Remember that time you installed Windows XP before it even hit the market? Remember how your AGP video card would only display a maximum resolution of 800 x 600 and your audio card would only emit bleeps and bloops? Ah, those were the days. Quite a bit has happened since XP landed to wash away the awful stain that was Windows ME, though it’s still no shock to hear that new operating systems leave more than a few applications broken. Over the past few days, we’ve seenoodles of gripes from across the web from loyal Mac users who just can’t believe Snow Leopard has borked their favorite software, but we’re wondering how things have been on your machine. Have you realized that your Optimus Maximus no longer boogies with OS X 10.6? Are you bummed that iStat pro isn’t giving you the details it used to? What kind of hell has broken loose since you threw caution in the garbage and updated your machine?
This article was written on October 14, 2008 by CyberNet.
Over the last several weeks, you may have heard people talking about “supposed” changes Apple was going to make to their MacBook laptops. Some of what we heard turned out to be just rumors, but much turned out to be true. Today Steve Jobs, along with a few of his pals from Apple took the stage to unveil the new laptops. At the end of the day we were left with a new 13-inch MacBook, a new 15-inch MacBook Pro, a MacBook Air with better graphics, and a new LED Cinema Display “made especially for a MacBook.”
About the new 13-inch MacBook:
The “better” of the two “new” MacBook’s, the 2.4GHz model, comes with features you’d expect from a MacBook Pro, like an LED-backlit display. In looks it has definitely changed, and now the MacBook’s and MacBook Pros look a lot alike.
New MacBook Features:
Built from “a solid block of aluminum” – in other words, it should be durable (no more plastic).
Illuminated keyboard (only 2.4 GHz model)
New trackpad is one big button – no longer is there a button at the bottom of the trackpad for clicking — just click anywhere
Improved graphics (powered by NVIDIA)
Multi-Touch trackpad
Pricing of the new models is $1299 for the 2.0GHz model and $1,599 for the $2.4GHz model. One of the best moves Apple could have made was to drop the price of the white 13-inch MacBook (no aluminum casing) to $999.
About the new 15-inch MacBook Pro:
The biggest change here is in looks. You’ll see what I mean when you take a look at the image below:
A black rim around the edge of the screen is new, and reminds us of the iMacs.
Other features:
Improved graphics (still powered by NVIDIA)
Updated keyboard
New glass touch-pad (with multi-touch)
Made from a solid piece of aluminum
*Note: The 17-inch MacBook Pro was not updated
If you’d like more information, checkout the following:
We’re thinking that with the update, the new products look great. However, it’s not enough to entice someone to go out and buy a new computer if they updated within the last year or so.
When we were purchasing the MacBook Pro’s in April, there were rumors back then that Apple would be releasing updated models in the Summer. We thought long and hard about whether it would be worth waiting but all of the rumors at the time pointed to the idea that the new laptops would be equipped with the MacBook Air style keyboard (also known as the Chicklet keyboard). After playing with the MacBook Air, we realized that we preferred the “old style” keyboard without the spaces between the keys. After today, we are definitely happy we didn’t wait to make our purchases, seeing as the keyboard has changed.
Entelligence is a column by technology strategist and author Michael Gartenberg, a man whose desire for a delicious cup of coffee and a quality New York bagel is dwarfed only by his passion for tech. In these articles, he’ll explore where our industry is and where it’s going — on both micro and macro levels — with the unique wit and insight only he can provide.
Apple, Microsoft and the Mac have an interesting history: Microsoft was among the first developers for Macintosh, yet not long after, Apple would sue Microsoft for copying the look and feel of Mac OS in Windows. By the late 90s, Microsoft made a huge splash at Macworld with an announced 150 million dollar investment in Apple and promises of further development of Office and Internet Explorer for Macintosh. Office in particular was a major issue as it was a key requirement for business users. Early on, Office applications for Mac were far more advanced than their Windows counterparts. Excel was actually introduced for Mac users before Windows users could get their hands on it. But by the mid 90s, all that changed, the Mac versions of Office lagged behind Windows in terms of features and performance. It took forever to get things such as a common set of file formats, so that users of Office on the two different platforms could exchange documents with ease (it seems like something we take for granted but having managed and supported PC and Mac users in mixed shops, it was a nightmare to deal with). The latest version of Office for Mac, Office 2008 showed that Microsoft could produce top quality Macintosh software. I personally, think Office 2008 for Mac is the best version of the software that Microsoft has ever done (far better than Office 2007 for Windows, as it preserved the core part of the Mac UI while co-existing nicely with the ribbon UI). Obviously, however, a situation with such broad inconsistency is untenable.
