What I like about Snow Leopard

I was hesitant at first to install the new Snow Leopard as I have heard a lot of about the inconsistencies, bugs and quirks of this new operating system from Apple. However, after the release of the 10.6.1 update, it looked attractive enough that I went and bought the €25 upgrade (FTW price!). It was lying another week or two waiting for the right moment, and it finally came some time ago. Here are just a few things that I liked about this years first Snow.

The upgrade is really smooth. None of my files got lost, and the OS footprint on the disk got significantly smaller (by about 45%). Also, there was a small increase in the speed of the OS. It’s probably the 64-bit doing, though I’m not sure, because I have heard of reports that by default, the new Snow is launched in 32-bit mode. That’s strange, because after the upgrade Safari Adblock stopped working, and that happens only when an app is launched in 64-bits. But that’s some techy flaming about these bits, not important :)

What struck me first was that Apple decided to slightly change the chrome of Snow. Now it’s lighter, the color bulbs have less contrast. I quite like it, I must say.

Another important change, especially for the designers, is that now the default gamma is 2.2, which is the same as on Windows. From some reason I was unable to create a profile with 1.8 gamma, like on the previous Mac systems. One way or another, I think it’s another good move, along with enabling Windows installations, in order to make the Apple computers compatible, but still unique.

I think you have heard that Preview now can select multicolumn PDF files properly. That is a big feature for everyone who read and quote academic journals on daily basis. Luckily, now I don’t have to, but during my times at the Uni that was a really big quirk. Another great feature I would love to have back then, are the full-blown annotations. Preview now supports various shapes, color and text areas, both on PDFs and images. FTW!

I must say I had to get use to the new stacks black look, but once I did, I really liked the changes. Especially the folder browsing inside the stacks. That was a thing I hoped for, and here it is. Nice :)

The icing on the cake is the new Quick Time X. Not only it has this awesome new interface that enables chrome-less movie display on the desktop – I tried designing a logo and watching F1 at the same time, and it was great! But what is more important, QT now supports easy audio, video and screen capture – yes, now you can create screen-casts easily. And with the built-in YouTube uploader (with video compression!) you will publish your demos in no time. Sweet, isn’t it?

Conclusions

I remember hearing a lot of comments that Apple should have given this new upgrade for free, because it’s basically the same system. Well, it’s not. Don’t judge the book by its cover. The guts of the this OS were rewritten, and the new feature-set is actually one of the best I’ve seen in years. Way to go, Apple. And if you are still hesitating whether to install Snow or not, I recommend to upgrade. You might want to hesitate until 10.6.2, but so far 10.6.1 has been really good too.