REVIEW: Apple Snow Leopard a speedy no-brainer upgrade

It’s like this. You’ve bought an old house and settling in for months of renovation. You have goals for every month and many of them give you immediate and intense gratification. The cramped Avocado Green kitchen is now open and airy, doused in natural light, and filled with modern appliances. The rickety back porch is now a full deck, with a six-person hot tub.

Other renovation landmarks include a new roof, upgraded electrical service, and a new heating system with multiple zones. Boring. But nonetheless essential. These are the things that keep a house functional and livable, and ensure that it’ll still be a fun place to live in twenty years’ time.

That’s my overall take on Snow Leopard, aka Mac OS X 10.6. Impressive and important, it’s an update that will revitalize your existing Mac even though you’ll be stumped for a quick five-minute demo that convinces the people around you that much of anything has changed at all.

The improvements in Snow Leopard fall into two categories. They’ve made fundamental improvements in the OS that allow both system software and applications to wring the full potential out of the multiple CPUs inside every new and old Intel-based Mac. And while Snow Leopard might not feature any revolutionary new user features, you’ll find many neat little enhancements have been made and many minor annoyances that have been done away with.

It seems as though Apple’s OS engineers spent the past year rummaging through all of the drawers and closets in the office, looking for every idea that they’ve come up with over the past few years that they’ve never been able to get to. “90% of more than a thousand different OS team projects have been refined or tweaked for Snow Leopard,” Apple tells me.

Snow Leopard is seriously faster than its predecessor. Apple happily furnishes bar charts touting 1.4x to 2x speed boosts in common tasks all through the user experience.

I don’t care much for benchmarks. It’s a provable fact that over the course of an average day, your computer spends more time waiting for you than you spend waiting for your computer. Does Snow Leopard feel faster than 10.5?

Hell, yeah. I partitioned a FireWire drive with clean 10.5.8 and 10.6 installations for comparison purposes and the improvements on my 2008 MacBook Pro were obvious.

Time after time, Snow Leopard “caught me reaching.” That is, I’d launch a complicated app and my Mac would complete the task while I was reaching for my deskside beverage. Going for a sip of Dr. Pepper is a reflex action; under 10.5, I know I have time to get a drink and put the glass back on its coaster before my Mac is ready to receive visitors once again.

The performance enhancements aren’t perceptible across the board, but in many operations the improvement is downright flamboyant. One morning last week, I was reading my email for a full five minutes before I realized that I was actually working with the Mail client on the desktop on my office via Screen Sharing, and not the copy of Mail installed there on my MacBook. It was completely fluid and responsive. Waking from sleep is now nearly-instantaneous, as well.

(For the MacBook, not the user. If I were capable of coming fully online from sleep immediately, I might have figured out the Screen Sharing thing sooner.)

The leaps in speed are due to two or three deep under-the-hood new features which the user will never see, and never need to know about. Apple’s major apps have been rewritten to take full advantage of 64-bit addressing. A 64-bit app can push around more memory than an older 32-bit one, and can use a bigger shovel, y’see.

The most important speed enhancements come courtesy of two technologies that apparently merit their own names. “Grand Central Dispatch” represents Apple’s determination for itself and all third-party software to stop playing around and to finally exploit the hell out of the multiple processors inside nearly every old and new Intel Mac.

Apple describes Grand Central as an “extremely comprehensive” new approach to multiprocessor computing. With the multicore services available in 10.5, developers had to carefully tune and optimize their code. How should this code perform with four processors? What should it do if there’s only one? And how should an app create and dispose of multiple “threads” (which each thread essentially representing a new task for the CPU, consuming its own resources)?

Grand Central involves several brand-new programming concepts. The net effect is to make the process of managing multiple tasks fairly abstract to the software developer. Whereas an application can only see and understand its own performance, the operating system can see what’s going on across the entire environment, and do a smarter job of making sure that each app gets the processing resources it needs and releases those resources when the task is complete. So the developer describes the code’s needs in rough terms and then Grand Central figures out how to make that happen, factoring in what’s best for the app’s performance as well as the performance of the whole system.

OpenCL is a far more straightforward and clever idea. With the exception of dirt-cheap economy PCs, every computer has a monster CPU that’s devastatingly fast at crunching numbers: the graphics accelerator chip. Its designated task is to make sure that HD movie files play smoothly and that when you blow a nose tackle’s head off in “Grand Theft John Madden 2010,” the skull fragments fly off at 60 frames per second. But otherwise, it spends its time loafing.

(How powerful are these graphics chips? University researchers often buy banks of Playstation 3’s and gang them together as a supercomputer.)

