September 01, 2009
Mac OS X 10.6 Snow Leopard Review and Comment

First of all, the Ars Technica review of Snow Leopard is exhaustive, going into about every detail you'd want. Here's my take too, if you care:

I'm a bit underwhelmed to be honest. I know that Apple hyped this as "no new features" and that there wasn't anything to really expect, but I still felt a bit empty after the install. However:
Pros:


  • Saved 10+G of space (from 73G or so free to 90-something)
  • Feels faster (could be just the effect of a new install though)
  • New expose features
  • My multi-touch trackpad now supports the four finger expose actions
  • Exchange support in mail (meh)
  • Quicktime X is pretty sexy
  • Some little tweaks, ie: an 'ignore' button on the 'mounted drives can't be found' dialog, and the oft-mentioned CD ejection improvements :)
  • Hey, it's only $35.... that's practically the cost of a trip to Starbucks these days! Definitely less than the price of entry to a Windows 7 install, or a brand new Mac OS X Leopard disk (which as an aside, you don't need to have to do the Snow Leopard install).

Cons

  • Some apps aren't updated for 64bit operation yet

    • I have a couple of extras in my control panel that require a control panel relaunch to access
    • Flip4mac doesn't work for playing WMV files through QuicktimeX (but I can play them through mail.app)

  • I still have to get used to the way that expose does it's things, I was starting to get used to how it arranged windows before, now I'm going to have to re-learn
  • The 4 finger gestures for expose and show desktop can be .... twitchy. Half the time doing the 'undo' move (ie: swipe down to show expose, swipe up to un-expose) when I take my fingers off it re-exposes. Either I'm operating the trackpad incorrectly, or it needs to detect the difference between taking your fingers off the trackpad and doing the movement again.
  • I can't say I see the huge and noticable performance changes other people say. Yes it feels faster, but I can't say that after a few days of using Snow Leopard I can still say it feels faster than before.

My consensus, hey, it's $29 and as long as you realize it's basically a service pack and roll up of tweaks, you'll be fine.





Posted by Arcterex at September 01, 2009 11:29 AM