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.