EclecticGuy

I pre-ordered Snow Leopard from Apple to have it delivered first thing on its release date – August 28th, 2009! Apple came through, the package arrived by 10am and was waiting for me when I got home from work. The package is a single DVD installer. Simply insert the disk and double click the installer, it does the rest (no rebooting from the DVD). It took about 55 minutes start-to-finish to install on my 3.06 GHz Core 2 Duo iMac with one automated reboot during the process. The entire installation is “touchless” after kicking it off.

So, now that I’ve update four of our Macs (Family Pack) with Snow Leopard and used it for a few days, what do I think? Well, there is very little change in the user interface. That’s a good thing, I hate relearning new UIs. The real power of Snow Leopard is under the covers – full 64 bit support and a completely re-written Finder (that is, of course, 64 bit). Almost all of the Apple apps are now 64 bit too (Mail, Safari, iCal, and iChat). Snow Leopard’s “Grand Central Dispatch” is an enabling technology for software developers to write better multi-processor applications more easily. OpenCL taps in to graphics processors to use for more than just graphics. Very cool, I can hardly wait to see what developers do with it! Snow Leopard comes with QuickTime X also. It includes a new Player, really improved internet video streaming, and built in audio and video capture!

So far, Snow Leopard has been noticeably faster and completely transparent – meaning I have not run in to any problems with any of the apps I run – Photoshop CS3, ViaCAD, the iWork suite, Lightroom 2, TextMate, etc. The new XCode is also really solid.