Initial Snow Leopard Client Impressions

My initial impressions are that Snow Leopard is very much worth the upgrade if you can afford the time to do an operating system upgrade (in this case for me it was ~1.5 hours: 45 minute install, 45 minutes testing apps and seeing they still worked without any modification)

Pros:

  • Speed
    Awesome!
  • New Services Feature
    My favourite feature
  • OpenCL
    If you haven’t seen MacResearch’s Introduction to OpenCL check out 33:30 to 34:50 or so. (Rough timecodes
  • iCal Event Editing Gets a Window Again
  • Spotlight Default Search Location Fix and Sortable Results I can finally search within a folder without holding a needle to my eye first!
  • Enhanced Icon View Neat if I used icon view.
  • Faster wakeup to password screen Hawt.
  • Faster Time Machine Backup Hawt.
  • Airport Menu Changes Neat animation, but more info when holding the option key as well.
  • Gamma 2.2 Default No longer do I have to set this up each time.
  • New Fonts Menlo is cool, but Chalkduster; Heiti SC and TC; and Hiragino Sans GB are all fonts I’ll never use.
  • Safari Plug-ins are sandboxed Awesome - Flash won’t hurt as much even after ClickToFlash
  • QuickTime Player New UI is great for viewing.
  • Preview Faster and better scaling.
  • Mail Much faster. :-)
  • Set a time before the screen saver asks for a password. THANK YOU.
  • Smaller footprint I liked the good thwack of disk space I got back (~6GB)
  • Grand Dispatch Can’t wait to see the results on the Mac Pros at work.
  • Screen Recording Neat, but I’ll stick with ScreenFlow.
  • Revised Keyboard Shortcut / Services Preference Pane Much nicer to work with.
  • Wake on Demand No more having to worry about whether the computer is asleep or not? Over wireless? Sweet (Airport Extreme only though)

Cons:

  • Base 10 Counting
    WTF. DO NOT LIKE. “Mac OS X can not count” Would prefer a preference to turn this off and/or proper suffixes (eg. MiB instead of MB)
  • QuickTime Player Absolutely neutered into being useless beyond viewing and “Sharing” your movie to MobileMe.

In summary, there is no one real feature in Snow Leopard worth upgrading for - no major consumer focused feature. It’s the sum of all the parts that make it worth much more than the $29 they are charging. Once installed you never want to go back.