Snow Leopard Impressions

My copy of Snow Leopard was delivered to me on Friday, after an amusing and annoying mess up by Fedex. I decided first to install it on my iMac to make sure everything goes smoothly before I install it on my primary machine (a 15″ MBP). The whole process took about an hour on both machines and it went by smoothly.. and that includes reinstalling XCode.

• Everything is faster, especially app load times. Even my old iMac from years ago, which I always dreaded using because of what seemed like hard drive thrashing, now performs very well.
• Quicktime has the biggest UI change — and it’s okay. For me though, I need to use Quicktime 7 Pro because of the export options that I use for Radio Javan’s music videos, and Snow Leopard still includes this in the Utilities directory.
• Finder has been completely re-written taking advantage of the new libraries (will they ever rewrite iTunes?). I know this because I’ve read it, but also it is slightly more responsive.
• The new Expose that let’s you do show only windows within a specific app is pretty cool.
• After install, I had gigs of hard drive space freed up on both my machines.
• I admit, the new wallpapers (the two of the Snow Leopards) are pretty cool.

Since Snow Leopard is basically just a rewrite & rework of Leopard, there’s not much that’s going to awe you. But for only $30, Apple made a great choice by avoiding the feature creep that shows up on every new OS. They decided to go back and improve everything under the hood. I know the word “refactor” scares many of us, but I hope more software developers take notice.