Snow Leopard will not have any new features. Though this isn’t technically true, it’s what Apple says. So why would I want to buy it? Because, assuming Apple delivers on their promises, it will be the best Mac OS X experience I’ve ever had. Now, keep in mind none of these features are definite, but this wishlist should give you an idea of the type of changes that will make Snow Leopard a fantastic desktop companion. Whether people will buy Snow Leopard or not due to its “lack of features” is a different article, but for those who do buy Snow Leopard, here is why they will be running the biggest and best upgrade to OS X yet.
Spaces 2.0
Spaces should get a healthy brain upgrade in Snow Leopard. With any luck, Spaces will be able to remember where windows are if they have been moved from their home space. There is little more annoying than moving a window from Space 6 to Space 1, minimizing it, and maximizing it and having it fly right back to 6. Maybe Spaces will be able to handle having windows of one application thrown across different Spaces. That would be just fantastic.
Time Machine 2.0
Time Machine as it stands is an incredibly basic piece of software. If you have a folder, with another folder with 20 GB of files inside, and you rename the first folder, all 20GB inside gets backed up again. All. 20. Gigabytes. And the files haven’t been changed at all. With luck, Snow Leopard will introduce bit-level backups to not only prevent those scenarios, but also to back up only the parts of files that have changed, meaning that backups can take even less space. Only change 1MB or a 20GB file? In Snow Leopard, that might not mean another 20GB of backup space gone.
Mail 4.0
Will we finally stop crashing? And maybe be able to handle lots of emails without slowing to a crawl? That would be fab.
Safari 4
This is less speculation and more excitement. Bottom line, this stuff is fast. Well, at least it was comparatively speedy when the Developer Preview was first released. We’ll see if it ends up being as speedy as other browsers when it finally comes out.
The Little Stuff
I can only hope that besides the promised under-the-hood enhancements, Apple will focus on all the little weird stuff throughout the OS. They should match the scrollbars to the rest of the interface. They should let third party menu items be draggable and use the same APIs as Apple menu-items. They should stop the Finder and other apps from freezing up while an external drive spins up…because it’s likely you’re not even planning to open that external drive.
What are some more little things you find simply insane in OS X? How could they be fixed? Sound off below, because you never know, Steve Jobs himself might just drop on by and read this one day.
I don't normally comment, but i feel that someone should offset "John."
Expose is faster than I've ever experienced it, I've been a mac user for two years. I started on Tiger, switched to Leopard in February 2008 (I think), and switched to snow leopard on the friday that it came out.
The only problem that I have with 10.6 so far is that Time Machine seems to not be working properly….which is concerning for me.
I'm considering just performing a clean install of Leopard because backups are one thing that I will not sacrifice for the speed and sleekness of this new(ish) OS.
Idk, tell me if I'm doing something wrong when I test Time Machine: I added a song to my iTunes library by a new artist today. I have iTunes copy the music to my music folder by default. I backed up my computer, then deleted the new song by the new artist. I went to Time Machine….and the new artist's folder wasn't even there. I don't think I did anything wrong, and I'm pretty confident in that.
I guess if you don't use Time Machine, then 10.6 is incredibly worth it.
Bought the sleek new magic mouse only to find out I had to buy Snow Leopard to enjoy all it's functionality. No problem, I like the latest & greatest. However, Time Machine is now not working for me. First of all, I hear the HD grinding away like my old PC trying to boot up and after ten minutes of that every hour, I get a message that says I don't have enough room on my 100 GB external drive.
We'll see what the geniuses at my local Apple store say…
I have been running snow leopard for a few hours now. and noticed a few things. First, spaces arent swapped like they used to. The windows now sit on this sheet, that you drag over to the space u want. Very ugly, very unpractical. Very stupid. Second. Slow animations. Extremely slow. Expose, and dashboard crawl. and im running an intel core 2 duo. So no excuse.
Im guessing over the next few days. Patches are released to get things going, and the 10.1 update will fix alot.
I give it to apple that this is day 1 of snow leopard. But slowness where loepard 10.5 shined shouldnt happened.
and the sheet with spaces is unexcusable, and ugly
What specs are you running? just to compare your snow leoaprd platform with mine.
Im running it on an 1.83 ghz intel core 2 duo, 2 gb of ram. 80gb hdd, intel gma 950
I know i wont get opencl because i dont meet the specs on the video card. But i still experience choppiness
also i noticed some time machine quirks, so your not alone. 1 i noticed is automatic backup. Sometimes i get a backup failed message, for no apparent reason.
and i noticed another thing, which apparently a lot of people around the net are noticing and having the same issue. It deals with torrent and p2p software. Frostwire, bittorrent, transmission. wont connect properly or at all. So this has to be fixed, either on apples end or the companies, im thinking most likely the company.