Snow Leopard reviewed

Product: Snow Leopard Mac OSX 10.6
Website: Apple
System Requirements: Intel Mac, 1GB memory, 5GB of disk space, DVD drive
Price: £25 ($29)

WHEN APPLE ANNOUNCED the impending release of the latest iteration of OSX many months ago, the Cupertino company made it quite clear that there would be no new eye candy, bells or whistles. The intention was always to take what was already a rock solid foundation and rebuild it into a faster, leaner, more efficient operating system which would make better use of modern multi-core architecture.

Snow Leopard - OS X 10.6 - has arrived almost a month early and our initial investigations confirm that Apple has kept its promise by delivering a mature operating system with hundreds of minor tweaks, a handful of major behind-the-scenes breakthroughs, and at least one killer app that could see disgruntled Windows users leaving the Microsoft fold in droves.

Installation
The first thing you'll notice on double clicking the 'install Mac OS X' icon is that the installer doesn't immediately restart your machine and boot the OS from the DVD, as has been the case in the past. Like most things in Snow Leopard, the installer has been completely updated.

Simplicity is the key here and, unless you want to dig deeper and do a custom install, you'll need to click a couple of standard EULA agreement buttons and that's it. Done. No keycodes or passwords. No nagging about copyright infringement. Nada. It just gets on with the job.

A clean install to a recently-formatted drive took 35 minutes and, despite some reports to the contrary, made no effort to check that a previous copy of Leopard was installed - take note Tiger users. An update to an existing install of Leopard 10.5.4 took a little longer at 55 minutes, but that included checking and isolating out of date and incompatible software and installing Rosetta which is required for certain legacy apps from the PowerPC era. This upgrade left pretty much everything intact including user accounts and preferences, network connections and even desktop icons. Totally seamless.

The installer also intelligently installs only the printer drivers it thinks you require by checking which printers are installed on your network or have been used recently. Apple reckons Snow Leopard will save you at least 7GB of hard drive space once installed. Some users have reported as much as 20GB on older machines and we raked back 9GB. We suspect that a large chunk of this has been achieved simply by not installing thousands of useless printer drivers.

Boot it up
Once installed, the OS takes just 50 seconds to spring to life from a cold boot, and a little over a minute to restart. Initial impressions are that the Finder, which has been completely rewritten from the ground up in Cocoa, is snappier and more responsive than in Leopard, with windows containing hundreds of files and folders opening almost instantaneously. Copying and moving files and folders between volumes also seems faster, even over a network connection. Many of the custom application icons have been updated and can be resized to gigantic proportions using the new slider button in icon view mode. They also look fantastic in Coverflow mode which will be familiar to Itunes and Ipod users.

Looking good
There have been a few minor interface tweaks including an addition to the Exposé system whereby clicking and holding on an application icon in the dock pops up all of that application's open files. Stacks from the dock now have an additional scroll bar allowing you to look through every item in a folder, rather than having to switch to the Finder. Quick Look has been updated so that items like Microsoft Office documents can be previewed even if you don't have the relevant application installed, and PDF documents can be viewed and manipulated without opening Acrobat or Preview.

The print dialogue box in some applications has been up updated to include an on-the-fly indication of ink levels for installed printers, and Apple has also included a sneaky link to its own website encouraging you to order new printer supplies, though it currently points to the US portal only.

On the subject of printing, it seems that Apple has decided that it knows best what bits of a webpage we want to print and has taken it upon itself to arbitrarily strip certain items, including advertising banners and some images, out of such pages without asking. Which is all well and good until you want to print a web ad. Try as we might, we couldn't work out how to switch this 'feature' off, but we're sure one of our enterprising readers will let us know how it's done.

They're out to get you
Much has been made of the fact that Apple hardware suffers less from malicious attacks than some other systems, and it's true that your average Mac user is less inclined to fret about trojans and viruses than many of his Windows-toting contemporaries. But in the real world there will always be sordid individuals who want to mess with your computing experience for the fun of it, or more worryingly get their hands on your hard earned cash through phishing scams and the like. Because of this, Apple has taken the bold step of finally admitting that there could possibly be a problem by adding a level of antivirus protection to Snow Leopard. File Quarantine sits in the background and addresses a regularly updated list of known Internet black-spots, warning you that certain sites or downloadable files could potentially damage your system.

