I haven’t paid a whole lot of attention to the oncoming release of Mac OS X 10.6, because as I’ve heard mentioned I thought it was basically a service pack dressed up as a new release. I knew there was more to it, but really… how much more could it be? As it turns out, quite a lot.
It doesn’t look much different than 10.5, aside from nice, subtle changes here and there. It’s likely that is why it only costs $30 instead of $150. Apple rebuilt the entire OS on a 64-bit platform. Finder has been rewritten in Cocoa. I don’t know what any of that means, but let’s say that if you are a software developer and you found a way to improve the performance with extreme significance but it meant rewriting the ENTIRE program, it would be a huge pain but eventually you know you should do it. Now they have. To put it another way – the Audi R8 comes with a V8 normally, but now you can order one with a V10… and why the heck wouldn’t you?
I will try not to go over anything that is already on 100 other blogs already – suffice to say that Snow Leopard is FAST. My first-ever white Macbook with the 1.83 Core Duo (not Core 2 Duo) is even acting like it is brand new. It’s just snappy! The installation took almost an hour, and it didn’t cause any issues, except for one which I will get into shortly because the same problem came up on my iMac and I suspect that more people are seeing this.
- Mail – faster
- iCal – faster
- Bootup – faster
- Waking up from sleep – faster
- Finder – faster
- Expose/Spaces - faster/cooler
- Spotlight – WAY faster
- Quicktime – WAY faster/awesomer
- Rendering thumbnails for a giant folder full of images – faster
- The feel of the entire computing experience – MUCH faster
Just about everything I use on a day-to-day basis works without issue.
- Adobe CS3 Products – yes, that is a 3 – I have not run into any issues with this yet.
- ColdFusion 8 – no issues with my 64-bit installation. Makes sense, right?
- Billings 3 – works. I saw a chart that said it was unknown – it works.
- Dropbox – I heard that it has integration issues – before installing Snow Leopard I wanted to resolve this beforehand – go here to get a beta that works fine. Even all of my symbolic links stayed in tact! (What is he talking about?)
- Aperture – the latest works. It loads MUCH faster than before.
- Logic Studio – works great!
- Amplitube 2 - NOT WORKING (it could be the M-Audio MobilePre – will have to return to this.)
- MySQL Server – NOT WORKING yet. I haven’t checked for updates. The latest beta works.
- Brand new Wacom Intuos4 (Medium) – works beautifully.
Snow Leopard now supports Exchange, which is really nice. iCal and the Address Book now have access to Active Directory and such as Outlook does. Meeting requests work nicely finally – and you can see peoples’ availability. So the iPhone supports it, and now Snow Leopard has it built in – so technically it does Exchange better than Windows does.
The One Big Medium Not-So-Huge Issue
I may be just lucky, but there was really only one issue that I ran into, and it may or may not be common for those who have a MobileMe subscription. It’s the Keychain. It won’t remember your MobileMe information. I suspect that the OS handles it differently than before. All you have to do to fix this, is go to your Keychain Access in utilities (or use the blazing fast Spotlight to get to it), search for keys that contain “.Mac” in them, delete them and then restart. You will need to know your keychain password when you restart, so keep that in mind.
An entire rundown can be found over at Engadget, with screenshots and everything that people who are paid to blog do. Just take my word for it – this is absolutely worth your time and the $30. Do it.
