Here is my review of Mac OS X v.10.6 "Snow Leopard"
These are just a few of the pros and cons that I have come across so far, as well as a few tips to make the installation or upgrade as painless as possible.
Pros:
1.) Price - This is the cheapest OS upgrade for OS X, $29.99 for a single-user license or $49.99 for a family license, but some of us might remember (I certainly do) that 10.1 "Puma" was a free upgrade.
2.) Installation - No restart is required to install the OS, instead you can customize the installation even before the restart is needed. Previous versions of OS X had you double-click the installer then you had to click the Restart button in the installer to restart the computer from the CD or DVD, then customize the installation to your liking and then proceed to install the OS.
3.) Speed - Up until now this has been the reason that many users didn't upgrade. Snow Leopard gives your Mac a nice burst of speed by using both cores of the processor because it's not a Universal Binary OS, it's Intel only and it also introduces a technology called Grand Central Dispatch to split up the tasks that the processor cores are using, that is the reason for the increase in speed.
4.) Expose' in the Dock - Expose' first introduced in Panther (10.3) allows users to see what is open and click on the window they want has now made it's way to the Dock. For example, if you have multiple windows open and they're hidden, click on the application icon on the Dock and all the windows appear in Expose', click on the window you want to use and it comes to the front.
5.) Startup, Restart and Shutdown - This is the one area that has been lacking in speed. For a while now it has taken at least 15- 20 seconds for the computer to do these tasks, now it takes 3-5 seconds for this. No longer do you have to wait for these. When you want the computer to do these options it will happen so fast that if you blink, you'll miss it.
6.) PowerPC applications on Intel Macs - I know some of you are asking if you can still use PowerPC apps on Snow Leopard. The answer in a nutshell is, Yes. If you have an app that is PowerPC based (like a word processor) and try to start it, Snow Leopard will bring up a dialog box saying that you need Rosetta, and you click on OK, it will automatically download and install Rosetta, you will now be able to run PowerPC-based applications on Snow Leopard and they will be running at near native speeds.
7.) Minimizing applications to their Dock icon - Since Mac OS X 10.0, any application you had opened but were not quite done with, you had no choice but to minimize its windows to the dock and it took up space on the Dock. Not anymore, there is an option in the Dock Preference pane to minimize the applications windows into its application icon on the Dock, cleaning up the clutter on your Dock.
Minor Annoyances:
1.) Adobe Flash Player - Instead of being upgraded during the Installation of Snow Leopard, this is actually being downgraded (oops!), but don't worry, it is fixable. You can run Software Update to fix this because Snow Leopard has been updated to 10.6.3 which fixes Flash Player.
2.) Scanning and Faxing - Here is the reason I made this an annoyance. If you have software that came with your Multi-function printer, some of that software becomes unusable, for example, the scanner, the scanning software is no longer needed to scan pictures or documents. You use Preview to scan your documents onto your computer, I’ll provide a tip for this at the end of this review.
These are just a few of the things that I have found so far, that are both good and bad, but I give Apple a lot of credit for making an already great OS even better.
Now on to the scanner tip. You only have to do this one time. Open Preview, click on File, go down to Import From Scanner and click on Include Networked Devices, then click on the network name of your printer (e.g. Officejet 7200 Series), then find a document to scan like a developed picture, or a newspaper article, then scan it. You can now scan whenever you need to.
If you have any pros or cons on Snow Leopard, please leave your comments here.
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