OpenCL is an API that allows the OS to hand off some persnickety math tasks to the graphics chip. It’s an open standard that only works with compatible chips, but the big accelerator makers are already on board and the feature should work out of the box on most Intel Macs.

OpenCL and Grand Central Dispatch are features that will speed up every existing app to a certain degree, by virtue of the fact that apps rely on OS routines; naturally, Snow Leopard itself takes full advantage of both technologies. But expect to see more serious performance gains as developers begin to fine-tune their apps for 10.6.

But you’re not supposed to really know or care about these new core technologies. To the user, Snow Leopard is like a big gift basket that keeps turning up small and happy surprises.

The Installer

And the gifts start coming right at the top. Apple has greatly improved the installation process. A fresh install takes half as much time as a 10.5 installation, and requires far less initial free space. If you have as little as six gigabytes free on your existing 10.5 system, you can upgrade to 10.6 without deleting any files.

Apple has also finally clarified the “Archive And Install”/”Erase And Install” muddle by taking the dangerous one and moving it off of the main installation wizard. Yes, many folks were unaware that the latter option would erase the entire hard drive and all existing data.

And magically, the OS installer can now recover from crashes gracefully. If something interrupts the installation or upgrade process the system restarts and the installation automatically picks up right where it left off.

My MacBook froze while I tried to install 10.6 on a keychain flash drive (which you’re really not supposed to do, but there are ways of tricking the Installer into doing it anyway). Before I could select a proper curse word, the machine restarted and the installation was back on its way to a successful finish.

Another new twist: if you’re upgrading an existing machine, the Installer will scan your drive for apps and drivers that are known to cause problems with Mac OS X 10.6. The errant apps will be discreetly moved to a separate folder on your drive, out of harm’s way.

Are there large incompatibilities with Snow Leopard? Apple described it to me as a “very small number”; the chief issue appears to be developers who chose not to write their code with Apple’s standard tools and APIs. Apple promises to have a complete list of known troublemakers up on Apple’s support site (http://www.apple.com/support/) in the form of a Knowledge Base article. Look for it online on Friday, Snow Leopard’s official launch day.

The Installer found no naughtiness with my own systems but it’s smart to check that list before committing your lone Mac to 10.6.

The OS’s footprint has shrunk, taking up 7 gigabytes less than a straightforward 10.5 install. The Installer does this by using code compression as well as by ending the practice of installing every printer known to God by default. Now, the Installer will only install drivers for the printers you’re likely to run across. If you’re ever missing a driver, you can now find and install printer drivers automatically via Apple’s standard Software Update mechanism.

The Finder

“A totally revamped Finder” has been high on many people’s wishlists for the past three releases of Mac OS X. True, the venerable Finder’s starting to look a little long in the tooth. The Snow Leopard version appears unchanged but has plenty of nice surprises.

The flashiest one is the new twist on Icon View. Traditionally, it’s the window view that I never use. I want to see the contents of my drives and folders as tidy lists of files, not as useless little cartoonish avatars.

In Snow Leopard, the addition of a Size slider at the bottom of an Icon View window changes it from a forgettable relic of Mac OS 1.0 into a sort of “Super Preview” view. 25 years ago, these were 32-pixel icons. Now, they can be postcard-sized previews of the files’ actual contents, up to 512x512 pixels. If it’s an image, you see the image. If it’s a movie or an audio file, you can play the file. If it’s a multipage document, you can scan through it, page after page.

Two examples of those “root through all of the desk drawers looking for things we’ve always wanted to get around to one day” Finder features: a much, much smarter Eject mechanism. In 10.5, you might try to eject a memory card or a flash drive or any other kind of removable storage, but find that the Finder will have none of it.

“I can’t do that,” it sniffs, distracted. “Something on that volume is in use by something running on your Mac.”

You’d like to ask the Finder a logical followup question but nothing doing: it won’t tell you what file it is. You’re forced either use an obscure Unix command-line trick, or randomly close windows and apps, or just yank the drive out of the USB port and hope for the best, despite the presence of open files.

In 10.6, the Finder just tells you what the holdup is.

Why, oh why, did we have to wait this long for such simple courtesy? According to Apple, it was one of those problems that lived deep, deep down at the core of the Finder. Only a complete rewrite of the code that the Finder uses to eject media could solve the problem.

In fact, the Finder has finally been rewritten using Apple’s Cocoa framework. The Finder was one of Apple’s last and most legendary holdouts to use Carbon, which was a system intended to help developers bridge the gap between Mac OS 9 and Mac OS X…ten years ago. This alone is responsible for a snappier, more agile Finder.

And recovering from an accidental Trashing is more elegant. Items in the Trash can now be “Put Back,” or restored to where they were before you impulsively decided to get rid of all of your illegal Tito Puente MP3s.

