A complete review of Snow Leopard. Part 2

Original author: Jason Snell
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I suggest you get acquainted with the second part of the most detailed and accurate review of Snow Leopard by Jason Snell, Director of Editing at Macworld. The first part of the review talks about the changes that affected the installation process, some aspects of the interface and Exchange support.

Application changes



Together with Mac OS X comes about fifty large and small applications and utilities that form the basis of Mac user experience. If you have a favorite program, you will probably notice at least a few small changes.



There are several major enhancements to the Preview, including improved text highlighting in multiple columns.

Perhaps the biggest changes in the Preview, Apple's universal utility for viewing images and PDFs. I have been using View as my standard PDF viewing application for many years and I believe that it is superior to Adobe Reader in speed and interface. Pleasant changes to the View in Snow Leopard include improved text highlighting within multi-column PDF documents. A new annotation panel has also appeared for users who need to add comments to PDF documents.



Individual applications may optionally support new system-wide settings for automatic text correction.

Some programs, including TextEdit, Mail, and iChat, can take advantage of the new system-wide replacement service , which can automatically fix common errors (e.g. teh onthe ), change simple quotes to rounded and vice versa, and turn double minuses and three dots into long dashes (em dashes) and ellipses, respectively. Even better, the Text tab in the Language and Text panel of the System Preferences application allows you to create your own replacements.

System settings- This is also the place where you will see the most ugly evidence of the transition of Apple to a 64-bit application throughout the system. If you use only standard Apple settings panels, everything will work fine. But if you click on the settings panel from third parties that have not yet been updated to the 64-bit version, the system settings will tell you that they need to restart in 32-bit mode to open this toolbar. Of course, on the part of the system settings, it’s nice that they do it themselves, but after you go through all these dances several times with a launch, opening and starting again, it bothers. To solve this problem, developers need to update their settings panels, which is likely to happen soon. But it seems to me that Apple should do so

Snow Leopard ships with Safari 4 , the latest version of the web browser. This version has been available for Leopard for some time, but in Snow Leopard it works in 64-bit mode. This speeds up some math JavaScript operations . More importantly, according to Apple, browser plug-ins like Flash work as separate processes inside Safari in Snow Leopard, which means plug-in errors will not kill the entire browser. Although for several weeks of using Safari on Snow Leopard, I have not come across a case where the plug-in actually crashes in this way. However, the browser itself crashed several times, which left me no choice but to restart Safari and view the History menu to find the pages that I had read before this cataclysm.



The QuickTime Player X interface is located on the surface of your video, blocking the content (above). When you move the cursor, all aspects of the interface disappear (below).

Apple's QuickTime Player , a long-established tool for playing audio and video, has completely transformed into Snow Leopard. As I said earlier, the QuickTime Player application lacks so many features from the previous version that Apple made QuickTime Player 7 optionally available as a standalone installation.

Apple says the new QuickTime Player aims to play media, and boasts its new interface. In fact, this interface is practically absent. Just open the movie and you will see that it appears completely alone, with only a small black window panel at the top indicating its name. When you turn on the video, the interface completely disappears, leaving you alone with a movie that plays on its own on the screen. All playback buttons - sound, forward, play, backward, full-screen mode and scroll bar - are located on a floating die inside the movie itself.

This interface is good if you use full screen mode, otherwise it is a complete disaster. Any changes in the settings, including a slight increase or decrease in volume, cause a floating plate and a window panel to appear that block part of your video. (And on small films this is a big part of your video). Each time I wanted to make the video louder or quieter, even with a keyboard shortcut, this floating plate appeared and remained on the screen for one or two seconds, and then completely disappeared. Compare this with the old QuickTime player, which, while not in full-screen mode, had all the controls right under the video, where you could get to them without blocking what you were watching.

I don't think a disappearing interface is a good solution. During the middle of a movie, even the panel with the name of the movie disappears, at least until you start moving the mouse around the window. Over the years, I have learned to identify every window on my Mac from the window bar at the top, which tells me the name of what I'm looking at. And now a strange QuickTime window appears, not limited by any borders, playing by itself. Honestly, it looks like a mistake . I am completely in favor of removing the controls from the user's path when watching a video in full screen. But if I watch something that is mixed with all my other windows on the Mac, I would like the movie to look like a window, and not like some kind of anonymous escaped video that doesn't even have its own window pane.



QuickTime Player X offers standard shortening of clips (top) and standard export settings (bottom).

Although QuickTime Player X is more focused on video playback, it also offers some editing tools. There is a shortening, but it is extremely basic, no more complicated than the same function on the iPhone, where you can only set the beginning and end of the film. The Share function in QuickTime X is also somewhat more limited than what you are used to in QuickTime Pro: you can choose one of three standard export settings, or share files using MobileMe or YouTube. All in all, if you've ever used QuickTime Pro to crop, export, or process media, QuickTime X will disappoint you.

