Mac OS X Snow Leopard

My teachers and classmates were quite shocked when, during class on June 10th, I said I could not wait for September to come. Of course, I did not mean I could not wait for school to start once more; I was referring to the fact the Snow Leopard is to be released in September, and I cannot wait for its release, for Snow Leopard is the one piece of software that has me interested far more than iLife or iWork. It’s something I’ve been waiting for for a long time.

To explain the reason why Snow Leopard is such an exciting release for me, first I must tell you about Mac OS X Leopard, the operating system I am running right now. Leopard has plenty of excellent features and is definitely the best operating system I have ever used. However, I have many quirks with it, all of them related to behind the scenes “stuff”.

One reason that Leopard was quite annoying is stability; Tiger was definitely more stable than Leopard. Leopard seemed to be a bunch of fancy features that were extremely useful, but unfortunately also rendered the operating system less stable and more… Windows esque. It’s a poor description of Leopard, because it is more stable than Windows, but it definitely wasn’t as good as Tiger.

Not only that, some times Leopard does not use the CPU very well. Time Machine Backups hog the CPU and set the fans running high, and small tasks often drain too many resources. Startup and shutdown has dramatically slowed down from Tiger, and iChat almost always has problems connecting to others attempting a video chat or audio chat.

Snow Leopard promises to fix Leopard. With Snow Leopard, the transition of Mac OS X to 64 bit is complete. Most core applications will be 64 bit, such as Safari, Mail, iChat, etc. Being 64 bit helps improve the performance of a program, and will probably help out Safari loading flash. According to Apple, the Safari 4 that ships with Snow Leopard will be 50% faster than Leopard due to it being 64 bit, and it is also crash resistant, so no more cooliris or adobe flash crashing Safari.

With Snow Leopard, there is also Grand Central Dispatch, which will help allocate the CPU’s resources more effectively. Instead of Time Machine Backups taking up most of my CPU, it will focus on the application that needs it, such as Safari or Pages or whatever is using the CPU most. When programs aren’t being used, they will also use much less resources on the CPU, unlike in Leopard where idle applications use almost as much resources as when they are running full time.

Startup and shutdown are also going to be much faster, up to 2x faster according to Apple. Snow Leopard also takes care of many small things, such as taking up 6GB less of disk space. Exposé and Stacks  have been updated, with Stacks now having the ability to view into folders (something I’ve always wanted) and Exposé is now much neater, with the windows arranging themselves like a grid, making it easier to get to the window you want. Dock Exposé is quite interesting, because it has the capability of replacing traditional Exposé, since you now no longer need an Exposé key to launch Exposé.

In general, Snow Leopard is promising a huge user experience upgrade. Somewhat similar to the subtle but also very useful upgrade of the iPhone 3GS, Snow Leopard is going to bring a faster Mac to your already feature filled computer.

PS – If you’re wondering why I haven’t written something for so long, it’s because I’ve been studying chemistry and reading books on Xcode.