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Just an update

June 17th, 2009 | Author: admin

I very recently wrote a blog on how I felt about Snow Leopard, and my first impression with the OS. This is just an update to that post, so if you have not read it already, you may either ignore this post, or put it on hold while you read this.

One thing that I talked about was the apparent lack of Quicktime X, one of the innovations of the new OS that Apple touted the most at the World WIde Developers Conference. While it has suddenly appeared, and is indeed very nicely designed, it has some serious issues, surprise surprise. It seems Apple hasn’t done such a good job with the 64bit environment as I first gave them praise for, at least not yet, this might (and should) be fixed by the official release. Now the Quicktime player in and of itself is fully 64bit, there are no issues there, but it seems Apple has chosen to split up the processes, letting Quicktime handle the GUI and design, while a separate process, the QTKit Server, handles some of the more hardcore processing. When it turns out that the QTKit Server shows up as a “normal” 32bit process in the activity monitor, the alarm bells start wailing.

Come on Apple! You can do better than this! Or maybe there’s something I don’t understand, it’s not like I’ve done any research on this new thing, it might be that a 32bit process is necessary to play movie files that were made on a 32-bit processor, and therefore the QTKit needs to be 32bit for these movie files? I don’t think that sounds very reasonable, but it’s possible, and I will test the hypothesis some time in the future, I shall simply make a movie myself and see how Quicktime handles that, but for now I stand disappointed.

Edit: I googled a bit, and found an article suggesting that the QTKit is in an even worse shape than I thought… Read more about it here.

Song of the Blog: The Static Age

Sincerely yours
Bjørn

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Snow Leopard Review

June 16th, 2009 | Author: admin

I have, through completely legal channels, of course, gotten my hands on a copy of the Snow Leopard developer beta! For those of you who do not spend hours watching Apple keynotes, and I assume that means most of you, Apple just held their World Wide Developers Conference, where they demonstrated some of the new features that will be present in the next big release of their current operating system, Mac OS X. At this conference they offered a seed (torrent address I think) of a beta version to the developers, so they could check that their software would run on the new technology, an make tweaks if it didn’t. This helps Apple because it means there will be more software available when the system ships, and it helps the developers because it gives them something to fiddle with, and developers love fiddling.

I had some trouble installing Snow Leopard, mainly because I wanted to circumvent the whole “Burn this to a dvd” step, as I do not have a proper DVD-burning utility. I attempted to run the hidden mpkg file that contains the installer from within Leopard, and install Snow Leopard onto another partition. This failed, several times. I have no idea why it failed, but something went wrong, so I had a splendid idea. I partitioned my disk again, leaving me with one large Leopard partition, and two tiny snow leopard partitions, each of roughly 8 gigabytes. I should have made one larger, and one smaller, but it all worked out in the end. I then “burned” the .dmg disk image to the last partition, booted from this, and proceeded to install onto my second partition. There was barely enough space if I took away most of the extras, but there was enough room, which is the important part. Everything ticked, and after removing the install dvd partition, I was ready to try it out.

Snow Leopards fancy new default background. Can you tell the difference from Leopard?

What I had been most excited about was the new Quicktime. I’m surprised they didn’t call it iQuicktime, but I guess they realized that they’d already overused the i, so they called it Quicktime X. Not much for innovation on names, they seem to be very good at innovating with software. Quicktime X looked downright sexy, with the disappearing menu during playback, the neat controls, the simple intuitive editing controls, all brilliant new additions to an already brilliant piece of software. The only problem is Quicktime X hasn’t been released yet! They spent quite a lot of time showcasing Quicktime at the WWDC, and it isn’t even done! Or if it is, I sure as hell can’t figure out where to get it. It’s not available through the software updater, and it’s not on their webpage, so I can only imagine it’s in some lab somewhere. Screw you, Apple!

Another thing I remember looking forward to trying out was some new exposé function. Exposé is the mac function that displays all your open windows in a grid-like view, allowing easy switching between open applications. They’ve added more functionality now, so that you’re supposedly able to do it within applications. I can see some of you Windows Live lovers in the back drooling already. Thing is, I can’t figure out how to do this either, so it’s not in the developer beta! What the hell?

This is why I love Snow leopard.

Other than that, there really isn’t that much to say about Snow Leopard, not that jumps out and glares at you anyways. Most of the stuff that’s new in Snow Leopard goes on under the hood. For instance, it’s all 64-bit now! Finally! They rewrote it all to run in a 64-bit environment, and you can really tell the difference. And then they decided to make it even better, and wrote the Grand Dispatch Central, which manages the threading of the applications. This can get really tech heavy, but what it means is, when an application isn’t working, it no longer requires much of your cpu’s attention. Thanks to the Grand Dispatch Central, uTorrent no longer makes the cpu spin out of control! In order to calm it down under Leopard you had to disable some features, which was really lame.

One thing that always bothered me about Leopard was that it didn’t handle flash very well. The Adobe Flash Plugin was badly broken for a long time. I don’t think it was until the release of 10.5.7 (the last official release of Mac OS X) that we finally saw some improvement in this area. What it meant was that you could actually watch youtube movies with your laptop on your lap! It was intense I tell you. In Snow Leopard, there’s a new feature. Actually it’s a Safari 4 feature, but it only works in Snow Leopard. What it does is, it isolates your plugins as separate processes, such that if Flash Player crashes, you just have to reload the page, instead of having Safari faint on you. This is great and all, maybe we’re moving towards sandboxed tabs too, but guess what, it’s not all good news. Yup, you guessed it, my CPU is going crazy again. This might be partly because the Flash Plugin shows up as a 32-bit process, and it’s trying to function inside of a 64-bit application. Come on Apple, you knew this had to happen. So for now all I can do is find a table, grab a cup of coffee, and wait for Adobe to do their job.

In conclusion I can say that I’m very pleased with Snow Leopard. I find myself booting into it rather than Leopard every time, despite some flaws. I also find myself constantly entering the Google Desktop shortcut, and I’m equally disappointed every time it doesn’t show up. It doesn’t work with Snow Leopard yet, but I assume it’ll be fixed soon enough. For now, spotlight will do, but if you’re completely dependent, don’t bother switching yet, it’s completely dead. Another reason not to install Snow Leopard would be that the iLife suite is 34-bit still, but it works wonders nevertheless, so it’s not stopping me. All over it’s a wonderful upgrade, and it provides an incredibly stable system for a closed Beta.

Song of the Blog: ¡Viva la Gloria!

Sincerely yours

Bjørn

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