QuickTime also has new recording features, allowing you to record the contents of your computer screen and save it in a QuickTime movie. Attempts to record video on my MacBook Air using QuickTime completely failed, even though I successfully recorded video on the same system using Snapz Pro X from Ambrosia Software and ScreenFlow from Telestream.

I disagree with Jason Snell about QuickTime. I really liked the new interface back when I saw the first screenshots in AppleInsider a few months ago. Apparently, this is a matter of taste.

Wonderful little changes



Since global changes in appearance did not take place, we can only rejoice at the small gifts that Snow Leopard presents to us, and there are not a few of them. I would like to choose my favorite, but in fact they are all so small that I can’t even stop at one thing. But if I could collect them all in my hands, I would hug them.



Snow Leopard greatly simplifies the extraction of mounted volumes, and when this fails, it lets you know which application is to blame.

Eject discsNow it’s much simpler, and given that I connect an external drive every day at work, I know how unpleasant it is when I try to unmount this volume just to be told that something on my Mac thinks that my external drive is vital, and grabs him like a child in his favorite blanket, which makes him feel safe. Now when I try to eject the disk, its icon in the Finder dims and the system sends a message to all running applications that they should let it go, unless they have serious reasons not to do so. In most cases, the result will be trouble-free disc ejection after a few moments. But if, for example, iTunes plays music from this drive, the system will instead show a useful window that will explain that I can’t eject the disc,

As a regular MacBook user, I endlessly euthanize my Mac and wake it up again. In Leopard (and previous versions of OS X), mounted servers usually did not withstand the wake-up process. Leopard did a better job of this than previous systems. Older operating systems usually made my Mac freeze for half a minute before announcing that my server was gone, although that was not the case, while Leopard simply showed a warning that some servers were gone.

Snow Leopard handles this situation a lot better. A warning window still appears, but while it is there, Snow Leopard is trying to reconnect to these servers in order to restore the state that was before I brutally closed the cover of my laptop. In general, this function works wonderfully, because it itself resumes the connection with the servers, and I do not have to do it manually.

Snow Leopard is also much smarter when it comes to file-sharing with sleeping Macs.. If you are online with an AirPort or TimeCapsule base station, Snow Leopard will work with these devices to wake up when another Mac wants to share files and then fall asleep when the file sharing process is complete. This means that if you configure the network correctly, you can put your Mac to sleep and still have access to its files when you need them.



Monospaced fonts (size 12 points, top to bottom): new to Menlo, choice of Microsoft and BBEdit - Consolas and old standard Monaco.

Programming geeks who also love fonts(and yes, we exist), it will be interesting to know that in Snow Leopard the venerable standard monospace font Monaco has been replaced with the new Bitstream Menlo font, which is based on the Bitsream Vera and DejaVu headsets. I am sure that there are people who like Monaco, but as the person who used it for many years, I am not among them. (For the last couple of years, I used the wonderful Consolas, which is also included in Microsot Office, as my favorite font in a text editor; the BBEdit text editor that I usually use switched to Consolas at the end of last year). Attitude to fonts also depends on personal preferences, like attitude to haircuts or ironic t-shirts, but after a little time with Menlo I can definitely say that he has the potential to be a good alternative to Consolas.

Finally, scripts and automation got a good update on Snow Leopard thanks to the Mac OS X Services upgrade that was about to be done a long time ago. Everyone who was not afraid to visit the OS X Services menu, located in the application menu, in past versions saw a strange mixture of various and often mysterious commands - in truth, very few of us have ever visited it. It seems that the new system of Services is more likely to get a wider, although still somewhat geeky audience. Users can create new services using the Automator utility, and then start them through the Services menu or as a context menu item in any suitable application.

There is only one catch: although the Services menu has always appeared, the context menu items on some of my test systems sometimes appeared, and on some they did not appear at all. As soon as Apple fixes this problem, Services can become a favorite tool to increase the productivity of experienced Mac users.

A hidden feature in Snow Leopard is the limited ability to check downloaded files for known malwareIs a generic name for bad programs like viruses and trojans. This new scanning feature is included in the existing protection system, which warns you before opening applications or mounting disk images downloaded from the Internet. This is minimal protection, but it is also a good line of defense for unsuspecting users, and it’s worth congratulating Apple for providing it. However, the Apple system cannot be compared with antiviruses from third parties, and even Apple recognizes this. If you would like more detailed information on this subject, read our “Complete Survey of Hidden Malware Protection in Snow Leopard .

Upgrade to work faster?



In most cases, software updates add new features to the detriment of speed. (Imagine if Microsoft Word 2008 were as productive on my Intel 1.86 GHz processor as Word 5.1 on my 8MHz Mac SE processor, then I would finish the national month of writing novels in three hours)! But since Snow Leopard announced, Apple has kept repeating that this update has been made not only to fix problems and debug existing features, but also to improve performance.

