“While [Apple’s Mac OS X] Snow Leopard is, essentially, Leopard, it has been dramatically rewritten to be faster in some operations on all Macs, and faster still when future Macs can take advantage of architecture enhancements,” Mark Webster blogs for The New Zealand Herald.
“So if you’ve upgraded, you will have noticed straight away that you now have more disc space. This is partly because of Apple’s adoption of the hard drive space maths used for decades by most hard drive manufacturers (ie, that 1000 megabytes is a gigabyte, and not 1024 megabytes), but also because OS 10.6x is smaller,” Webster writes.
“This is partly through ‘leaner’ code being written for essential operations and partly because 10.6 only installs the printer drivers you’re deemed to need, rather than every printer driver available,” Webster writes. “But now you might be sitting there wondering what all the fuss is about. If that’s you, here are a few new tips and tricks.”
Full article here.
[Thanks to MacDailyNews Reader “James W.” for the heads up.]
Quick Look works on the printer’s job Queue, so documents waiting to be printed can be read.
Little nit to pick… Snow Leopard won’t be faster on ALL Macs, only Intel Macs.
well , it only works on intel macs
Jay-Z perhaps I’m not picking up your sarcasm, but Snow Leopard won’t work at all on non-intel Macs. Additionally, the speed increases are minimal on first-gen Intel Macs that have 32-bit processors like my MacBook CoreDuo
Ah! Go to link for way cute picture of snow leopard cub!!
——RM
While we are nit picking:
The Finder has always had a number of quirks I thought the alleged rewrite would address. Sadly, they have not.
For example, if you select a file and shift select another in Icon View, the Finder fails to select the files in between, a behavior standard in windows machines and a number of Apple’s own apps such as iPhoto, Image Capture, Aperture and so on.
The Finder is also too stupid to go to the next row down if you right arrow along a row of images. It just stops at the end of the row.
Can you imagine ex-windows users consternation – no shift select in Icon View!
Bizarrely, if you try either of these on a page of spotlight results they work just fine.
As I’m mostly dealing with images Column and List Views don’t cut it.
Now however, a quick test in Snow Leopard at the Apple store reveals that even search result windows have regressed to non-shift-select and row-blindness stupidity. Essentially a step back.
The FTFF campaign never really got up enough steam for Apple to take any notice. Apple had the opportunity to make the Finder a little smarter, but chose to ‘add stuff to’ rather than actually ‘improve’ the UI.
Doesn’t the disk space benefit come from the fact that Snow Leopard doesn’t include the PowerPC binaries, seeing as it’s Intel-only?
Tip #11 – Leave your PowerPC friends behind!
Check out John Siracusa’s review in Ars Technica <http://arstechnica.com/apple/reviews/2009/08/mac-os-x-10-6.ars>. I believe he points out that a significant reason for the space reduction is that many files are now compressed. It turns out it’s faster to read a smaller file from disk & unpack it in RAM than to read the larger file from disk (RAM speed >> disk speed)
@jgarbers,
Not entirely. Some of it actually comes from file compression – and a few other tricks.
http://arstechnica.com/apple/reviews/2009/08/mac-os-x-10-6.ars/3
No. Any space gains from dropping PowerPC binaries would be more than made up for by adding 64-bit binaries.
Dammit, wleddy! Beat me to it while I was being a nice guy and finding the direct link.
(it’s page 3 of the review)
A nice little bonus (a very refreshing and time saving at that) is the new behaviour of keyboard shortcut for keyboard layout switching.
Up until Leopard, if you had, for example, English (UK), in addition to several different layouts for another language (say, Serbian-Latin and Serbian-Cyrillic, or Russian-phonetic and Russian-PC), your usual keyboard shortcut would switch between that English layout and the last of the other language (for example, Serbian-Cyrillic). If you needed to switch to Serbian-Latin, you would have to mouse-hunt for it on the menu.
This functionality continues to work in the same way, but they added a great time-saving little bonus: if you hold the primary modifier key (for example, if your combination is Cmd+Space, hold Cmd for a bit longer), a transparent menu will show up in the middle of the screen, allowing your to use the other key (space) to switch between all available layouts.
For me (and for many of my multi-lingual friends and colleagues), this is a great time-saver. The little flag in the menu is too tiny to quickly nail with the mouse.