![]() I like Snow Leopard, and found moving back to Leopard quite surprisingly painful. The only software that couldn't run was one called Blogo. In terms of compatibility, I had no problems with a series of applications I tried: Microsoft Office 2008, a six-year-old version of Adobe Photoshop, even applications that use low level I/O, such as Amadeus Pro and Audio Hijack. Since QuickTime is built into the OS, browsing libraries of videos in different formats is better. ![]() On the plus side, QTX played Flash movies without complaint, something currently only possible with third-party add-ons. Now you can quickly zip through columns listed according to the order that you prefer, by size, kind, date modified and so on: Previously, if you wanted to use the fastest method of navigating a folder hierarchy - the old NeXT method that's now called Column view - it would insist on an alphabetical sort order. If you squint, you'll see Sleep has acquired a keyboard accelerator - Apple add-on keyboards haven't had a power button for a few years now.Ĭhanges are minor, and some improvements are subtle. Another reference point, the System Preferences panel, also looks exactly the same as before. And here it is.Īs you can see, there are no new applications, or even icons. It's an amazing eight years since we first discussed a truly "native" Finder, one written to the Cocoa frameworks. It has been claimed that Snow Leopard will download Rosetta if it wasn't installed but you need it subsequently. Rosetta smoothed the migration to Intel hardware enormously, and will be needed for some time. Perhaps it's a licensing issue? Rosetta is the miraculous run-time technology developed at Manchester University by a computer science professor, who went on to found Transitive - a brief history here. If you need Rosetta, remember to choose it at install time, or else you'll need your DVD. On the Mac Pro, I performed an in-place upgrade. I was a bit surprised to find I couldn't format this from inside the Installer - I needed to quit the Installer and run Disk Utility manually. On the MacBook, I nominated to keep the Leopard partition intact, and reformat a Boot Camp Windows partition for Snow Leopard. Not exactly the latest and greatest hardware, but in both cases EFI reported a 64-bit system. I installed Snow Leopard on a three-year-old quad-core Xeon Woodcrest Mac Pro, and a 15-month-old basic MacBook. All these goodies will come in due course. Nor is it a benchmark, a comprehensive run through of all the features - I didn't test Cisco VPNs, for example - or a technical analysis. I can't promise you that this is the final version, although some web forum posters have suggested that it is. And despite radical under-the-hood changes, such as the move to 64-bit and a new scheduler, it provides excellent compatibility.Ĭonsider what follows an illustrated scrapbook of my experience on two Macs. Whizz-bang features are thin on the ground, but it's undoubtedly faster and more responsive than its predecessor. I've been using a release candidate cut of the OS, and found plenty to like. ![]() And Leopard now works so well, many will wonder why they should risk things at all?Ĭonsequently, Snow Leopard has got a price to match: just $29/£25 for a single-user upgrade from 10.5. It also leaves behind Macs as recent as three years old - it will only install on Intel hardware. It's an important engineering release that isn't being sold on features - because there aren't really that many new ones. ApparentlyĪpple's 10.6 release - aka Snow Leopard - faces even more than the usual challenge. Snow Leopard: the World's most advanced OS, fine tuned.
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