Microsoft Exchange Support

This will provoke either a “Woo-hoo!!!” or an “Eh,” depending on the presence or absence of Microsoft Exchange servers in your life. If your office uses Exchange for mail, contacts, and scheduling, it’s a born-again experience and your data is integrated seamlessly within Apple’s built-in apps. Exchange groups are now included among Address Book’s groups; iCal is now aware that Ted and Sylvia aren’t both available to meet with you until Tuesday and if you want the conference room with the good projector, better make it Wednesday at 3; and some of your Mail folders are Exchange accounts.

The Services Menu Now Actually Does Something

I have to pick this as my second-favorite single feature of Snow Leopard. The Application menu of every Mac app has an item called “Services.” The original idea was that an app could “lend” some of its features to other apps via this menu. For instance, if you’re in the Finder, you could select a file, pick “Send Selection” from Services’ “Mail” submenu, and then the Mail app would open the file and append it to a brand-new outgoing message.

Services never reached its real potential. It needs to be supported by individual apps, and most developers just don’t bother. I’ve just checked my own 10.5 Services menu and I find that after two years of installing dozens and dozens of apps on this drive, there are only ten services that were put there by third-party software.

That all changes in Snow Leopard. First, Services makes more sense. Instead of seeing every single Service that’s available, Services only shows you the few that are actually relevant to your current situation. If you have a block of text selected in your word processor, for example, it won’t offer to calculate a CRC-32 image checksum from it. Services is now also a submenu in every contextual menu. You can bring up a list of relevant Services just by Control-clicking on that block of text; the feature is no longer hidden far away.

But that’s not the best bit. You can roll your own Services right in Automator, the built-in Mac OS utility that makes automating a process as simple as snapping together a stack of Lego bricks.

In a certain sense, this gives you the ability to add your own context-aware features to Snow Leopard. It only took me about five minutes to create a Service that converts any selected text in any app to an audiobook in iTunes, ready to be copied onto my iPhone the next time I perform a Sync. I select the text of a long article in Safari, or a long email, or a PDF. I control-click, choose “Make Audiobook,” and after some background percolation it’s been converted to spoken text.

Automator is dead-easy. There’s just one new complication when creating a Service: you need to specify what kind of selected content your Service operates on (fourteen different types are available), and whether this Service should show up everywhere or just in a specific app.

And it works. Truly, if there’s something that’s worth doing more than three times, it’s worth turning it into an Automator-powered Service in Snow Leopard.

Dock Exposé

But this new twist to the Dock is my single favorite new feature. The Dock is a row of application icons that live at the bottom of your desktop; you can launch and navigate to apps by clicking. Exposé is a feature that momentarily lines up live thumbnails of all of your open windows in neat, non-overlapping rows. Hit a function key and they all scatter like infantrymen; click on the window you want, and they all move back to their original sizes and positions, with the chosen window at the top.

Dock Exposé is the greatest combination since the debut of the Reese’s Peanut Butter Cup. Hold down the mouse on the Dock icon of any running app and presto: all of its windows get Exposéd within a tidy little smoked-glass window. Click on the thumbnail of the window you want.

“Hmm,” you think. “Not terribly different from the the new revamped Taskbar in Windows 7.”

Yeah, I thought that too. Until I actually used this new feature. It’s far more than a simple window-exposer. Let’s say you’re writing an email and you want to drag in a photo you found on the Web. Needless to say, you’ve got dozens of Mail and Safari windows everywhere.

Use Dock Exposé to find the Safari window with the photo. Once you’re in Safari, drag the photo out of that window onto Mail’s icon, and hold it there for a second.

Exposé shows you thumbnails every open Mail window. Drag the photo to the message window and hover there for a moment. Exposé will navigate you back into Mail and right over the selected window. Drop, and it’s inserted into the message.

Or wait … you actually wanted to download that photo and put it in a special folder? Drag it on top of the Finder’s Dock icon. Hover over any open window. Exposé takes you to the Finder and with your finger still down on the mouse button, you can hover over folder icons and “drill down” to where you’d like to finally release and save the image.

Apple, by simply hooking up one great feature to another great feature, has killed any incentive I ever had to keep my own desktop organized.

QuickTime X

Most users neglected the QuickTime Player app. For video creation and editing, they used iMovie. For audio creation and editing, they used GarageBand. For media playback, they used iTunes.

Which is a shame. $29 for a QuickTime Pro license is money well spent. It unlocks a whole barrel of features that turn the Player into the right tool for a bunch of simple jobs. Any time I need to record some quick audio, or take one of the video files recorded by my little pocket Flip Mino camera, perform some simple edits, and post it onto YouTube, I’d head straight to QuickTime Pro.

