Review Of The Apple Mac OS X Snow Leopard

Gadgets — By Ricky on September 4, 2009 at 6:00 am

Apple Mac OS X Snow Leopard- This Winter Is Definitely Going To Be Long…Snow Leopard Is Here To Stay

Sum n substance:

System requirements:

Min Processor Type Intel
Min RAM Size 1 GB
Min Hard Drive Space 5 GB
Peripheral / Interface Devices DVD-ROM

THE WHIZ-KID SPEAKS:

Priced at $29 for the upgrade, this snow leopard surely packs enough punch worth your money for all the current leopard users. Before I go ahead with the review let me just add in that the snow leopard isn’t a total system revamp just a few added improvements to the leopard. Also amidst all the smaller jerks this one has a lot in store for mac fans. Also the total system revamp for $169 for all the non mac users comes with iLife and iWork is an awesome deal at the price.

Starting with the review…

Installation: The installation of the snow leopard is darn simple, almost a child’s play.it is almost 45 percent faster than the leopard with a newly designed installer which asks only one question during the installation. On my machine the entire process hardly took an hour with two automatic restarts.
Plus, knowing that not many people know that a clean install would mean deleting all the files it has got rid of the clean install option just prevent a few whack jobs from losing all their data.

Also if we go by the claims of Apple, the snow leopard used almost 7GB less space as compared to the leopard because of better ccompression of files along with the selective intrusion of files.

High tech: All the new Macs come loaded with 64-bit multiprocessors, loads of RAM space, high end dandy graphics processing units , keeping all this in mind the applications of the snow leopard have been rewritten in 64-bit to make it compatible with the new Macs.

A few of the new technologies that the snow leopard has to offer are:

Grand Central Dispatch(GCD):It manages the data sent to multicore processors in an attempt to maximize the performance. If the claims made by Apple come true then the speed of applications ranging from image processing to playing favourite games will increase drastically.

OpenCL:Majorly a good news for software developers, this new technology allows software developers to tap into the power of any onboard video cards (or GPU, for graphics processing units) for general-purpose computing without the addition of enormous amounts of code.

To just keep tab on these claims I though of pitting the snow leopard in a few performance tests against thee leopard and voila.. just as expected the snow leopard is faster and more responsive with the snow leopard.

Fresh features: the snow leopard comes packed with a huge array of fresh features.

Expose: There are a lot of UI improvements added to the snow leopard to make working with the Mac OS more efficient. Expose is an application which helps you to find out the desired window from an array of cluttered windows on thee desktop. All you need to do is just click and hold onto the Dock icon and then see all to see the thumbnails of all the applications that are open. This could have easily been added as a feature on the leopard but anyways better late than never. This application is surely a show stealer.

The Dock: With the help of the dock you can drag files from one application to the other. Suppose you just want to add an image to an email all you have to do is drag the image and then drop it on the email window.. and kaboom… the image is dropped into its place. Though I am not sure of how efficient this application is as compared to the conventional attaching of files, it definitely is fascinating.

Stacks: Though stacks were introduced with the leopard itself, this version definitely has the better of it. Stacks come with a scroll bar so icons are still easy to read and anything can be launched out of the Dock. Folders are now accessible within Stacks as well, so you’ll be able to navigate to files within folders all without leaving the Stacks Window.

The finder:Though the finder hardly any interfacing tweaks, the way files behave in the Finder makes it easier to use. Now you don’t have to ever leave the finder window to preview multipage documents or to play quick time videos because of the enhanced icon view that has been added. Also preview lets you preview any file even if the software that created it is not present in the hard drive at the moment. Preview also recognizes that if there are multiple columns in your document and lets you select the text of your choice from any column that you want.

Safari 4: All your topsites can be viewed as thumbnails using the safari 4 for easy access. Plus the safari 4 has been made crash resistant which means that if any of the plug in crashes, it won’t lead to an entire browser collapse. It always provides internet security by warning you if the site your visiting is a phishing site or a fraudulent site.

The Apple Mac OS X Snow Leopard

QuickTime X: Now this one is damn exciting. Whenever you play a video amidst an array of windows then the interface fades away immediately to provide you with a more immersive video. Videos and audios can be recorded with just a few clicks.

Exchange support: A major drawback for anyone using a mac in a windows workplace was the inability to connect with the Microsoft exchange on windows. Rest assured for all the users who till so long would have either had to use Microsoft entourage or available open- source options, but it was always difficult connecting it. Snow leopard supports the Microsoft Exchange bringing about a breath of fresh air.

File Quarantine: The file quarantine feature which was introduced with the Mac OS X 10.4 Tiger has always undergone some refinement. It checks for a malicious signature and if it finds an offender it warns the user and advices to immediately send it to the thrash.

Universal access: Apple continues to help the visually impaired with its gesture support on the trackpads. Also it has more than 40 different Braille styles on display.

NITTY- GRITTY: Comparing the snow leopard with the Windows 7 is almost unfair…just because of the fact that windows 7 has to repair the Vista but snow leopard only adds to the amazing set of features already being offered by the leopard. Definitely worth every penny being paid for it, it just makes the best even more better. Definitely a no brainer upgrade just go and grab it guys.