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MacChat: Spot the difference in Snow Leopard

IT’S one small step for a Leopard, but one giant leap for Mac-kind.

It’s not often an operating system upgrade runs faster and more efficiently than the one before, but that’s what Mac OS X Snow Leopard achieves. Apple has built a better Leopard: sleeker, faster and with a smaller footprint.

But while the focus has been on fine-tuning performance, it has been at the expense of new features. You won’t find any major new additions such as Expose, Dashboard, Spotlight or Time Machine in this operating system.

Snow Leopard has achieved its new efficiencies in several ways. Ninety per cent of Leopard’s code base has been refined, and Snow Leopard is now a 64-bit operating system (though it will run 32-bit applications, which still make up the majority). This means it can use more than 4GB of RAM, up to a theoretical maximum of 16 billion gigabytes.

Importantly, it has jettisoned support for PowerPC Macs, taking OS X back to its Intel-only NEXTStep roots. This means about 20 per cent of the system’s user base just became obsolete.

But while it won’t run on PowerPC Macs, it will still run PowerPC applications via an optional install of Mac OS X’s Rosetta emulation layer. Upon installation, Snow Leopard will file any incompatible applications into a folder of their own.

It also no longer installs unneeded code such as printer drivers. These are downloaded as required, and only for the printer model you use.

Apple says Snow Leopard will give you back 6GB of hard disk space. Real-world experiences show this can be even higher.

Will you notice the speed difference? It depends on the age of your hardware. Leopard was already fast enough on the latest Macs, but if your Mac was a couple of years old you might get a speed boost.

Where Snow Leopard will come into its own is when developers start writing applications to take advantage of its new, more effective use of processing power. New technologies such as Grand Central Dispatch and OpenCL make it trivially easy for developers to use 64-bit multicore processors and powerful GPU cards.

The Finder is one of the main beneficiaries of Snow Leopard’s code overhaul. The venerable Mac file browser, which users have loved to hate because of usability and performance issues, still looks the same but has been totally rewritten in 64-bit Cocoa, making it much more responsive.

It is also said to be more reliable at ejecting CDs and DVDs. This might seem a basic function, but with Mac OS X it has always been hit-and-miss for some reason.

Leopard introduced 512-pixel icons in CoverFlow view, and Snow Leopard extends this to normal icon view. You can browse your apps and files in high resolution, and even preview documents from icon view.

In a nod to Windows 7, the Expose windowing function is now accessible from the Dock as well as a hot key or hot corner: click and hold an application icon in the Dock and its window previews spring up. Expose now also sports a tidier, more uniform grid view.

Snow Leopard now boasts Microsoft compatibility not even Windows can match out-of-the-box: system-level support for Microsoft Exchange servers, meaning Apple’s Mail, Address Book and iCal can seamlessly integrate with a corporate mail and collaboration environment.

The catch is that it supports only Exchange 2007. Users of Exchange 2003 need not apply.

On the server side, this newfound Exchange support makes Apple’s Xserve running Snow Leopard Server a compelling alternative for corporations, regardless of which platform they operate.

Some of Snow Leopard’s enhancements are ones you’ll hopefully never need to use. If your installation is interrupted, say, by a power outage, it will pick up where it left off.

While there’s a scarcity of new user features, the new QuickTime X throws in a few of its own. As well as enjoying an interface overhaul and hardware acceleration, it offers such nifty new features as screen recording, basic editing and exporting to iTunes, MobileMe and YouTube.

But the best part about Snow Leopard might be its price. As it seems like a modest update on the surface, it will set Leopard users back only $39, or $69 for a Family Pack for up to five Macs. Tiger users can buy the box set, also including iLife ‘09 and iWork ‘09, for $299.

Snow Leopard is a no-brainer for Leopard users, and for Tiger users who skipped Leopard, it’s now well worth making the leap.