[NPMUG] David Pogue on Snow Leopard .... " Snow Leopard truly is an optimized version of Leopard ...."

[Dave Sevick]

http://www.nytimes.com/2009/08/27/technology/personaltech/27pogue.html?_r=2&8cir&emc=cirb1
August 27, 2009
STATE OF THE ART
Apple’s Sleek Upgrade

By DAVID POGUE
Buying software is not like buying a vase or a comb or a lawnmower  
where you pay, you take it home, and the transaction is complete.

No, buying software is more like joining a club with annual dues.  
Every year, there’s a new version, and if you don’t upgrade, you feel  
like a behind-the-curve loser.

There’s a time bomb ticking in that business model, however. To keep  
you upgrading, the software company has to pile on more features each  
time. Sooner or later, you wind up with a huge, sloshing, incoherent  
mess of a program; a pile of spaghetti code that doesn’t run well and  
makes nobody happy.

You’re in even worse shape if that bloatware is your operating system  
— the software you run all day. Just ask anyone with Windows Vista.

This year, though, Apple and Microsoft both realized that the pile-on- 
features model is unsustainable. Both are releasing new versions of  
their operating systems that are unapologetically billed as cleaned- 
up, slimmed-down versions of what came before.

Microsoft’s, called Windows 7, comes out in October. Apple’s, called  
Mac OS X 10.6 Snow Leopard, arrives on Friday, a month earlier than  
announced. (Apple to Microsoft: “Surprise!”)

Apple’s release strategy is highly unorthodox: “Leopard, a k a 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.”

What? No new features? That’s not how the industry works! Doesn’t  
Apple know anything?

And then there’s the price of Snow Leopard: $30.

Have they lost their minds? Operating-system upgrades always cost a  
hundred-something dollars! ($30 is the price if you already have  
Leopard. If not, the price is $170 for a Mac Box Set that also  
includes two suites of Apple software: iLife (iPhoto, iMovie, iDVD,  
iWeb and the GarageBand music studio), and iWork (the Numbers  
spreadsheet, Pages word processor and Keynote presentation software).

In any case, Snow Leopard truly is an optimized version of Leopard. It  
starts up faster (72 seconds on a MacBook Air, versus 100 seconds in  
Leopard). It opens programs faster (Web browser, 3 seconds; calendar,  
5 seconds; iTunes, 7 seconds), and the second time you open the same  
program, the time is halved.

“Optimized” doesn’t just mean faster; it 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  
gigabytes more free space on your hard drive. That, ladies and gents,  
is a first.

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  
Leopard forever.

(Techie note: Popular conception has it that the space savings comes  
from removing all the code required by those earlier chips. But that’s  
not true, according to Apple. Yes, that code is gone, but new 64-bit  
code, described below, easily replaces it. No, Apple says that the  
savings comes 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.)

As it turns out, Apple programmers could not leave well enough alone.  
They disobeyed the original “no new features” mantra. As they pored  
through all the bits of Mac OS X, they kept stopping and fixing little  
things that had always bugged them, or coming up with neat little ways  
to make things better. So:

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 hot spots 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 (several inches) square, turning any  
desktop window into a light table for photos.

There’s now 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, too. Movies open up into a  
gorgeous, frameless playback window with built-in trim handles and a  
“Send to YouTube” command built right in. You can now record your  
screen activity as a movie — fantastic for tutorials. The old Services  
feature has been 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, e-mail and calendar can show up in  
the Mac’s own address book, e-mail and calendar programs, right  
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 more little tweaks. In all, Apple says that more  
than 90 percent of Leopard’s 1,000 software chunks were revised or  
polished. Many are listed onApple's site, but I kept finding more  
undocumented surprises until the deadline for this column. Just little  
stuff. Like: When you rename an icon on an alphabetically sorted  
desktop, it visibly slides into its new alphabetic position so you can  
see where it went.

Despite all of this, the haters online 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.

A big one: Mac OS X and most of its included programs (the desktop,  
Web browser, calendar and so on) are 64-bit software, a geeky term  
that, for now, pretty much means “faster.” Other new underlying  
technologies, called OpenCL and Grand Central Dispatch, are features  
that software companies can exploit for even greater speed in their  
new or rewritten programs.

That Snow Leopard’s looks haven’t changed at all, in other words,  
betrays the enormous changes under its pretty skin. Unfortunately,  
that fact also explains the number of non-Apple programs that “break”  
after the installation.

I experienced frustrating glitches in various programs, including  
Microsoft Word, Flip4Mac, Photoshop CS3, CyberDuck and TextExpander,  
an abbreviation expander. (Interestingly, Snow Leopard offers its own  
typing-expander feature, but it works primarily in Apple programs,  
like TextEdit, Mail, Safari and iChat.) The compatibility list at  
snowleopard.wikidot.com lists other programs that may have trouble.

Most of these hiccups will go away when software companies update  
their wares (although Adobe says, “Just upgrade to Photoshop CS4”).  
Let’s hope that Apple hurries up with its inevitable 10.6.0.1 update,  
too, to address the occasional Safari crash and cosmetic glitch I  
experienced, too.

Otherwise, if you’re already running Leopard, paying the $30 for Snow  
Leopard is a no-brainer. You’ll feel the leap forward in speed polish,  
and you’ll keep experiencing those “oh, that’s nice” moments for weeks  
to come.

If you’re running something earlier, the decision isn’t as clear cut;  
you’ll have to pay $170 and get Snow Leopard with Apple’s creative- 
software suites — whether you want them or not.

Either way, 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. May the rest of the  
industry take the hint.

E-mail: pogue at nytimes.com


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