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A Geek's-eye View of Snow Leopard
By Michael White | September 9th 2009 04:40 PM | 2 comments | Print | E-mail | Track Comments
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About Michael White

Welcome to Adaptive Complexity, where I write about genomics, systems biology, evolution, and the connection between science and literature, government, and society.

I'm a biochemist


... Full Bio

No, that Geek is not me, it's John Siracusa exhaustively reviewing (literally - the review is 23 pages long) Mac OS X 10.6 for Ars Technica:

A major operating system upgrade with "no new features" must play by a different set of rules. Every party involved expects some counterbalance to the lack of new features. In Snow Leopard, developers stand to reap the biggest benefits thanks to an impressive set of new technologies, many of which cover areas previously unaddressed in Mac OS X. Apple clearly feels that the future of the platform depends on much better utilization of computing resources, and is doing everything it can to make it easy for developers to move in this direction.

Though it's obvious that Snow Leopard includes fewer external features than its predecessor, I'd wager that it has just as many, if not more internal changes than Leopard. This, I fear, means that the initial release of Snow Leopard will likely suffer the typical 10.x.0 bugs. There have already been reports of new bugs introduced to existing APIs in Snow Leopard. This is the exact opposite of Snow Leopard's implied promise to users and developers that it would concentrate on making existing features faster and more robust without introducing new functionality and the accompanying new bugs.

On the other side of the coin, I imagine all the teams at Apple that worked on Snow Leopard absolutely reveled in the opportunity to polish their particular subsystems without being burdened by supporting the marketing-driven feature-of-the-month. In any long-lived software product, there needs to be this kind of release valve every few years, lest the entire code base go off into the weeds.

I'm all for that - the new features every major OS release (Windows too) gets to be dizzying. It's time for a break to focus on tightening up the code and thinking and laying the groundwork for the future.

I've been running Snow Leopard about a week. The extra hard drive space and snappier performance is nice, but I have to say that my favorite feature is the monospaced font Menlo. It makes typing blog posts in TextWrangler so much more pleasant.

Read the feed:


Comments

barryleiba's picture
The interesting thing about 10.6 is that despite the "no new features", they broke a great deal of stuff.  I had to get new versions of at least a dozen programs, and there are still several that I use that don't work — including both of my antivirus protectors.

I did like getting some disk space back, and I like that the Exposé feature now shows minimized windows.  I haven't tried Menlo — I write my blog posts in TextWrangler with Droid Sans Mono.  I'll have to give Menlo a try.

Barry Leiba | 09/09/09 | 20:55 PM
adaptivecomplexity's picture
The interesting thing about 10.6 is that despite the "no new features", they broke a great deal of stuff.

Ironic, because they were billing is as something that fixed a lot of bugs. But, as the Ars Technica review makes clear, this version of the OS doesn't seem to be about stability - it's about transitioning the OS to full 64-bit support. So of course there are a ton of new features that will be obvious to developers, but invisible to end-users like me.

I've never tried Droid Sans Mono - I was lazy and stuck with Monaco, which I didn't really like.

Michael White | 09/09/09 | 21:08 PM

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