An infected bootleg copy of Iwork which has been doing the rounds of P2P networks and Usenet servers is one such case, and File Quarantine will calmly suggest that you might want to step away from the download and put your hands in the air.

Behind the scenes
While it is true that Snow Leopard seems at surface level to be a rather minor upgrade, if you dig a little deeper there have been some major goings-on at system level, some of which will never be apparent to the naked user. Just about every bit of the operating system has been pushed along into 64-bit territory, including all of the core Apple applications. Grand Central Dispatch quietly goes about its work of making sure your multi core processors are working as hard as they possibly can by sharing out system resources in a kind of computing communism, giving more threads to hard working applications and redistributing those hogged by the idle and indolent.

A fact admirably demonstrated when one of our fat fingered reviewers accidentally opened every single programme in a well stocked applications folder. After a tense minute or so, we had 117 applications up and running quite happily. In fact there were too many apps open to take a snapshot of the application switcher. Try doing that in Vista! No really… don't. We don't care.

If you want an indicator of how fast the the new 64-bit applications are, just try opening Safari. We got out our trusty stopwatch and clicked on the application icon from the Dock. And there it was. Didn't have time to hit the start button on the timer. Some mishtake shurely, It must have already been open. OK quit the application and start again. Nope. There it is. From zero to Google in about a tenth of a second. OK, there's got to be more to this. The OS must preload it without asking. A quick check in activity monitor soon quashed that notion. Now, Safari has always been pretty spritely, despite what its detractors might say, but when an application launches almost as quickly as pulling it up from the Dock, you know you're onto something special.

We won't go too deeply into the advantages or otherwise of the newly added OpenCL tools, suffice to say that, once developers have taken advantage of the new kit, many processing tasks normally undertaken by the CPU will be farmed out to working in the GPU saltmines, making for even snappier apps.

And the killer app is...
For some existing and potential Apple users, the biggest bonus in Snow Leopard could well be the inclusion of Microsoft Exchange Server support straight out of the box. Windows users will, of course, point out that they have been able to keep their lives in order using Exchange for many years, but in order to use the mail, contacts and meetings tools you have to buy and install MS Office.

Snow Leopard users can now use full Exchange Server functionality through native applications like Mail, Contacts and Ical, all of which are installed as standard on every Mac. We didn't have the facility to test this out at the time of writing but the word on the street is that set-up and synchronisation work like a dream and some are even suggesting that Apple makes using Microsoft's own facilities even simpler than on a Windows box.

Conclusion
Snow Leopard will disappoint some of the Mac faithful, especially those without huge multi-core processors and anyone with a system older than three years. OS X 10.6 will currently only run on Intel-equipped Macs, and those sporting PowerPC architecture have been left out in the cold. Anyone waiting for a fix, much like those offered for older machines when OS X was first introduced to replace OS 9 close to a decade ago, will almost certainly be left wanting. Apple is looking to a 64-bit future of ever-increasing cores and clearly thinks three years is long enough for users to get on the programme and upgrade.

Eye candy addicts looking for more flash for their cash will also find Snow Leopard's stealthy update less than exciting with obvious tweaks to the GUI few and far between. But anyone looking for a well rounded, mature, and exceptionally efficient operating system which can get on with the work of keeping your computer chugging away whilst you get on with working - or playing if you like that kind of thing - will be happy to shell out the paltry £25 Apple is asking for what is, after all, much more than a service pack as some wags have suggested.

The Good
Simple install. Faster, leaner, future-proof. Exchange Server support. 64-bit goodness.

The Bad
Most of the good gubbins are invisible. Where's the new swooshy stuff?

The Ugly
Some applications and extensions need to catch up.

Bartender's verdict
9/10