A late post, but the moral of the technological advancement is timeless, or perhaps, ancient. Not that it is from the olden days, but the honesty and the integrity of what is done dates back from the olden days…
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David Pogue
Apple Mac OS X v10.6 Snow Leopard
BUYING software is not like buying a vase or a comb or a lawnmower, where you pay, 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 from upgrading, the software company has to pile on more features each time. Pretty soon, you wind up with a huge, incoherent mess of a programme; 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 (OS) - the software you run all day. Just ask anyone with Windows Vista.
This year, though, Apple and Microsoft realised that the pile-on-features model is unsustainable. Both are releasing new versions of their OS that are unapologetically billed as cleaned-up, slimmed-down versions of what came before.
Microsoft's, called Windows 7, will come out this October. Apple's, called Mac OS X 10.6 Snow Leopard, arrives today, a month earlier than announced. (Apple to Microsoft: "Surprise!")
Apple's release strategy is highly unorthodox: "Leopard, aka 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: US$30 ($42.70).
Have they lost their minds? OS upgrades always cost a hundred-something dollars! (US$30 is the price if you already have Leopard. Otherwise, it'll cost you US$170 for a Mac Box Set that includes two suites of Apple software: iLife and iWork.)
In any case, Snow Leopard truly is an optimised version of Leopard. It starts up faster (72 seconds on a MacBook Air, versus 100 seconds in Leopard). It opens programmes faster (Web browser: 3 seconds; calendar: 5 seconds; iTunes: 7 seconds), and the second time you open the same programme, the time is halved.
"Optimised" 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. That's not true, according to Apple. Yes, that code is gone, but new 64-bit code, described below, easily replaces it. Apple says 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.)
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 hotspots 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 square, turning any desktop window into a light table for photos.
There's now also 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 as well. Movies open up into a gorgeous, frameless playback window with built-in trim handles and a "Send to YouTube" command. You can now record your screen activity as a movie - fantastic for tutorials. The old Services feature is now 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, email and calendar can show up in the Mac's own address book, email and calendar programmes, 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 of more little tweaks. In all, Apple says that more than 90 per cent of Leopard's 1,000 software chunks were revised or polished.
Despite all of this, online haters 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.
For instance: Mac OS X and most of its included programmes (the desktop, Web browser, calendar and so on) are 64-bit software, a geeky term that, for now, 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 programmes.
That Snow Leopard's looks haven't changed at all, in other words, betrays the enormous changes under its pretty skin. Unfortunately, that also explains the number of non-Apple programmes that "break" after the installation.
I experienced frustrating glitches in various programmes, including Microsoft Word, Flip4Mac, Photoshop CS3, CyberDuck and TextExpander, an abbreviation expander. Most of these hiccups will go away when software companies update their wares. Hopefully, Apple hurries up with its inevitable 10.6.0.1 update, to address the occasional Safari crash and cosmetic glitch I experienced, too.
Otherwise, if you're already running Leopard, paying the US$30 for Snow Leopard is a no-brainer. You'll feel the leap forward in speed polish and keep experiencing those "oh, that's nice" moments for weeks to come.
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. THE NEW YORK TIMES
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From TODAY, Tech – Friday, 28-Aug-2009
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