OS XSnow Leopard seems to do nothing really new. And yet, it could be their most important OS since 10.0.0. Updated the Bad Stuff section.
Snow Leopard, as a follow up to Leopard, is almost absurdly insubstantial at first glance. The new operating system takes the same old boring, every day tasks like opening files, for example, and makes them happen subtly faster. But that performance is not being utilized by any third-party programs right now. And there are practically no new first-party programs by Apple. Nope, mostly just rewritten old ones and dozens of little interface tweaks. Some fanboys will ask, incredulously, “This is a new operating system?!” Those people are missing the point.
On deeper inspection, Snow Leopard’s inconspicuous aspects—performance squeezed from underused CPU multicores/GPUs and basic UI tweaks—are found to be the kind of refinement generally reserved for virtuosity. These speed optimizations are deep, reminding me of when a master martial artist puts the entirety of his weight behind a strike (while a neophyte would flails his limbs like a henchman in a Bruce Lee movie). The little UI tweaks are no different than when a great sculptor’s chisel works to remove everything non-essential during the final steps on a statue. Challenging 30 years of ever more bloated software tradition, the changes here are about becoming a more effective middleware between the media and the hardware, reducing friction while becoming more useful by, well, being lighter, less visible.
And if you think that’s bullshit, well, I can’t say you’re completely out of your mind, but there’s always the consolation that this OS upgrade costs about the same as a used Xbox game.
Performance
After some benching on a first-generation MacBook Air, an older MacBook Pro 15 and a pair of current-gen 13-inch MacBook Pros, it’s clear that Snow Leopard is faster—sometimes drastically—but almost never in third-party applications. Some people like charts. If you feel like skipping them, here’s a summary:
• In preview, where opening six 35MB 20,000-pixel-wide images of Tokyo’s cityscape each took half the time in Snow. • Safari’s javascript processing, using Snow’s specific tech, is about 40% faster—useful for all those Ajax-heavy websites we all use now. • Time Machine backed up a 1GB dataset nearly 40% faster than on Leopard. • There was no discernible improvement in non-optimized 32-bit programs: Photoshop testing and Handbrake DVD ripping times were identical. High-def playback on QuickTime 7 (not the new QuickTime 10 version) was identical in CPU usage, too. • Synthetic benchmark results were interesting: The aging Xbench app, which tests everything from graphics to disks to memory, took a slight performance dip, implying older software may, too. Geekbench, a multicore optimized, newer benchmark available in both 32- and 64-bit saw a lift on Snow. But the test is only focused on theoretical CPU and memory performance, which may not translate into every day use.
Here’s a video of those JPEGs cranking open in parallel, rather than serial, fashion:
Impressed yet?! You shouldn’t be. Well, not by the act of opening images. But you definitely should once you realize what it really shows: Apple just pulled 2X performance out of my hardware, by software alone. Tada!
How is Snow Leopard Getting Faster?
There are three fundamental reasons for these performance increases: Better multicore processor support through what Apple calls GCD (Grand Central Dispatch—which we explain here); OpenCL APIs for utilizing the processing power in any graphics cards above the GeForce 8600 Series for video acceleration and general purpose computing; and they’ve rewritten almost all the applications that ship with Snow Leopard to run in 64-bit mode while taking advantage of GCD and CoreCL. So it’s making processing for today’s chips more efficient and easier for developers. And giving programs a way to utilize the power of the video card when it’s not playing games. It also allows programs to run in 64-bit mode, the main theoretical advantage of which is to allow these programs to access more than 4GB of RAM on systems that have it. (More on all that at the bottom of the page.*)
Snow Leopard is efficient in other ways too. Install size is down to 10GB from 16GB, most of that weight shed by losing printer drivers and the PowerPC part of universal binaries. (Snow Leopard runs only on Intel hardware and downloads printer drivers it needs from the net, as you need them.) Installation is also quicker by about 30% on any given piece of hardware (consistent with the smaller install footprint). And in a move that can only be categorized as showing off, Snow Leopard can finish its installation if you accidentally power it down midway through.
