The hot cat

So Snow Leopard is now running on my year and a half old MacBook Pro… how’s it doing?The big Snow Leopard reviews have already come out from other people, so now it’s my usual late turn! I haven’t updated this blog in forever, but things have been pretty busy here and school is about to start.

Snow Leopard is HOT. My MacBook Pro runs hotter daily than before on Leopard. Most likely, OpenCL, which utilizes the GPU for CPU tasks, gives my Nvidia Geforce 8600M GT more reason to heat up more than usual. And since it normally heats up too much, adding CPU tasks onto its to do list just makes it worse. The heat difference isn’t noticeable while doing day to day tasks, but when watching Youtube or using flash…. there goes the fans.

But other than that, Snow Leopard is quite amazing. 64 bit Safari is FAST! Web pages load much snappier than before, and Google Maps sees an extreme performance boost, to the point where loading maps is instantaneous. Of course, I’m using Verizon FiOs which is a very fast internet service, but DSL and Cable users should also see a major improvement.

Quicktime X’s interface is quite interesting, and is a new idea to see a window without any sign of its frame. However, I don’t use Quicktime too often because a lot of the videos I download and watch are in a format supported by my favourite, VLC Player. Fortunately, it still works in Snow Leopard.

What doesn’t work in Snow Leopard is iStat Menus. They’re supposed to be working on an update, but iStat Menus has been very useful to me in Leopard, and in Snow Leopard I have to judge certain things based on how loud the fans are spinning (therefore guessing the temperature and how much CPU the computer is using). It’s true I could use Activity Monitor, but it takes up room on my screen and looks very clumsy.

I love the new stacks and Expose. It makes life so much easier. Before, to go into my utilities folder, I would open my applications stack, click on the utilities folder, wait for finder to open, and then double click on the utilities folder again, and finally get to open whatever application I am looking for. Now in Snow Leopard, I simply click on my applications stack, click on utilities, and open the app.

Finder is much smoother than before. Cover flow especially sees a major performance boost; before in Leopard, cover flow would take a long time to load the icons for apps. Now with the 64 bit Finder, Cover Flow loads icons very fast, so it is actually useable. However, it still isn’t my favourite way of using the Finder, so I still don’t use it.

Dock expose is quite useful, but there’s a little improvement they could make; when using dock expose on applications such as safari, it would be useful to be able to actually see different tabs of a web browser. Usually, most of my web browsing is done in one window with multiple tabs, which makes expose useless for Safari in my case.

I still have to try out that chinese input thing, but unfortunately, my MacBook Pro does not support it. I’ll just have to wait until I install Snow Leopard on my dad’s MacBook Pro unibody to see how well it works.

iChat’s video quality has improved, but there’s also a problem. Because the video is now 4 times the resolution, that means my Mac has to work 4x as hard to render that video. Which of course, means even more heat produced by my nvidia geforce 8600m gt. Wonderful.

My apps also open faster. Whether it’s Photoshop or Final Cut Express, apps just feel like they’re faster and more streamline. Indeed, Snow Leopard is an upgrade that involves tweaking things in the background. On the outside, it looks exactly the same. Well, almost. Just waiting for Apple to release that update that fixes the heating, and also waiting for that iStat Menus update.