listening to TWIT (This week in tech).
Leo says it's more Snow Job.

Your thoughts?

I agree.

I completely understand how meaningful all the under the hood changes are but it offers the user very little.

If someone installed 10.6 behind my back, i'm not sure i would have noticed.

---

I don't really notice any difference, and don't see any difference. But I hadn't paid much attention to what I was supposed to see or what I was supposed to notice either.

I do see time machine backing up regularly, so that app I had to schedule that for once a day is no longer working, but I do notice that time machine is faster and doesn't impact the speed of the computer at all, so I guess that is a noticable difference.

Walt Mossberg likes it, so who're gonna believe?
[ptech.allthingsd.com]

---

Some things are fixed. Remote Desktop works better now and .mac sync is working better also. I think visual hub might be a casualty though. It's been sitting on the first pass for a really long time. That would be a hard blow.

I can confirm that Visualhub is a casualty.

I've switched to handbrake/VLC combo, pending review of the pretenders to the throne that have popped up since VH died.

...with Leo Laporte.

Unlike a Leopard, he changes his spots from TWiT to MacBreak Weekly. In fact his presence turns it into MacBreak Weakly. He goes for the sound bite, not the insight.

His guests far outshine his knowledge and ability, and he should probably stick to diagnosing callers PC problems.

I'll wait to see what Andy Ihnatko has to say about it. He's a *lot* more objective than LaPorte.

That said, I found Snow to be exactly what it was purported it would be-- under the hood stuff with little above the waterline.

I don't know what anybody else was expecting, but obviously it was more than what was promised. "One more thing", maybe?

And broken apps? What .x update doesn't break something?

But more than just bug fixes, pruning, and tweaking, I think .6 is the start of a Foundation that's going to put the N and the I back in "new and improved". I don't know if we'll see it in .6.x, but I think .7 will an even bigger step than .5.

For me, Sno fixed a few things that *might* have been repaired with a .5.x NnP, but defied First Aid, DiskWarrior, and TechTool Pro. That alone made me happy.

Now if it could just fix hardwae.

---

We don’t do focus groups. They just ensure that you don’t offend anyone, and produce bland inoffensive products. —Jonathan Ive

-An armed society is a polite society.
And hope is a lousy defense.

There is no safety for honest men
except by believing all possible evil
of evil men.

I *love* Sigs. It's Glocks I hate.

[www.phoronix.com]

These guys think the upgrade is improved.



Edited 1 time(s). Last edit at 08/31/2009 12:48PM by SKYLANE.

Visual Hub not broken for me?

As everyone knows, no whizbang features, but I notice a dramatic smoothness, speed increase and snappiness in many operations, primarily with the Apple apps ... I think most other upgrades over the many years of Macintosh have been for "features," so maybe that's why I notice the speed more on this one? But I'm thrilled with it ...

Quote
lazydays
Some things are fixed. Remote Desktop works better now and .mac sync is working better also.

Can you expound on the fixes to Remote Desktop?


Nathan

I love the Activesync stuff. Leo just doesn't work for a company with an Exchange-based email system.

Exchange support, QuickTime X, Exposé overhaul, scrollable stacks, enhanced PDF text selection - all seem pretty visible to me...but then I haven't had a chance to play with everything yet

---

StingMe

Quote
RAMd®d
...with Leo Laporte.

Leo's theory?

"Here's what bugs me. It feels like Apple had a lot of improvements they held back over the last two years, minor little things in the systems preferences pane, 512 x 512 icons, they did some really nice stuff with the assistive technologies, some of my blind friends are saying much improved, but these are all things, if you ask me they could have been releasing over the last two years. Somebody somewhere wrote a memo saying lets just hold these back, and we'll release it all on a disc and call it a new version."

He blows off even the idea of 'under the hood' changes. "It's barely anything at all."

Leo's lights began to dim for me when he took up the pitchfork over the whole use of the term "podcast". He dropped precipitously again when he started doing "baked in" ads (ads that are blended in to content so as to obscure the fact that they are ads and not spontaneous personal endorsements) for Dell and other vendors.

Over the years, more and more I've seen his support or lack of support for the Mac platform become dependent on the number of PC/Windows geeks he's with. Conviction replaced by pandering. This Snow Leopard stuff feels like more of the same. TWit fell off my 'must listen' list quite awhile ago into a 'nothing better available' purgatory.



Edited 1 time(s). Last edit at 08/31/2009 02:04PM by Blankity Blank.

Quote
SKYLANE
[www.phoronix.com]

These guys think the upgrade is improved.

They sure do!

"We are not Mac junkies at Phoronix. Ummm, hell, we are just performance-enthused Linux fanatics with a love for benchmarking... The performance improvements we encountered in Mac OS X 10.6 through our benchmarks we were quite astonishing. Thanks to the introduction of the Grand Central Dispatch, 64-bit migration, OpenCL support (to largely benefit future applications), and other refinements made "under the hood" of Snow Leopard, this is one hell of a fast operating system... Snow Leopard presents Mac OS X users with incredible performance improvements that leave us quite in fact amazed. Mac OS X 10.6.0 was also 100% stable throughout our testing..."

And Leo, it seems to me you missed a few other things too:

[www.apple.com]

Thanks for the link, SKYLANE.



Edited 1 time(s). Last edit at 08/31/2009 02:08PM by Article Accelerator.

Leo Laporte is an idiot. It took me a few years to get my dad to stop paying attention to all his stupid crap about PCs.

Gamma 2.2.

The default gamma has been changed from 1.8 to 2.2 to better serve the color needs of digital content producers and consumers.



FINALLY.

---

[twitter.com]

I installed it on my Macbook, and the speed increase is VERY noticeable.

Quote
RAMd®d
I'll wait to see what Andy Ihnatko has to say about it. He's a *lot* more objective than LaPorte.

[forums.macresource.com]

---

If it had cost me $129 I'd be pissed. But for $29, if I may, you get faster OS, better use of your dual core chip, and your 64 bit chip that had before pretty much not been utilized....

There are some worthwhile upgrades. While I have no use for it, the Entourage server thing has some people nearly orgasmic!

As for me, the upgraded features of Preview that allow you cut and paste PDF as if they are plain text and the new annotation features have made my blogging much easier. Preview is in some ways a neat little swiss army knife.

Now the one thing that should be a hit, but I see little about are the new features in Automator.

---

PM G5 original 1.8 SP, with 2.5 gigs of ram. 410 gigs of hard drive. OS 10.5.8
MacBook Pro (Early 2008 model) 2.4 ghz, 2 gig ram, 200 gb hard drive/ Mac OS 10.6 and XP SP3
Location: Cincinnati

I'm loving it.

Exchange support was worth 30 bucks alone to me.

But the rest is well worth it too. My machine is scrolling things much nicer, is and seems snappier all around. It's like butter!

Apple didn't misrepresent anything regarding the release of Snow Leopard. It was about what is going on behind the scenes.

There wasn't 300 new features.

There wasn't 4 gigs of added bloatware.

We have all joked about every update making our Macs "snappier". The finder in Snow Leopard does feel more responsive. Safari opens darn quick. As soon as developers start writing programs to take advantage of Grand Central and Open CL; things should get faster all around.

I'm pretty happy with Snow Leopard. For $29, my Mac got a pretty good tune up. I really feel Snow Leopard was more bang for the buck than Leopard was.

---