Snow Leopard

By Francine Schwieder

The Invisible Event

If you do as I did and simply upgrade your current installation of Leopard to Snow Leopard, you may not notice any change at all when you first boot into Snow Leopard. Everything will be set just the way it was. Well, you may notice that what your monitor is displaying looks different in terms of color, saturation and contrast, but whatever was on your Desktop is still there, the Dock is where you left it--which was a relief to me, since I keep it on the right side and pinned to the bottom, and while right is an official option, pinning isn't--and the items you had in the Dock are the same. The Menu bar is displaying what it always displays, your Desktop picture is just what it ought to be. In short, your new world looks pretty much like your old world. The Finder is still the Finder and works just the way it always has worked. Things may (or may not) seem a bit faster, but essentially the transition from Leopard to Snow Leopard appears to be a non-event. Your first clue you aren't in 10.5 any more may well be when you click on a folder in the Dock. I keep my Application folder there, and that was the first place I went. Ah! Something is different alright!

The Dock

I was a bit startled by the dark background of the list view, but everything seemed to function pretty much as expected. Clicking an item opened it, if it was a folder the hierarchical menu popped out, down at the bottom you could open it in Finder, and the options appeared when you selected that, so you can specify how you want your stack or folder to behave. Basically what we have is a tiny bit of cosmetic change. While I personally despise the immensely popular (among programmers) dark gray interface/white type look, I can live with it for the brief period it takes to select something. So I was REALLY startled the first time I clicked and held the click a bit longer than usual on an application. The whole screen turned dark, the application icon in the Dock seemed to have a spotlight shining on it, and a menu popped out. I had stumbled upon what some are calling Docksposé. You get the same thing if you option click (as I do when I want to relaunch Finder to see if some change I made to its behavior worked, or force it to update a window when it has failed to do so). So what is this feature for anyway? If the application has several windows open, those windows, and only those windows, appear. If it has additional windows that have been minimized to the Dock, those windows, as little miniatures of themselves, appear at the bottom of the screen. You may find this useful.

I suspect whether it is useful or not may depend on if you have enabled a new Dock feature: you can set minimized windows to disappear into their application icon when you click the minimize button. Go to System Preferences, bring up the Dock pane, and at the bottom you'll see three options you can enable by checking the box. I gave it a try, but since the app icon in the Dock gives no visual clue that it has minimized windows lurking behind it, I would simply forget they were there, so I found the feature not just useless, but rather counter-productive. You may love it.

If you prefer stacks to folders in your Dock you may be interested in the revised Grid view. Drag a folder with sub-folders in it onto the Dock, select Stack and Grid in the options. Click on it, then click on a sub-folder and the sub-folder's contents are displayed. If the sub-folder has sub-folders, you can go to them too. You can get back upwards, one step at a time, by clicking on the little arrow in the upper left corner. If the folder or sub-folder has more items than will display in the space available, a slider appears along the right side, which you can use to see the rest of the items. Of course thanks to the idiotic gray on gray on darker gray interface you may not notice this, but it is there. I've helpfully outlined the places where the slider and arrow will be (barely) visible in the illustration on the left. When your cursor is actually over the slider it does brighten up a bit, which helps. Oh, and if you have an alias in the folder, to another folder somewhere else, clicking the alias presents the alias's original folder's contents. You can navigate around pretty much at will. There will also be a curly arrow icon following the last item in any folder which, when clicked, opens that folder in Finder. So much for the earlier announcement by Apple that there would be no new features in Snow Leopard. There may not be many, but there are a few.

One major new feature, which I'm not going to discuss because I don't have a job in corporate America and have never had to deal with a Windows server, is built-in support for Microsft Exchange. Those who are interested in this can check out Apple's blurb for "out-of-the-box support for Microsoft Exchange"--or for a more objective assessment, do a Google search.

QuickTime X

My first hyperventilation moment came when I opened a movie file and discovered you can't really do much with the new QuickTime Player X, and, as someone who always pays the extra for QuickTime Pro (because I use the Pro features), and having heard that those features would automatically still work, I got a bit upset. A little looking around and I discovered that the Pro features just are not available in QuickTime X, but are still enabled in QuickTime 7, which was automatically installed (because I had an active Pro license). Thing is they only work in QT Player 7, which had been summarily exiled into the Utilities folder. I found it. It still works.

Another new feature is the ability to do a recording of your screen. Once you have your full screen movie you can save and use it as is, or open it in iMovie and crop it (as I did here). You can also record movies with a connected camera, and audio with a connected microphone. Or, presumably, with the built-in ones that come with many Macs. The save options are very simple, and won't lead to as much confusion as the old QT7 Pro export options--and obviously will be painfully limited to those who actually know what they are doing.

There are still enough options to get a bit a lost though. In the File menu there is a Save as option, as well as a Save for web, and then there is the Share menu, with the ability to save in various ways and ship your result to iTunes, your Mobile Me gallery, or to YouTube.

For the hopelessly curious the movie playing in the Screen Capture is Bruce at the Superbowl.