I was excited to hear that Apple was integrating Pro features into the new edition of Quicktime. I’m sorry to find that they weren’t terribly ambitious, but the updates give Player new relevance.

First, you can edit video without paying the extra $29. It’s simple editing, almost identical to what you can do with the iPhone’s camera app. You can quickly trim the ends of a video file to make it start and end exactly where you want, and then export it to a bunch of useful formats or post it online.

And for an app that’s supposedly not meant to be any competition for iTunes, it offers a gorgeous viewing environment for video files. Like a good butler, playback controls appear when needed and discreetly withdraw when not.

This is going to be an increasingly-essential app as video files become more popular forms of entertainment currency. All of the videos I shot in Asia were recorded as playable files. Many of the shows I watch arrive that way as well, and that’s how my digital TV shows are recorded off the air using my USB tuner. I don’t necessarily even want to import these files into iTunes; often, I just want to watch them once and then trash ’em. QuickTime Player is the perfect answer.

As a guy who often has to show what he’s talking about … I’m also pleased that the new Quicktime Player now has a video screencapture mode. It’s not something you’ll use every day, but when you send a non-techie relative a WiFi base station and you need to show them how to set it up, you’ll be happy that you were able to simply click “Record,” demonstrate and narrate the whole process, and then send him a Quicktime file.

Little Random Touches

The Airport menu icon now cycles through its four bars like a Cylon (from the old, terrible “Galactica,” not the new one) when it’s searching for base stations.

There’s system-wide automatic text substitution. Look in the “Language And Text” panel of System Preferences and click on the “Text” tab to set it up and define substitutions. Type (tm) anywhere and the OS will automatically change it to a proper typographer’s symbol. Type “=THEUSUALFIBS=” and it’ll be replaced with a whole paragraph promising that the check is in the mail and that their people should definitely do lunch with your people and whoops, you’re getting a call on the other line and you’re heading into a tunnel … etc.

Location Services? On a desktop OS? Yup: the OS can scan the vicinity for known WiFi hotspots and get a rough fix on your location. Interesting. The only thing the OS can actually do with that information is set your time zone. And it won’t work with any external GPS hardware. But that rough location is available to third-party software via an API so maybe we’ll seem some clever uses of this new feature in the future.

Enhanced malware-awareness. Every file that you download via Safari, Mail, or iChat is checksummed and compared against a regularly-updated database of known malware. For now, “known Macintosh malware” is chiefly limited to things like commercial apps that have been embroidered with Trojans and then uploaded to pirate sites, but it’s good to know that Apple’s staying ahead of the ball.

And Apple is continuing to make universal access a serious priority. Even support for mechanical Braille displays is now built right into the OS.

Apple did indeed promise that Snow Leopard, as its name implied, was merely an enhanced edition of Leopard; an evolution, rather than a revolution.

The pricing tends to bear that out. Normally, an Apple OS update costs $129. Snow Leopard will cost existing Leopard users all of $29. Got a family? Great: buy a five-pack for $49.

Folks using 10.4 or earlier will need to buy the Mac Box Set. It’ll run you $169. But! You also get full-retail copies of iLife and iWork ‘09, which normally cost $79 apiece.

That’s an aggressively cheap upgrade. It seems as though Apple’s using the occasion of Snow Leopard to make sure that all of the random stragglers among their user base catch up to the bus and bring everything up to date.

Snow Leopard is a very egalitarian release, too. Any Intel Mac will benefit from Snow Leopard’s performance enhancements. This OS isn’t just for Fotheringay Q. Yachtowner, who sets fire to their current hardware every three weeks and buys whatever’s hot off the dock.

(Yes, I am now arching an eyebrow at Microsoft. When you visit their Windows 7 page, it’s much easier to find links to new PCs you can buy with 7 pre-installed than it is to locate the upgrade packages.)

The other upside, I suppose, is that the price represents perhaps the most emphatic middle finger that Apple’s ever extended towards Microsoft’s general direction. In the past five years, Microsoft has done far less with Windows than Apple has done with the Mac OS.

Windows 7, due in October, is a big leap forward but hardly revolutionary. There are three editions and even the cheapest copy currently available for pre-order (Windows Home Premium) costs $119 as an upgrade and $199 as a clean install. Even before you scroll down the feature lists and figure out whether it’s more fair to compare Snow Leopard to Windows 7 Ultimate ($219 upgrade), you can see that Apple clearly thinks it’s making enough dough off of their other products to worry about pricing Snow Leopard ambitiously.

In truth, it’s likely that Apple chose the most palatable price. Most of Snow Leopard’s best features are fairly abstract and I imagine that the average user would find other things that they could spend $49 on.

But just $29? To make your Mac this much faster? It’s a gimme.