SillyDog701

[Antony]

Apple announced that Mac OS X v10.6 Snow Leopard will go on sale Friday, 28th August 2009. Snow Leopard builds on a decade of OS X innovation and success with hundreds of refinements, new core technologies and out of the box support for Microsoft Exchange. Snow Leopard will be available as an upgrade for Mac OS X Leopard users for only US$29.

To create Snow Leopard, Apple engineers refined 90 percent of the more than 1,000 projects that make up Mac OS X. Users will notice refinements including a more responsive Finder; Mail that loads messages up to twice as fast; Time Machine with an up to 80 percent faster initial backup; a Dock with Exposé integration; QuickTime X with a redesigned player that allows users to easily view, record, trim and share video; and a 64-bit version of Safari 4 that is up to 50 percent faster and resistant to crashes caused by plug-ins. Snow Leopard is half the size of the previous version and frees up to 7GB of drive space once installed.

For the first time, system applications including Finder, Mail, iCal, iChat and Safari are 64-bit and Snow Leopard’s support for 64-bit processors makes use of large amounts of RAM, increases performance and improves security while remaining compatible with 32-bit applications. Grand Central Dispatch (GCD) provides a revolutionary new way for software developers to write applications that take advantage of multicore processors. OpenCL, a C-based open standard, allows developers to tap the incredible power of the graphics processing unit for tasks that go beyond graphics.

Mac OS X version 10.6 Snow Leopard will be available as an upgrade to Mac OS X version 10.5 Leopard on 28th August 2009 for only US$29 or AU$39. Snow Leopard only runs on Macintosh with Intel-based processor.

For more information about Snow Leopard, please refer to Mac OS X Snow Leopard website.

You can pre-order Mac OS X 10.6 Snow Leopard from Apple Store (USA) or Apple Store (AU) via SillyDog701's link and support SillyDog701.

UserAgent: Mozilla/5.0 (Macintosh; U; Intel Mac OS X 10.5; en-US; rv:1.9.1.2) Gecko/20090729 Firefox/3.5.2

[Antony]

I got my Snow Leopard!





Now, time to install it.

UserAgent: Mozilla/5.0 (Macintosh; U; Intel Mac OS X 10.5; en-US; rv:1.9.1.2) Gecko/20090729 Firefox/3.5.2

[Antony]

still installing...

UserAgent: Mozilla/5.0 (Macintosh; U; Intel Mac OS X 10.5; en-US; rv:1.9.1.2) Gecko/20090729 Firefox/3.5.2

[James]

Very exciting, Antony. Keep us updated on how it works for you.

UserAgent: Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Windows NT 6.0; en-US; rv:1.9.1.2) Gecko/20090729 Firefox/3.5.2 (.NET CLR 3.5.30729)

[DJGM]

Well, it's been over 48 hours ... surely you've got Mac OS X 10.6 Snow Leopard installed by now ... !

UserAgent: Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Windows NT 6.1; en-US; rv:1.8.1.22) Gecko/20090605 SeaMonkey/1.1.17 Firefox/3.x

[Antony]

Thank you for reminding me. Well, without a doubt, I've been playing with it.



It is a great operating system, and a very good refinement to 10.5 Leopard. It does not have many new features, but the improvements are very welcome.

So far, it works very well, it did not take very long to install, but once it has been installed, the initial Time Machine backup may take a while. (I let the Time Machine backup running on 802.11n instead of plugging a Gigabit ethernet cable.) The Time Machine seems to be far more smoother than previous version.

The Dock Exposé is very handy. I am still not that familiar with QuickTime X's interface, perhaps I am too familiar with QuickTime 7. (QuickTime 7 is still available but required customised installation, and will be installed under /Applications/Utilities folder).

So far, I only experience one application not working under Snow Leopard, ForkLift from Binarynights. (Just checked their website, they have released a ‘hot list’ addressing the compatibility with Snow Leopard, I shall get it.)

And, I only installed Snow Leopard on my MacBook Pro. My almost 3-year-old iMac is still running Leopard, and the 5+ years old PowerBook G4 (12-inch) is still running Tiger (which Laurent is using it).

UserAgent: Mozilla/5.0 (Macintosh; U; Intel Mac OS X 10.6; en-US; rv:1.9.1.2) Gecko/20090729 Firefox/3.5.2

[Pu7o]

I'll probably still stay with Leopard for a while. No need to rush to an upgrade.

UserAgent: Mozilla/5.0 (Macintosh; U; Intel Mac OS X 10.5; en; rv:1.9.0.14pre) Gecko/2009080201 Camino/2.0b4pre (like Firefox/3.0.14pre)