Snow Leopard 10.6
Interestingly enough, installation is one of the few parts of Snow Leopard that’s dramatically different than previous versions of OS X. Unlike Microsoft’s subtle nudges towards clean reinstallation of Windows 7, Apple’s quite proud of the new 10.6 installer, which upgrades in place, quarantines incompatible apps and plugins in an “Incompatible Software” folder, and boots you right back up with little to no user effort. Seriously, you just stick in the disc, open the installer, enter your password and go — that’s it. You don’t even have to reboot off the DVD. Of course, that made us a little uneasy, since we’ve always chosen Archive and Install to get a fresh OS, but you can’t have cold feet here — that option’s been removed. We’ve been told it’s now the default action behind the scenes, but the bottom line is that you have to trust the installer more than ever before — and while we didn’t have any major problems, it would be nice if we could force a new install of the OS without having to wipe a disk.
Installation itself took about 45 minutes on most of the machines we tried, although we did run into some snags once things were complete. We didn’t have any problems with the more pristine MacBook Pros in our fleet, but one of our production machines is a cranky older iMac that’s been in constant use for over two years without a system rebuild, and when it restarted the desktop pictures were all set to the defaults, the System Preferences app wouldn’t launch from the Apple Menu, our MobileMe sync states were a little confused and Spotlight began reindexing all the external drives. Fixing these problems didn’t take much, but if your machine is already acting up don’t expect everything to go perfectly.
Other installation notes: We were promised 6GB of storage savings with 10.6, and Apple more than delivered — we got anywhere from 10GB to a whopping 20GB back after installation. Rosetta is no longer installed by default, so if you’re still rocking some legacy non-Universal apps you’ll want to make sure and install it. Printer driver installation is much smarter, installing drivers only for those printers you’ve used in the past and printers that appear on your local network. We have no idea why Apple continues to insist on installing language translations by default, but they’re much smaller now at 250MB.
Overall, installing Snow Leopard is just like installing any other major OS update: it works great, except when it doesn’t. The process itself is fine (in fact, Apple has even built in some safeguards to let you pick up an install if your computer dies or is shut off half way through), but it’s the little kinks you have to work out afterwards that can be tricky. If you haven’t loaded up your system with hacks and tweaks chances are you’ll be fine — and if you’re living on the edge, well, you’re probably used to doing some extra work around upgrade time.
UI enhancements
Dock Expose
Previous OS X releases have brought major UI features like Expose and Dashboard with them, but there’s nothing that major in Snow Leopard, although the various tweaks to the system are certainly appreciated. The biggest new feature is Dock Expose, which, as you’d expect, simply links Expose to the Dock. Holding down on an app’s icon triggers Expose for that application’s windows, and if you drag a file onto an app, you can then select which window you want to drop it into. It’s definitely nice, but it’s not earth-shattering. Here’s a little video of it in action:
We’ve never been huge users of the Stacks feature, but it’s been tweaked and is much more usable in 10.6 — as long as you’re using grid view, which is now scrollable and offers the ability to drill down into folders just like a Finder window. All the other views are essentially the same — and for whatever reason, dragging a file onto a stack icon doesn’t open the stack, but instead opens a Finder window. While we’re on the subject of folders in the dock, explain this nonsensical operation to us: command-clicking a stack icon doesn’t open the folder (as you might expect), but instead pops open the enclosing folder. This counter-intuitive (and frankly frustrating) glitch has been around since Tiger — and we have no idea why. Here’s some video:
Finder file previews
We’ll get to the big Finder changes shortly — the Cocoa rewrite definitely improved things — but the big UI tweak here is live file previews. That means you can watch a video, flip through a document, and generally peek at things without having to open an app or even hit the space bar for Quick Look. It’s quite handy — but again, not earth-shattering.
And… that’s really it, as far as UI changes go. There’s some other minor stuff, like better PDF text selection in Preview, new glass-look menus for the Dock, and alphabetical / per-app window organization choices in regular Expose when you press command-1 or command-2, but overall it’s all extremely iterative and incremental — welcome, to be sure, but not major. The new Finder, on the other hand, is both major and more than welcome.
Notable app changes
Finder
It’s hard to explain how dramatically improved the Finder is now, because there’s nothing externally different beyond those file previews and an icon-size slider in icon view. Suffice to say that the Cocoa rewrite has simply made things better: opening folders with thousands of items is instantaneous and scrolling is just as fast; network connections are snappier; and everything hums about with essentially zero lag. Sure, all the old Finder quibbles like inconsistent windows states and those damned .DS_Store files are still there, but trust us — speed cures all ills. At least until we dump another couple thousand files into the system and slow things down again.
QuickTime X
Like the Finder — and, really, all things with Snow Leopard — QuickTime X is a set of major changes wrapped in seemingly-minor interface tweaks. Although the big change for users is the “dark” interface with a title bar and controller strip that disappear during playback, underneath QuickTime has been entirely rewritten with hooks into modern OS X components like Core Video, Core Animation, and Core Audio. That doesn’t mean much if you’re just playing back an MP3 or a single video, but remember that QuickTime is more than an app — it’s the entire media layer for OS X, so the Snow Leopard rebuild will have big consequences down the line.
That said, there are some notable changes with QuickTime Player: there’s a new screen recording tool (we made all the videos in this post with it), you can record right off your built-in iSight, and there’s a new iPhone 3GS-like “Trim” tool to cut your videos fast.
That glossy title might come at a steep price for some of us — at least at first glance. QuickTime Player X has certainly added some welcome new options for most, but for QuickTime 7 Pro users, things get a little confusing. If you’ve already got Pro on your system and do a straight install, you’ll end up with the standard new QuickTime — which means a lot of what you’re used to will be missing. Hell, there isn’t even a preferences dialog — so say goodbye to presenting movies on a different monitor, or choosing a default full screen setting. The changes also means that you can’t do quick’n'dirty edits by copy-and-pasting anymore (a favorite of Engadget editors), and export options have been reduced to presets for iPhone, iPod, Apple TV, MobileMe, and YouTube.
On top of that, some QuickTime-dependent apps seem like they need a rewrite to work correctly — we couldn’t get our Turbo.264 HD stick to function, and other QuickTime programs we tried seemed similarly stressed. Oh, and those screen recordings? They’re encoded with some combination of H.264 and AAC audio that didn’t play nice with Viddler out of the box — and YouTube’s uploader refused to load under Snow Leopard (we had a number of server errors), so we ended up uploading all these screencasts from a Windows machine. That may not be the case for all, but it was for us.
This won’t be too much of an issue for users who are sticking with the basic QuickTime functionality, but for those of us who’ve become accustomed to Pro, it may be a little shock. Interestingly, Apple let us know that you can actually re-install QuickTime 7 Pro from the Snow Leopard disc (and from your Utilities folder, oddly), but if you hop right into a standard upgrade, it’s amazingly easy to miss (we did on multiple systems).
