This year, though, Apple and Microsoft realized that the pile-on-features model is unsustainable. Both are releasing new versions of their OS that are unapologetically billed as cleaned-up, slimmed-down versions of what came before.
Microsoft’s called Windows 7, will come out this October. Apple’s, called Mac OS X 10.6 Snow Leopard, arrives today, a month earlier than announced. Apple’s new strategy is highly unorthodox: “Leopard, aka Mac OS X 10.5, was already a great OS-virus-free, nag-free and not copy-protected. So instead of adding features for their own sake, let’s just make what we’ve got smaller, faster and more refined.” And then there’s the price of Snow Leopard: US$30.
In any case, Snow Leopard truly is an optimized version of Leopard. Is starts up faster (72 seconds on Macbook Air, versus 100 seconds in Leopard). It opens programme faster (web browser: 3 seconds; calendar: 5 seconds; iTunes: 7 seconds), and the second time you open the same programme, the time is halved.
“Optimized” also means smaller. Incredibly, Snow Leopard is only half the size of its predecessor; following the speedy installation (15 minutes), you wind up with 7 GB more free space on your hard drive. Unfortunately, Snow Leopard runs only on Macs with Intel chips – that is, Macs sold since 2006. If you have an older Mac, you’re stuck with Snow Leopard forever.
Popular conception has it that the space savings come from removing all the code required by those earlier chips. That’s not true, according to Apple. Yes, that code is gone, but new 64-bit code, described below, easily replaces it. Apple says the savings come from “tightening up the screws”, compressing chunks of the system software and eliminating a huge stash of printer drivers. Now the system downloads printer drivers as needed, on demand.
The Mac now adjusts its own clock when you travel, just like a cellphone. The menu bar can now show the date, not just the day of the week. The menu of nearby wireless hotspots now shows the signal strength for each. When you’re running Windows on your Mac, you can now open the files on the Macintosh “side” without having to restart. Icons can now be 512 pixels square, turning any desktop window into light table for photos.
There’s now also a Put Back command in the Trash, just as in Windows’ Recycle Bin. You can page through a PDF document or watch a movie right on a file’s icon. When you click a folder icon on the dock, you can scroll through the pop-up window of its contents, turning a worthless feature into a useful one.
Buggy plug-ins (Flash and so on) no longer crash the Safari web browser; you just get an empty rectangle where they would have appeared.
There’s an impressive trove of tools for blind Mac users, including one that turns a Mac laptop’s trackpad into a touchable map of the screen; the Mac speaks each onscreen element as you touch it.
There are some bigger-ticket items as well. Movies open up into a gorgeous, frameless playback window with built-in trim handles and a “Send to YouTube” command. You can now record your screen activity as a movie – fantastic for tutorials. The old Services feature is now reborn as powerful commands that appear only when relevant – and you can modify, make up or assign keystrokes to them.
Once a system administrator provides setup details, your company’s Microsoft Exchange address book, email and calendar can show up in the Mac’s own address book, email and calendar programmes, alongside your own personal information. That’s irony for you: The Mac now has Exchange compatibility built-in, but Windows itself does not.
There are hundreds of more little tweaks, In all, Apple says that more than 90% of Leopard’s 1,000 software chunks were revised or polished.
Despite all of this, online haters deride Snow Leopard as a “service pack” – nothing more than a bug-fix / security patch update like the ones Microsoft periodically releases for Windows. That’s a pretty uninformed wisecrack. Especially because the biggest changes in Snow Leopard are under the hood, completely invisible, but responsible for some big speed and stability advances.
For instance: Mac OS X and most of its included programmes (the desktop, Web browser, calender and so on) are 64-bit software, a geeky term that, for now, means “faster”. Other new underlying technologies, called OpenLC and Grand Central Dispatch, are features that software companies can exploit for even greater speed in their new or rewritten programmes.
That Snow Leopard’s look haven’t changed at all, in other words, betrays the enormous changes under its pretty skin. Unfortunately, that also explains the number of non-Apple programmes that “break” after the installation.
The big story here isn’t really Snow Leopard. It’s the radical concept of a software update that’s smaller, faster and better – instead of bigger, slower and more bloated.
Source from david Pogue
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