Apple Snow Leopard Overview
Mac OS X 10.6 – aka Snow Leopard – will be released tomorrow. The truth is that it doesn’t contain hundreds of big new features to entice you into upgrading – but it does have one that everyone will appreciate: speed.
Snow Leopard is, in fact, blisteringly fast. Booting is quicker, waking from sleep is quicker, and, of course, launching applications is quicker than if you’re using Leopard.
That’s not to say that it doesn’t have other, real, new features, too – Exchange support in Mail, iCal and Address Book are probably the most well known in companies. And there’s the anecdotal effect: after a few days of using Snow Leopard, sitting down at a Mac running Leopard will drive you insane, just as using a Tiger-based Mac now sets the teeth of any seasoned Leopard user on edge.
In place of the big new features, Snow Leopard brings many small improvements. Finder has been rewritten to be much more robust in the face of vanishing network volumes. Your time zone is automatically set based on your location. Preference panes have been reorganised – sometimes only minutely – to make it easier to find the most important settings. The parental controls on a child’s Mac can now be managed remotely. And there’s one giant extra that’s inside the box, but requires third-party developers to make best use of it: the graphics acceleration of OpenCL, which will start to let developers use the power of your graphics processor to do CPU work.
Full review of apple snow leopard: http://www.guardian.co.uk/technology/2009/aug/27/snow-leopard-review
Categories: Tech