But I’m digressing. The bottom line on performance is that the programs included with this operating system will do just about everything faster on modern machines that support those technologies—that is, most of the multicore Macs or those running Nvidia 8600 series video cards or higher. And not just a bit faster, but faster on the scale of 25 to 50% which means there’s typically a good amount of latent processing juju in your video card and CPU. Great, but to be honest, it’s a bit less impressive than it sounds in real life today, because all the basic system tasks happen fast anyhow. (When was the last time you sat around while a JPEG opened up?) Again, no other apps that use GCD or OpenCL are available from software makers outside of Apple. But if the theoretical gains are here to be had via easier programming methods, I’d bet those apps will come soon.
Interface Streamlining
There are 5 major changes in the UI:
Finder Icons now scale, courtesy of a little slider on the bottom right of the pane, up to 512 pixels wide. It sounds wasteful, except that video files can be played directly from the finder window. Honestly, I don’t prefer it more than the QuickLook (hitting spacebar to popup a quick preview window) in Leopard and carried over in Snow Leopard. I don’t mind the option, but I have no use for this feature.
Dock OS X’s dock has been interactive for some time. You could drag a file to an icon there to somehow get the two to interact, but you could never use the dock to select which window instance of an app to use. Now clicking and holding (empty handed or with a file) triggers Expose, Apple’s window management doohickey, for that particular application. Being able to quickly pop out an app’s windows and then select the right one in a single step is terrific, but you still can’t use Expose to quickly find the browser tab you want within a window. That’s an increasingly big problem as the time spent in browsers goes up.
Expose Expose itself has been improved, too. When viewing all the windows for one application in Expose’s zoomed-out view, the items are now arranged in a grid instead of a single, impossible to read line, and each window has a text label. (That’s helpful when you’re trying to recognize a particular window amongst lots of similar looking—and rendered tiny by Expose—text documents or emails.) Minimized windows are also now shown at the bottom of the screen under a faint line dividing it from other maximized windows from the same application.
Stacks When Stacks made its debut in Leopard, the dock mounted quick file viewer was too twitchy to use. You’d try to move a file andit would snap close, offended you’d try to do anything but open a file. And the space was always too limited in fan or grid mode to display more than a few icons. Stacks improves on this by allowing scrolling in the Grid view, but by also adding a smart list view capable of showing numerous files at once. It’s an improvement.
QuickTime 10 Putting QuickTime in this list is questionable, but aside from its acceleration, there are some major changes here. That is, as you mouse away, the video screen loses all borders and buttons, appearing like the video equivalent of an infinity pool or one of those ultra thin LCDs. The program has a new capture system for encording video and audio clips and even voice annotated screen capture sessions. It also borrows the trimming thumbnail line from iMovie ’09. I love it.
Let’s face it, in the big picture, calling these changes “major” is generous. But there are literally dozens of even smaller examples, all welcome, all reducing friction points in the OS’s usage, eliminating clicks needed and making the OS less obtuse. You can read about all of these additions in the gallery below, or here on one page, if you’re curious to read about them all. If not, take my word for it: They all make things better.
While it’s not UI- or performance-related, one additional Snow Leopard benefit is free Exchange support, so your mail, address books and calendars can all sync through it. I don’t work at a corporation, so I don’t care, but you may.
Bad Things
What kind of sick fanboy would I be if I didn’t mention the imperfections?
And Safari 4’s ability to segment unstable browser plugins made itself useful when many more flash powered pages crashed in Snow Leopard than Leopard.
Other reviewers have discovered that Snow Leopard has disabled or quirk-ified some of their apps.
I’ve also noticed that Expose doesn’t work as smoothly with spaces now. You sometimes select a window on another virtual spaces desktop and it won’t bring the window up top.
If you’ve got some third part mission critical app that you need to run every day, you should double check its compatibility and wait for a new version before upgrading your OS. Look before you leap here. The OS isn’t so radically new that you have to have it right this moment.
Meow
The changes here are modest, and the performance gains look promising but beyond the built in apps, just a promise. If you’re looking for more bells and whistles, you can hold off on this upgrade for at least awhile. But my thought is that Snow Leopard’s biggest feature is that it doesn’t have any new features, but that what is already there has been refined, one step closer to perfection. They just better roll out some new features next time, because the invisible refinement upgrade only works once every few decades.
