Mac OS X 10.6 a.k.a Snow Leopard: Review
Snow Leopard
Snow Leopard, as a follow up to Leopard, is almost absurdly insubstantial at first glance. It is also known as Mac OS X 10.6, Apple’s new operating system. The speed optimizations are deep, performance squeezed from underused CPU multicores/GPUs and basic user interface tweaks.
Snow Leopard is faster, sometimes drastically—but almost never in third-party applications. The three reasons for the improvement of the Snow Leopard better performance. First the so-called GCD by the Apple Company which stands for Grand Central Dispatch is the responsible of handling the threads. Different program processes away from the application itself to the operating system. It is much more efficient, allowing more things to get done concurrently with fewer hassle at the application level.
In addition, the OS-level threading means the computer itself can spread the work out to all available cores; the computer knows how many processors and cores it’s sporting. The second reason is OpenCL APIs (Application Program Interface) for utilizing the processing power in any graphics cards above the GeForce 8600 Series for video acceleration and general purpose computing. Lastly Snow Leopard is set to run in 64-bit mode while taking advantage of GCD and CoreCL. It also allows programs to run in 64-bit mode, the main theoretical advantage of which is to allow these programs to access more than 4GB of RAM on systems that have it. So the processing of chips more efficient.
Snow Leopard is efficient in other ways too. It runs only on Intel hardware and downloads printer drivers it needs from the net, as you need them. The install size is down to 10GB from 16GB which makes the installation quicker by abut 30% on any given piece of the hardware. Here’s the kill, Snow Leopard still can finish the installation if it’s accidentally power down midway. The bottom line on performance is that the programs included with this operating system will do just about everything faster on modern machines that support those technologies—that is, most of the multicore Macs or those running Nvidia 8600 series video cards or higher. It’s faster on the scale of 25 to 50%. No other apps that use GCD or OpenCL are available from software makers outside of Apple.
There are five major changes on Snow Leopards user interface. The first is the finder, just like a search engine but icons here scale up to 512 pixels wide. It sounds wasteful, except that the video files can be played directly from the finder window which is great. Second is the “Dock”. In here you can drag a file to an icon there to somehow get the two to interact, dock has been interactive for some time. But you could never use the dock to select which window instance of an app to use. Now clicking and holding (empty handed or with a file) triggers “Expose” which is the third change. Expose is viewing all the windows for one application in Expose’s zoomed-out view, the items are now arranged in a grid instead of a single, impossible to read line, and each window has a text label. The minimize windows are also shown at the bottom of the screen. The fourth one is the Stacks improves on this by allowing scrolling in the Grid view, but by also adding a smart list view capable of showing numerous files at once. The last major change is QuickTime 10 . The program has a new capture system for encoding video and audio clips and even voice annotated screen capture sessions. It also borrows the trimming thumbnail line from iMovie ‘09. Have fun on your new Snow Leopard OS.