Mac OS X 10.6 "Snow Leopard"

Here at NerdBoys we loves our Operating Systems just as much as we loves our Gadgets. And, we also loves playing with our Operating Systems while they’re still in development – I’m talking pre-beta version! Yeah, we know, we’re hard-core right? We’re always running or testing out the latest beta or RC of Mac OS X, Ubuntu, Windows and iPhone OS on our production machines and they haven’t failed us yet (touch wood!).

We were at the Apple World Wide Developer Conference in San Francisco last month exploring and experiencing all the magical goodness that’s Apple has created for us developers. We were also fortunate enough to get our hands on a developer preview edition of their latest, greatest super-OS, Snow Leopard (10.6). Apple supplied all attending developers with a 2-DVD version for it in both Server and Desktop flavours. It makes sense for them to distribute these editions now as they plan on developers to start developing for this new OS as soon as they possibly can so a wealth of awesome, optimised, applications are available when Snow Leopard hits the stores.

So what exactly is so different about Snow Leopard? Well for starters it’s entire OS is pure 64-bit. Everything from the kernel to the screensavers, to preference panel widgets has been compiled for 64-bit computing. It’s also the first OS from Apple to ship with none of the older Carbon framework, this version is filled with all of Cocoa’s goodness, baby.

Snow Leopard, apart from looking almost identical to Apple’s current stable OS, Leopard, functions in pretty much the same way. Last year at WWDC when 10.6 was announced, it was said that the only Snow Leopard “feature” will be native support for Microsoft’s Exchange server, and while fundamentally that may be true, there are a ton of brand-spanking new visual goodies and behind-the-scenes developer treasures (most of which I’m not allowed to speak about because of the current NDA).

The demoes and videos we all saw (either on the net or at WWDC) showed off Snow Leopard’s amazing new speed (and I mean, holy-s**t that’s fast) were all on Apple’s latest mutli-core Mac Pros, but how does it really stack up against a normal, consumer-grade computer? I’ve been running 10.6 on both my MacBook Air and my iMac for a month now and wow! The different sure is noticeable. Everything is snappier, prettier, and man is it faster! Everyone knows the Air notebooks aren’t known for their super performance, and my 1st Gen Air with its Intel-based graphics card used to sometimes struggle when running multiple simultaneous applications, but now due to the major OS enhancements, it’s so smooth.

The real benefit though will come much later though, after the OS is released into the market and when software vendors use the all new, awesome speed enhancements whilst developing their apps (like the new super-easy multi-threading techniques).

In case you were wondering, I don’t have the Air’s SuperDrive unit. I used Disk Utility on Leopard to image the DVD onto a USB flash drive and boot off that to install 10.6 on my Air. Worked like a charm.

Previously, Apple’s preview OS’s were all in the form of downloadable disk-images that needed to be burnt onto a dual-layer DVD to try out. This was also the case for Snow Leopard up until the developer preview they released at WWDC (and available to ADC Select Members online). Since that preview release all OS updates now happen using the friendly Software Update application. Albeit large (the last two were 650Mb and 1.22Gb respectively) it’s much better than downloading and re-installing the OS time after time.

All-in-all, Snow Leopard looks like it’s going to rock. Can’t wait to try out the Server version next!