The Snow Leopard reviews are out
…and I’m not gonna be able to enjoy the upgrade anytime soon, so I’ll have to be content with looking at the reviews.
Does Snow Leopard feel faster than 10.5?
Hell, yeah.
Okay, then.
Apple continues to rely on the honor system for Mac OS X. Not only does Snow Leopard not require the entry of any serial numbers, but the standard version of Snow Leopard is a bootable “full install” disc that doesn’t actually check for the presence of Leopard in order to install.
When MacBreak Weekly discussed the upgrade procedure — just earlier today, but under NDA — I thought: “Come on, Apple hasn’t gone so evil yet that they’d check whether Leopard is installed on the drive, has it?” …but I wasn’t quite sure. I’m glad to see I was right.
Rosetta, the technology that enables code compiled for PowerPC chips to run on Intel chips, is available—but is not installed by default. Rosetta only takes up a few megabytes of drive space […] I can only assume that making Rosetta optional is an attempt by Apple to goad users to upgrade their apps and to shame developers who still haven’t recompiled their apps to run on Intel chips.
That is an odd choice. I guess, more than shaming developers, they really want to make it painfully clear that it isn’t Snowy’s fault that a certain application doesn’t feel any speedier than before.
By default, Snow Leopard still minimizes windows the same stupid way Mac OS X has for the last ten years. For us complainers, though, there’s a new alternative: A Minimize Windows Into Application Icon checkbox in System Preferences’ Dock pane.
Oh. Em. Gee.
But then, I’m not sure it’s quite usable, either: on Windows, when you minimize a window, you still see it appear in the taskbar, just as before (not sure how different it is in Vista/7 with some taskbar options). On Snow Leopard, though, if you turn this option on, minimizing a window will really make it all but disappear — and I can easily imagine having a bunch of forgotten Safari and Finder windows, all open on the same sites and folders. I never look at an application’s Windows menu, or its Dock icon’s menu.
Even better, this feature works with Exposé: When you invoke Exposé, all minimized windows line up together at the very bottom of the screen.
Okay, maybe it’s not so bad then. Although many people don’t use Exposé. (I don’t care, I do. And I love that it’s getting tidier, too.)
Several programs, including TextEdit, Mail, and iChat, can take advantage of a new systemwide Substitutions service that can autocorrect common mistakes (think teh to the), convert straight quotes to curly and vice versa, and turn double-minuses and triple-periods into em dashes and ellipses, respectively. Even better, a tab in the Keyboard pane of the System Preferences app lets you add shortcuts of your own.
I’m confused by this: A week ago, I read an article mentioning, like this review, that substitutions only worked on most of Apple’s applications. On the other hand, Andy Ihnatko’s review (linked further down) calls it systemwide — and it doesn’t make any sense for that functionality not to work in almost every third-party app, because the systemwide rich-text editor that’s provided “for free” to developers is one of the OS X SDK’s most touted qualities. So how could susbstitutions not work with all apps that use it?
I guess we’ll have to find out.
Apple’s QuickTime Player, long a stalwart tool for playing back audio and video, has been completely revamped for Snow Leopard. […] Every time I wanted to make my video louder or quieter, even via a keyboard shortcut, that floater appeared—and then remained for a second or two until finally fading away.
I’m quite glad to see I’m not the only one hating overlay controls. Emphasis mine on the particularly stupid behavior. And I also agree with the writer that having the player’s titlebar disappear when you’re not using it is completely ridiculous. But I guess there’s some strong-headed designer in the QuickTime Player team who won’t let go until he’s left his fingerprint on something ugly or impractical.
The changes also means that you can’t do quick’n’dirty edits [in QuickTime Player] by copy-and-pasting anymore (a favorite of Engadget editors)
Wow, I’m surprised not to see that mentioned more — video geeks will always tell you that being able to edit by using copy-and-paste in QuickTime is the basic skill any would-be editor needs to start practicing. And it is a really efficient way to do a quick-and-dirty edit when you need to.
But then I have nothing against the option of reinstalling QuickTime Player 7, I guess.
I don’t remember seeing Perian mentioned in any of the reviews, however. Can’t imagine that it’s 64-bit–ready, and I’m afraid updating the codecs might not be as simple as recompiling the bundle.
But if you click on a third-party preference pane that hasn’t yet been upgraded to a 64-bit version, System Preferences will tell you that it has to quit and reopen itself in 32-bit mode in order to open that preference pane.
Oh, gee, I’m sure it was so very important that System Preferences take full advantage of the speed of 64-bit computing. I mean, counting all those icons and stuff, that’s advanced computation.
(Okay, for all I know there may be a valid need for some of the preference panes to work in 64-bit. But, in that case, the correct workaround was definitely not to have System Preferences reopen every time you change panes. I’ve got 14 third-party panes in my iMac, some of which almost abandonware that I don’t expect to see updated for a while. How hard would it have been to have a second application bundle, called “System Preferences 32-bit,” launching separately when you wanted to activate a 32-bit pane?)
In Snow Leopard a mechanism was added to check for known malware signatures and display a user alert dialog. In these cases, rather than just advising the user that the file is an application, Snow Leopard provides a warning that the file contains known malware and suggests that the user move it to the Trash.
Uh-huh. The key words here being “added
” and “just
”: as in, judging from all the reviews, the new, secret anti-malware tool doesn’t dispense us of the goddamn warning when opening a file downloaded from within Safari. (I answered a tweet today about why use Safari rather than Firefox. I’d forgotten that this stupid dialog box — which only appears when a file has been downloaded from one of Apple’s apps — could just be reason enough for some to switch away from the system browser.)
The biggest compatibility-breaker is the demise of InputManager plugins in 64-bit apps. […] We also noticed problems with old standbys like Growl, GrabUp and Skitch […] There were some other head scratchers we saw on various systems, too. On a 17-inch unibody we were putting through the paces, the WiFi inexplicably has gone out and we have yet to get it working again. On a 15-inch, older generation MacBook Pro (3,1), Spotlight will only fetch search results in the dropdown – results in a Finder window come up empty. More annoyingly, on two other, newer models we were testing with, Safari crashes out when booting into 32-bit mode – meaning even Apple’s workaround doesn’t seem to… er, work.
Oh well, I suppose — well, I know — that every update has its horror stories. I’m always amazed that some people manage to concentrate so many of them. What the hell are they doing with their computers over there?
And, in conclusion: I want the new Finder! In fact, I simply demand that Apple release a Leopard version of the rewritten Finder for PowerPC users!
Also: god, this blog layout is unreadable when I intertwine quotes and reactions. Good thing I intended to redesign.
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unlimited, 5 years ago: