Snow Leopard runs how Mac OS X should have from the start

When Apple announced that the latest version of its operating system, Snow Leopard—for which you get +10 tech cred points by calling Mac OS X 10.6, its designated version number—would feature a grand total of zero new features, the assembled audience cheered loudly. Granted, this was at a developers' conference and Apple's promise to focus on working on the fundamental core of the operating system rather than adding user-pleasing bells and whistles was guaranteed to go down well. Developers, people who write software for Apple's Macintosh computers on a daily basis, saw the benefit of having a faster and more stable platform on which to build.

There are of course some people who buy cars based on what's under the hood, as opposed to whether it has a DVD player and conveniently located cup holders. Snow Leopard, released on August 28, is their kind of upgrade. Faster, lighter (about seven gigabytes of disk space lighter), and with a lot of new bits of tech under the hood, Snow Leopard may not be the revolution that we've come to expect from operating system updates since the Rolling Stones helped Microsoft launch Windows 95, but it's a solid evolution. I've been running Snow Leopard since it came out (no advanced press copies for me) and so I'm going to take a brief look at whether or not you should be thinking about upgrading your Mac.

Under the hood

I'm going to be honest here, I'm a technology writer but I'm not a developer. I don't program, in university my science credit might have said computer science but really all I was taught to do was launch Word and paste in clip art, and while I may have written about developers, whenever the talk turned too technical my mind would drift off to wondering whether or not my interview subject had ever seen Rachael Leigh Cook with her top off or had Tim Robbins try to kill them. So while I'm going to cover the technical leaps in Snow Leopard a little here, I'm not much more informed about what this means than Apple's PR materials have made me. What I do know is that most of these changes won't really be noticeable to the end user for a few years, because that'll be when developers have had time to make programs taking advantage of them.

First off, Snow Leopard continues Apple's march towards making the Mac a 64-bit computing environment, with the applications included in the OS such as Apple Mail, iCal, and Quicktime, now written for the 64-bit world. 64 bits sounds better and faster than 32-bit which is what most computers are operating on now, but few applications are ready to take advantage of this speed bump. For now to boot into 64-bit mode you have to hold down "4" and "6" during startup, a sign that this is a feature that's mostly groundwork for the future.

More ground laid in Snow Leopard is the adoption of Grand Central Dispatch, a method of managing multicore processors. To the end user it's another potential speed bump, but one we may not see the full benefits of for a few years. There's also the addition of OpenCL, which allows the computer to use the powerful graphics chips in most machines to do general purpose computing, providing more memory to the computer.

That's sort of a bare bones look at the work that's been done that'll basically be invisible to the end user for awhile. For a great, and much more technically savvy, review of OpenCL, 64-bit, and Grand Central Dispatch check out Ars Technica's review of the OS.

The end user

Let's be clear, when I was talking about buying a car based on what's under the hood I was talking about other people. I'm the kind of person who drives a car because it's compact and cute, not because it's got a V-whatever engine and however many horses worth of power. It's the same thing with an operating system. Sure, it might be nice to be able to mention something about how my computer is now ready for 64-bit computing, or pretend that I have noticed the influence of OpenCL, but the fact is I like the shiny bits.

When Apple said, "No new features", I was not sure whether I'd even be interested in upgrading this time around. I did anyway, but not before I'd heard about a few updates that were a little more than just technical revisions that I'd probably never notice until I bought a new machine in a few years. It would be hard to call any of this stuff a new feature, but there's enough revisions to how the operating system works that I'm glad I did upgrade.

The first thing I noticed was that the operating system is in fact much smaller than the previous one. I had eight extra gigabytes of storage available on my hard drive, and on a laptop that's some precious space. It's also faster in almost every instance from Leopard, the previous operating system. Apple's applications like Mail and iCal are especially sped up. The OS seems tighter, leaner, and more stable.

Seems. It's frankly hard to tell because it was not as if my computer was crashing every day.

The update to Expose is probably the most significant for my day-to-day work flow. I'd use Expose to quickly reveal all windows that a certain application had opened, but often if I'd moved one off onto another Spaces panel or minimized it in the dock, I'd have to hunt around for it. Safari windows especially would get strewn around as I'd have one open in the Spaces screen I'd set up for handling e-mail, one set up on my Word screen, and then another on the one I'd created for iTunes, and finding one of those even with Expose was difficult.

Now clicking and holding down any active application icon brings up all of the open windows for that app, regardless of where they've been hidden, even if they've been minimized and put away on the dock. This makes it so much easier to track down that one window you opened that you need right away, and eliminates the need to go shuffling through windows and Spaces to find what you're looking for.

Stacks also got a bit of a face lift, and now are much more easily navigated. Not only can you open a stacks folder and use a scroll bar to move up and down within it, the stack now allows you to drill down into additional levels of folders to find what you're looking for. I had always found Stacks kind of useless, but now I've been keeping my documents folder in the Dock for quick access to my files.

These things are not so much new features as just refinements. Using Snow Leopard I got the general sense that this was how things should have been from the start. This is a tightening of existing features, fixes based on a few years of user feedback that could not be envisioned when developing the software.

A few of these issues have been around for generations of the OS updates. In fact, one of the updates, a change to how the OS names screen shots, has been an issue from well back into the 1990s with OS 9, and possibly even earlier. Prior to Snow Leopard all screen shots were labeled simply as "Picture"; now they're labeled as "Screenshot" with the date and time that the picture was taken listed.

Of the applications that come with the OS it's QuickTime that gets the major overhaul. Combining a number of the features of the now discontinued QuickTime Pro, the application allows for minor editing of video clips. Excitingly for anyone who is interested in creating screen casts, recorded videos of the computer's screen, that feature is now built into QuickTime. Further the player itself has been redesigned, and now no longer appears in a window but rather in a windowless display. It's a bit of an odd design choice, and possibly a sign that in the future Apple will move away from traditional windows altogether. Without the window the controls are overlaid on the screen when the cursor is hovering over it.

Automator and Services also received heavy changes. However not being an Automator wiz I've yet to really get into this. There are however some wonderful resources for being able to write Automator scripts, allowing users to really automate a lot of the repetitive tasks that they have to do. I'd check out the current videos on MacBreak with Sal Saghoain going over how to create Automator scripts.

There is also the addition of support for Microsoft Exchange servers, however the support is for Exchange Server 2007 and my work is one of the many companies that have still not upgraded to that. Exchange support in Mail and iCal certainly looks pretty awesome for any of us who've had to make do with either Windows or Internet interfaces for the server, but sadly I'm not able to comment on whether it's as slick as it sounds.

Upgrade or not?

With nothing that Apple is willing to label as a new feature, there is a lot of question whether or not upgrading is worth it. One thing to consider is that Snow Leopard will only run on the Intel-based Macs and not on previous PowerPC versions. Also not every program is running smoothly with the new operating system and it's worth checking out this list to see if something you use has problems with OS X 10.6.

At $39 the price for the new OS is definitely right; however if you're planning on buying a new Mac in the next year or so it might be a cost you can avoid paying since most of the advances won't be noticeable until then. If you're not planning on upgrading to a new computer in the next 12 months then Snow Leopard is a must buy. As I said there's a real sense of "this is how it should have been all along" to the upgrade, with a lot of things finally falling into their proper places. Changes to Expose have certainly made my life a bit easier, and Stacks works a whole lot better.

Plus the animation on the Wi-Fi indicator while the computer is searching for networks is just kind of cool, you know, like cup holders.