Uses latent multicore and GPU power to speed up the apps it comes with by relatively huge amounts
Costs $30 to upgrade
Still haven’t seen any third party apps rewritten to take advantage of Snow Leopard’s speed yet
*Performance Background: You May Skip This Section. Today’s chips have hovered in the 2-3.6GHz range for some time, with gains in theoretical processing power made by increasing the number of CPU cores on one chip and optimizing the silicon in those cores. Think about it as roof shingles: It’s easier to protect your roof with lots of little shingles than one huge one. Unfortunately, the power afforded by the additional CPU cores has largely gone to waste, because it’s difficult to write code that takes full advantage of multiple cores. The programmer has to write the application in a way that breaks down large problems into multiple smaller problems (called threads), each of which runs on a single CPU core. The application then becomes a traffic cop keeping threads in sync. If any part gets out of sync, the app crashes or hangs.
This problem is made more complex because many apps are written with a maximum number of threads in mind. While some workloads, such as video encoding or photo processing can take advantage of many cores innately, most need to have some work done to add support for more threads, so future-proofing has been difficult. I don’t know if programming GCD is easier than straight-up multiple-core programming—we cover some of those details here—but the key here is that Apple’s created a middleware that developers can write for, which automatically scales up to work with the number of CPU cores or other hardware in your system. The developer writes for GCD, while the system handles the gruntwork. Apple hopes more people will use this easier, more future-proofed way to tap into multiple-core power. Of course, no one has so far, except Apple programmers themselves. This explains why Finder, Preview and basically everything else that ships with Snow Leopard run faster. But in my tests, Photoshop, still a 32-bit program on the Mac and written without any support of GCD or OpenCL, showed less than 1% variation from Leopard to Snow Leopard. Still, as we can see from the system apps, there’s potential here. And let’s face it, the majority of us are not rendering Photoshop files all day, so this is performance you can put in your pocket today.
There’s a story of efficiency here, too, however. Because GCD is better at managing resources, a program like, Mail, for example, shows less system impact (thread usage, cpu usage) while sitting idle in Snow Leopard, than on Leopard. When testing OpenCL’s hardware acceleration, something Windows machines have had for awhile, by playing a 1080p trailer of James Cameron’s awesome new Avatar movie, CPU usage dropped drastically when machines were using the 64-bit CoreCL and GCD supported version of QuickTime. Any modern machine can play 1080p video well, but here, we were talking about Snow Leopard causing the strain on the system to take total CPU usage from 30% to 16% on the 13-inch MacBook Pros. Other apps will eventually be able to use these GPU superpowers, but what Apple claims is the real potential for GPU processing is that OpenCL will let computers use video cards for not only 3D acceleration, video encoding, and heavy math, but more general computing tasks, too, because its written in a non-specific (C-based) programming language.
Furthermore, there have been a number of good articles questioning the speed benefits of 64-bit computing. Apple only goes so far to claim that math-based tasks benefit from the larger bus, but generally the only concrete advantage of 64-bit computing is the ability apps gain to manipulate over 4GB of RAM, a 32-bit limitation. Apple’s dev docs go on to say that some apps will incur a penalty if going 64-bit. So, rewriting apps in 64-bit versions is not a surefire recipe for speed improvement.
In many cases, with many of the built-in apps, Apple attributes the performance improvements to all three core technologies above. That stuff that means not so much today, but might mean a lot tomorrow as GPUs get faster and CPUs gain more cores and there’s already an infrastructure in place to take advantage of all that.
Apple’s next-generation operating system Mac OS X Snow Leopard is two days away, and the $30 price tag is a strong incentive for Mac users to upgrade. But this news might get some eager Mac fans to slam on the brakes: Adobe Creative Suite 3, including Photoshop, may have some compatibility issues with the new OS.
In a frequently-asked-questions document, Adobe said only its newer Creative Suite 4 has been tested for compatibility with Apple’s new OS. Adobe, however, could not make the same promise for Creative Suite 3.
“Adobe will support Creative Suite 4 software running with Snow Leopard according to its standard customer support policies,” the document states [PDF]. “Older versions of Adobe Creative Suite software were not designed to run on Mac OS X Snow Leopard (v10.6), so you may experience issues installing and using the software for which there are no solutions.”
John Nack, principal product manager of Adobe Photoshop, said in his blog that this does not mean CS3 will not be supported at all. He said CS3 has not been tested on Snow Leopard and “The plan, however, is not to take resources away from other efforts (e.g. porting Photoshop to Cocoa) in order to modify 2.5-year-old software in response to changes Apple makes in the OS foundation.”
Nonetheless, those who purchased Adobe’s Creative Suite 3 will undoubtedly be peeved. When it became available in 2007, the CS3 software bundle cost at least $1,700, and Creative Suite 4 came out just one year later.