When it comes to speed, there are actually two stories about Snow Leopard: one about the speed increase that the system provides today, the other about potential accelerations that users will see in the future when the software and hardware components continue to improve.

Let's talk about the present. Macworld labs compared Leopard with Snow Leopard in 16 different speed tests on three different systems. In half of our tests, Snow Leopard showed some speed improvements over Leopard.

Among the tests in which Snow Leopard exceeded Leopard were the Time Machine backup (Snow Leopard was on average 32% faster in this business than Leopard), shutdown time, H.264 video encoding, scrolling PDF pages in Preview, JavaScript passing - Sunspider benchmark, archiving a 2GB folder, importing photos into iPhoto and scrolling through a document in Pages. In the other two tests, Leopard was slightly faster than Snow Leopard. In the remaining tests, the results were mixed or identical between operating systems.

My subjective experience of using Snow Leopard for several weeks is largely consistent with the results of these laboratory tests. It seems that some tasks run faster in Snow Leopard than in Leopard, while others seem to be without any changes at all. Overall, I think most users will decide that Snow Leopard is faster and smoother than its predecessor.

However, software that runs on Snow Leopard has the potential to become significantly faster in the future. This will happen because Apple has provided two technologies to software developers that will help them speed up their applications, provided that they take care to take advantage of the use of new technologies.

First Technology, Grand Central Dispatch, helps programmers divide their programs into smaller parts so that they more effectively use the power of computers with multi-core processors. Programmers will still have to work hard to break the tasks into pieces, but Apple says that they hope that it will be much easier for developers than before, and that the result will be faster software, since every modern Mac has at least a dual-core processor .

The second technology, OpenCL , is a system that programmers can use to take advantage of the huge amount of processing power contained in the computer's GPU. By targeting certain tasks on the GPU, programmers will be able to use even more power to improve the speed of their programs.

In the long run, the computer industry is moving toward computers with a much larger number of processor cores and extremely powerful (and more flexible) GPUs. Your current processor may have a couple of cores, but it does not have an attractive GPU, such as my MacBook Air. But by integrating Grand Central Dispatch and OpenCL into Snow Leopard, Apple has staked on such a future, and is asking its community of third-party developers (as well as developers of all applications that come with Snow Leopard) to accept it. We are now waiting for small improvements, but Macs released next year will no doubt be able to take advantage of these features to a much greater extent.

In truth, none of these features is the reason to buy Snow Leopard now, but it will help make the next Mac you buy much faster than it could be.

Finally, a few words about stability. Usually, every major system update is a step forward within the scope of functions and a step backward in stability issues. Apple engineers had almost two years to get rid of all the problems at Leopard; No doubt the new features introduced in Snow Leopard have brought new bugs. But I am happy to report that, in general, Snow Leopard seems as stable as it is fast. Yes, I witnessed several Safari crashes, and I had to survive more Mail crashes than all the time I used Leopard. Apple will probably fix these issues in upcoming Snow Leopard updates, but stability issues have never made me regret switching from Leopard to Snow Leopard.

Here our opinions differ with Jason Snell. Safari in Snow Leopard has a known problem when it slows down a lot when opening Top Sites, especially if the computer is performing some resource-intensive operations at the same time, as a result of which Safari freezes for several seconds. I had this problem solved when I chose the option to open new windows and new tabs as blank pages in Safari settings. The Mail application surprisingly works very well and stably, it opens easily, closes instantly, and does not seem like the heavy clumsy monster that it was in earlier versions of Snow Leopard. I remember very well that prior to Leopard 10.5.5 Mail worked very unstable and could often freeze itself and hang the entire system. Now working with him is a pleasure.

Macworld Consumer Advice



Snow Leopard is Apple's cheapest operating system update in eight years. Guaranteed, this is a collection of feature enhancements and updates, as well as changes under the hood that may not pay off for users right away. But the upgrade price is so low that I simply have to recommend it to even the most ordinary, unpretentious Mac users. If you have a 32-bit Intel Mac (this is one that runs on a Core Solo or Core Duo processor), the benefit of the update will be slightly less. But for most Mac users, especially those who read a website dedicated to this topic, the various benefits of Snow Leopard will outweigh the price that you have to pay for it. I would pay $ 30 just for improved volume extraction, the ability to create services using the Automator and improving the Dock and Exposé - although I must admit that I would have paid a little more so that this incomprehensible QuickTime Player X was not included. If you are a user who connects to the Exchange server every day, you won’t have to think twice whether to switch to Snow Leopard. For everyone else, perhaps the choice will not be so simple, but it is very close to that. Snow Leopard brings very valuable changes, and all serious Mac users should upgrade now. but he is very close to that. Snow Leopard brings very valuable changes, and all serious Mac users should upgrade now. but he is very close to that. Snow Leopard brings very valuable changes, and all serious Mac users should upgrade now.

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