With a purr, not a roar
The Age
Thursday September 10, 2009
Apple's big cat triumphs by stealth, writes Garry Barker. OF THE seven versions of Mac OS X, Snow Leopard has arrived with the least hype; a refinement of earlier releases, an upgrade of its predecessor rather than a whole new box of must-have tricks.Is it a worthwhile advance on Leopard? In my view, yes, and more so if you are still running Tiger on an Intel Mac. Is it a good deal? At $39 for the "upgrade from Leopard" version, don't even think about it: do it!People still running Tiger must buy the Mac Box Set ($229) €“ Snow Leopard plus iLife '09 (the latest versions of iPhoto, iMovie, GarageBand, iWeb and iDVD) and iWork '09, the productivity suite with new versions of Pages, Numbers and Keynote.The price is more than Leopard users pay but if you consider iLife '09 and iWork '09 retail at $129 each, you are getting the two app suites at a discount and Snow Leopard free.Remember, Snow Leopard represents Apple's final departure from the PowerPC processor and runs only on an Intel Mac.Snow Leopard has smaller feet; on my unibody MacBook it occupies almost 10 gigabytes less drive space than Leopard. JavaScript performance in Safari 4 is much faster (the installation gives the finished Safari 4, although I see little difference in usability from the public beta).The all-new Dock, incorporating Expose, is lovely. Click on an icon and hold it: the screen dims and a little menu opens above the icon providing access to some options or an opening. If you have an application open, all open windows spread over the desktop, providing easy access.The Finder has been rewritten and is faster. There is an enhanced icon view that allows previewing of PDFs, QuickTime movies and so on. A slider increases the icon's size to make text easily readable.Applications open quickly: Safari in less than three seconds, Firefox, iTunes and Photoshop Elements much the same.QuickTime X, billed by Apple as "a major leap forward that advances . . . media and internet standards", includes a new Player with which you can record, top and tail and share media. Trimming is done on a line of frame-based thumbnails. Translucent controls fade when not needed but return with a flick of the mouse.QuickTime Player can now capture audio from the built-in camera and microphone on the Mac and also record action on the screen.Snow Leopard also takes the Mac closer to corporate users. People who want to use a Mac in a Windows environment no longer need to run VMFusion or Parallels to access Exchange. Snow Leopard supports Exchange Server 2007, although not earlier versions.You get Exchange's mail, calendar and contacts and access to the Global Address List and you can use the considerably improved Spotlight in Snow Leopard to search them. QuickLook is also available for previewing attachments, as is Data Detectors on emails.There's much more to like in Snow Leopard and during the next few weeks we will examine more of its many attributes.One final note: Anyone who trod water in the original maelstrom of Windows Vista will know about application compatibility, or the lack of it.With Snow Leopard, almost everything seems to work without need of an update; even my old Solitaire game.For a list of what is compatible so far, see thewiki-based list at tinyurl.com/n7gdtr.MacfileIT WAS the search, in 1996, for a new operating system that led to the dramatic rescue of Apple Inc from the financial knacker's yard, its resurrection and its current triumph.It returned Steve Jobs to the company's helm and restored Apple's commitment to originality, innovation and thinking differently; stuff that, to quote Jobs, would change the world.Back in 1996, Apple was in desperate straits. The Mac OS, developed to System 9, was more than a decade old and unable to keep pace with microprocessor and software advances.In 1994, Apple began developing a System 9 replacement called Copland that would run on the IBM PowerPC that was to replace the elderly Motorola 68000 in the Mac. But after two years of monumental effort and millions of dollars, it was deeply mired; beyond salvation.Gil Amelio, then Apple's chief executive, launched a hunt for a saviour system. Two were considered: BeOS from Be Computing, run by former Apple high-flier Jean-Louis Gassee, and NeXTSTEP, from NeXT Computing, the company set up by Steve Jobs after he lost control of Apple in 1985.Gassee wanted $US200 million ($240 million), which Amelio, under fire for Apple's parlous situation, rejected. But Amelio wound up paying $US427 million for NeXT. That also got him Unix genius Avie Tevanian to head software development. Jobs came too, as a consultant and Amelio's nemesis. Amelio resigned, Jobs took over, the rest is history.Tevanian turned his attention to BSD Unix, developed a kernel called Darwin, adopted open source and Java and developed a new theme called Aqua and an application launcher called the Dock.Today Mac OS X, now in its seventh iteration, is regarded as the most capable and easy-to-use computer operating system. Software developers have flocked to it. A version used in the iPhone and iPod Touch now has access to nearly 80,000 applications.
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