I’m a techie that likes to live on the bleeding edge, of course that does occasionally mean that I get caught out and need to backtrack. I am hoping that this afternoon is not one of those occasions as I install Mac OS X 10.6 Snow Leopard, Apple’s latest major release of their operating system.
In this release they’ve dispensed with the need to refer to fonts as one of the 129 new features, instead they have focussed upon mostly under the hood improvements, one of these being the utilization of my Mac’s graphics card gpu. One improvement that I am really looking forward to is the changes to stacks, previously the list/grid would only show so many items before you needed to drop into finder to see the rest, a real pain. 10.6 introduces scrolling to stacks as well as the ability to navigate to sub-folders. Exchange support is also a boon, although as a home user this is of no use. At work I also have a Mac as a secondary machine, albeit a PowerMac that cannot run 10.6, I can imagine this will be one of those upgrades that they’ll look to implement more speedily.
Well I am down to 32 minutes left until finished. Time to hang out the washing. I’ll do a write up later of my hands on experiences.
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Well the install process went flawlessly, although I think I may need to help understand the meaning of “less than a minute” as that message was displayed for about 2-3 minutes. The whole process took around 50 minutes, including 2 restarts. To be honest, on my MacBook unibody with 4GB and 2.0GHz C2Duo processor I haven’t really noticed any speed differences, although I am not pulling out the timer to compare.
I really like the changes they have made to Expose and Stacks, the latter allowing me to delve into sub-folders without the need to open a finder window. By default Apple’s chosen to run the 32-bit kernel, I hear this is to be the norm for all except XServe’s until there are sufficient numbers of 64-bit drivers become available.
An interesting change has been Apple’s move to describing file sizes in base 10 instead of the computing world’s base 2, I guess though this does conform to standard marketing practice these days.
Quicktime X is cool, I like that it isn’t that awful aluminium interface, that’s so old hat.
Other than that, nothing to report. Stable so far, wonder how long until 10.6.1 is released, usually a few weeks post-release isn’t it?
Comment by g04uld August 28, 2009 @ 9:47 pm