results in everything running smoothly. Multiple movie and image formats running in multiple windows smoothly and clearly? A true codec moment.
Syncing your Google and Yahoo mail accounts is now seamlessly integrated into OS X. So, if you’re a social media maven with myriad ways of interfacing with the world all anchored to your MobileMe, Google Mail and Yahoo Mail accounts, you really need to get on board and start using this feature (AddressBook -> Preferences -> Accounts).
Because this is a family Web site, I really can’t let loose the stream of expletive laden vituperation that’s been welling up inside me. Nevertheless, I’m really hating QuickTime X. That is, the sweet new screen capture functionality aside, it strips out nearly all of the “pro” features of QuickTime 7 (really, you need to reinstall it now) that made quickly and easily handling video files quick and easy.
That said, I’m guessing the iTunes 9 release expected on September will offer us some form of relief.
Yeah, but what about my apps?
Wondering if the applications you use on a daily basis are Snow Leopard compatible? By far the largest and most complete compendium of OS X 10.6 compatibility listings is the Snow Leopard Wikidot page. Dig in and make good use of it!
Natural Mac enhancement
Although Safari wasn’t a puke monster on Leopard, it crashed or hung with enough frequency to irritate. Apple’s default browser running on Snow Leopard, a single weird crash the first time I ran it aside, has been golden. Those “script running slow” warnings of the past have disappeared and my online banking site has been 100 percent since upgrading.
Another big, big improvement I’ve noticed since upgrading to OS X 10.6 is improved application launch times. Firefox aside, which has always been molasses slow likely due to all of the plug-ins I’ve installed, pretty much all of the software I use regularly — Text Edit, Mail, Safari, QuickTime, iTunes, iCal, Calendar, Photoshop CS2, iPhoto, Pages, Numbers — launches and runs much faster. Of course, this is what you’d expect given the fact that many of these apps have been rewritten from the ground up for Snow Leopard.
Barring individual rewrites, Apple’s newly cleansed and optimized Finder makes common operations in Snow Leopard feel faster, smoother, better.
Further, odd as it may seem, Photoshop CS2 even runs better than it did on plain old Leopard and no longer crashes when saving under certain circumstances — no more work arounds! Although it still opens slowly and often takes quite awhile to rouse itself after sitting unused in the background for more than a few minutes, Snow Leopard has nonetheless revitalized Photoshop CS2 for me, so I won’t be buying CS4 anytime soon — sorry, Adobe!
From the before time
My experience to date with Time Machine has been establishing a back up just before installing Snow Leopard and the restore perform after the upgrade. Thereupon, that first back up took forever (ie two cups of coffee!). Knowledgeable folks and just plain users all around the Macspace have, however, remarked that an initial Time Machine back is now much faster.
To date, I haven’t needed to rip or re-encode any DVDs, so I don’t have anything to report about Toast, Fairmount, MacTheRipper, Popcorn or Handbrake. Of course, if there was ever a bunch o’ applications that could benefit mightily from a Cocoa rewrite with 64-bit hooks, as well as OpenCL and Grand Central optimization, this is it.
So, what are your impressions Snow Leopard? Loving it or are you what David Pogue calls a “hater” that believes it should’ve been a free “service pack”?
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September 2nd, 2009
I’m a “soft” user, but I do enjoy updating, installing, and reading about OS X. We bought 10,6 on opening day and did the install immediately, and the first thing I noticed was how similar it felt to Leopard. If it wasn’t for the iPhone looking windows in the Dock, I probably wouldn’t have noticed anything. What did stand out for me was the printers not working even though 10.6 is supposed to install the correct drivers automatically. I deleted the suggested drivers and downloaded the drivers from the manufacturers websites, and now they are working. This was on an upgrade, not a clean install.
Was it worth it? For me, the entertainment of getting to work on the computers for $59 (family pack in Canada) was worth it. But I’m a dork.