Mac OSX 10.6 Snow Leopard
Posted by: LES in Apple, Software, tags: Apple, Mac OSX, Snow Leopard
About 1 week ago Apple released the it’s new operating system Snow Leopard. It was basically a improved version of Leopard with a few new features but not a lot. It was priced very reasonably at $29 for a single user license upgrade.
There’s been a lot of people talking about how it isn’t much different and breaks some compatibility with some old applications, so some have not upgraded and some have rolled back to Leopard.
Myself I have upgraded all of my Macs and I find that it is much faster and responsive. The sleep and wake function now works really fast and as I’ve been using it for the past week, I have slowly started to notice new features that weren’t on the previous OS Leopard. Some of these updates like when you click on the WiFi icon you can now see the signal strength of all the wireless networks detected which can make choosing one easier. Also expose is much better now and can now show what’s been minimized in the dock.
Overall I think Apple was going for stability and not so much for new features as that is what they mentioned in the last WWDC. One feature that works now for the address book that didn’t before and left my address book unable to work was adding a smart group that shows all the contacts that are not in a group. That use to make my address book hang and I would have to reset some settings to get it to function again, but now it works fine.
Also a big change was the ability to run in 64 bit native mode which only some macs can do. You can hold 6 + 4 during boot to force the OS to boot into the 64it kernel which makes the OS all 64bit but you may find compatibility issues if you do so.
I think most of the new features will be more apparent once developers utilize the new programming features like grand central dispatch and Open CL.
You can find out more about Snow Leopard here – http://www.apple.com/macosx/
Tomorrow September 9th Apple is holding a event in San Francisco which rumor has it they will be showing off their latest new iPods. Stay tuned for a post tomorrow on whats new tomorrow.
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