Here at Wired.com we’ll put Adobe CS3 to the test when we get our hands on Snow Leopard. Stay tuned.
Still rocking that Palm Zire with your new Intel-based Mac? Then you might just want to reconsider that upgrade to Snow Leopard, as Apple has apparently decided to ditch its support for legacy Palm OS devices in the latest incarnation of iSync. That, as you may be aware, had previously acted as a conduit for Palm’s aging but still available Palm Desktop software, and let folks easily sync up their contacts and other data from their Centro, Treo, Zire, Tungsten, or even a venerable old PalmPilot. Of course, that doesn’t quite rise to the same level of controversy as the whole Pre / iTunes situation, especially considering that Palm itself has mostly moved on from said devices, and there are still some third-party sync solutions available for folks that want to keep the Palm OS dream alive.
This article was written on June 23, 2008 by CyberNet.
Mac only Last week Windows users got the joy of carrying Firefox 3 in their pockets, and today Mac users can do the same thing! Earlier today Portable Firefox 3.0 for Mac OS X was released, and with it you can carry your browser around with you from one Mac to another.
One of the things that I really like about Portable Firefox 3 for Mac over the Windows counterpart is that it asks whether you want to import your existing Firefox profile into the portable version (as seen in the screenshot above). It will copy over your entire profile including bookmarks, passwords, extensions, history, cookies, and more. Of course Windows users can manually do this with their version of Firefox Portable, but you have to know where your profile is located.
Before getting started with Portable Firefox you’ll want to ensure that there is plenty of space on your memory card or USB drive. For the Mac version they recommend at least 57MB, and the Windows version is about 77MB.
That new MacBook Pro’s 7200 RPM HDD singing you too many ballads lately? As promised, Apple today released a new firmware update to silence that troublemaker. If it doesn’t come up through automatic system update, you can obtain Hard Drive Firmware Update 2.0 (catchy name, eh?) via the read link. Admit it, you’re gonna feel just a teensy bit lonelier once your laptop stops chirping so much.
Update: Apple today also released Bluetooth Firmware Update 2.0.1, which alongside various bug fixes improves compatibility with the company’s wireless mouse and keyboards on all machines with the Broadcom chipset — that includes all unibody laptops and any Mac released in 2009.
This article was written on April 29, 2008 by CyberNet.
Mac only Breakaway is a nifty little free application that makes your Mac computer stop playing music in iTunes anytime you unplug the headphones. Some of you might already be familiar with this feature because it’s something that most iPods do. I would imagine that this would be especially handy if you’re in a quiet office, and don’t want your music to play through the speakers when you unplug your headphones.
If you don’t use iTunes on your Mac this can still serve a rather useful purpose. With a little AppleScript programming you can essentially have the app do anything you want when the headphones are unplugged or plugged-in. By default Breakaway comes with several different scripts that you can setup under the Triggers tab in the preferences. They will do things like set your iChat status to away, play/pause VLC, start your screensaver, and more:
awayiChat.scpt – Sets iChat’s status to away
availableiChat.scpt – Sets iChat’s status to available
awayAdium.scpt – Sets Adium’s status to away
availableAdium.scpt – Sets Adium’s status to available
awaySkype.scpt – Sets Skype’s status to away
availableSkype.scpt – Sets Skype’s status to available
fastLogout.scpt – Fast user switches (logs out) the current user
startScreensaver.scpt – Starts the screensaver (useful if the screensaver locks your computer)
vlcPlayPause.scpt – Toggles the playing state of VLC
I could be missing something, but even after quite a bit of searching I couldn’t find anything comparable for Windows users. Maybe it’s not possible to detect when headphones are unplugged in Windows? If you know of any applications or add-ons that will do this in Windows or Linux please shoot us a comment below!
Call us crazy (our parents sure have), but we think this thing is awesome in a “this can’t be a real item for sale” kind of way. TwelveSouth’s “Mac exclusive” BackPack shelf attaches to the back of iMac and Apple Cinema Displays, providing a place for your Mac mini, hard drive — or your Dr. Beverly Crusher figurine. They run $29.99, or you can get a six-pack for $150. Yes, a six-pack.
This is site is run by Sascha Endlicher, M.A., during ungodly late night hours. Wanna know more about him? Connect via Social Media by jumping to about.me/sascha.endlicher.
Uses latent multicore and GPU power to speed up
Still haven’t seen any third party apps
No major new functionality might turn off
Mac only 