Bits and Bytes

Of course the Really Big Deal about Snow Leopard is that the OS, the Finder, and most of the programs that come with the system (TextEdit, Preview, Mail, and so on) have been completely rewritten in Cocoa and are 64-bit. This means all is optimized for the newest and greatest Intel Macs, and ready for whatever the future holds. And it should all run faster on your Intel Mac, and isn't available at all for PowerPC based Macs, which have come to the end of the Apple OS Road and will forever remain at Leopard the First.

So what does this all mean anyway? I've always found myself, in philosophical moments, finally coming down to American Pragmatism as my personal bedrock belief. Briefly summarized, by a US Navy Captain my husband knew, this boils down to "If you can't tell the difference, what is the difference?" So that's the fundamental way I'll be looking at this very complex and technical topic here.

Once upon a time the Mac ran a completely proprietary operating system. My very first Mac, bought in 1994, ran the 7.1.5 version of this OS. There were significant technical short-comings to this system, and Apple decided the only viable road to a better future was to change to a completely different basis for their OS, selecting the FreeBSD version of UNIX. Thus was born OS X, and it would not run on the hardware in older Macs. My trusty 8600 ran Mac OS 9, and would never run OS X. If I wanted the benefits of OS X, and to use newer programs and newer features that depended on newer hardware, I would have to buy a new computer. I did, and loved OS X. The new machine was a PowerPC G4 with dual cores and ran beautifully. All was good. Well, there were older programs I had paid good money for that wouldn't run in OS X. I had to run Classic to use those programs, which ran the old Mac OS in its own little world, and the programs ran there. Eventually programs got redone for OS X, the quick and dirty way was to use something called Carbon: it provided programmers with a way to convert their old code to work with OS X. Otherwise they would have to use the Cocoa programming interface and completely rewrite their code. For huge programs such as Adobe's Photoshop that was a daunting challenge, and they chose to carbonize their programs. So did Apple for such crucial items as the Finder. Apple wanted everything re-done using Cocoa to make native Mac OS X programs, but it would take awhile, even for Apple itself.

Meantime Apple became increasingly frustrated with the maker of their hardware, and finally decided to switch to the Intel processors and chip sets. Farewell to PowerPC. But all the code for everything, from OS to major programs, had been written for the PowerPC innards. Apple came up with Rosetta, which allows PowerPC code to run on Intel machines. Sound familiar? Pretty soon there were lots of programs that were billed as Universal, which meant they contained code for both PowerPC and Intel based computers. Apple itself had to write two versions of everthing. Obviously they would not spend the money forever to keep doing this. With Snow Leopard they've stopped the duality: it is written for the Intel machines only, which is one of the reasons that, perhaps for the first time known to man, the new OS actually takes up less disk space than the old OS.

Now one of the things that has been going on in the hardware department is endowing computers with more CPUs and more RAM. New programming is necessary to take maximum advantage of multiple CPUs and huge amounts of RAM, including the programming of the operating system itself. The most famous advantage of the 64-bit computer architecture, and the programming to use it, is the ability to use more than 4GBs of RAM. The PowerPC architecture, and the OS X version Apple used for it, is 32-bit. Period. So in order to move to the more efficient and performance improved future of 64-bit computing one needs a newly built computer whose innards support 64-bits, and a newly constructed OS written to use it. Meantime, there is the reality that not even Intel machines are necessarily 64-bit, and almost NO software is. Not to mention the drivers necessary to run things like hard drives, graphics tablets, and the other gizmos one plugs into the computer.

So Apple has come up with an OS that will support both 32-bit and 64-bit. At all levels, from the OS to individual applications. Because so many drivers for computer gizmos are still 32-bit, and won't work if the heart of the OS is running 64-bit, by default Snow Leopard boots with a 32-bit kernel. But most of the rest of the OS, including the Finder and many Apple applications, are running as 64-bit. How can you tell? Launch Activity Monitor and take a look.

I've restricted the processes shown here to only those belonging to the system, but you can choose to view all your running processes. As you can see, almost everything is listed as Intel (64-bit), except the kernel itself, which in a sense is the OS, and it is simply shown as Intel. You might also see a PowerPC process if you are running an older program, and you can do that if you use the option to install Rosetta when you do your Snow Leopard installation. But what you will mainly see is a mix of 32-bit and 64-bit processes. If you have a really new machine, and you are quite sure you don't have any 32-bit system extensions, you can choose to boot in 64-bit mode by holding down the numbers 6 and 4 when you start your computer.

Unless you have a really recent Apple computer it is likely that you can't do that thing. For instance my two year old Mac Pro won't, because the EFI on my machine is 32-bit. That's the way it was set by Intel/Apple, and that's the way it will stay unless there is a firmware update to change it. And it may well be that the chipset just isn't built to support 64-bit.

So, does it matter if you can't boot 64-bit? For the present, no. You will still see some performance improvements anyway, because many things, including some programs, are running in 64-bit, right now. Actually, you would be more likely to run into problems because so very many things are still 32-bit. With a 32-bit kernel you can use all those things, while the programs you have that are 64-bit will run as intended. I suspect by the time it will make a difference my computer will be old enough that I'll be eyeing all the newest latest greatest computers, and decide I just have to have one.