Dock Animations (Finally) Fixed in Snow Leopard!

[204353]

My trusty MacBook Pro always had problems with the Dock's animations (opening an app that isn't in the Dock, icon bounces, minimising etc.) that would slowly get worse and worse over time. The frame rates of these animations would slow down, resulting in the most horrifically jerky Genie effect ever. The only way to fix it was to restart the Dock. Although it doesn't sound that awful, it really ruined Leopard's slick user experience for me.

I remember reading previously that the problem may have been caused by a video memory leak... something to do with the NVidia drivers, perhaps.

It seems that in Snow Leopard all of the Dock animations, including the lovely new Stacks, are super smooth, back to how they were in Tiger.

I remember hearing similar stories from users of other Intel Macs, but it appears that this little (but very annoying) problem has been solved.

 

[Branskins]

That is good to hear! Luckily I haven't had this problem on my MBP

 

[204353]

Colour Profiles

Another thing that I've noticed in Snow Leopard is that it appears as though my default display colour profile has changed (in ways other than the 2.2 gamma point, which I knew about).

Some colours appear slightly different, but somehow better, such as the blue of the Safari icon and the traffic light buttons in window title bars.

It all looks better, although I'm not sure why it's changed... I thought colour profiles were tied in with the computer itself, not the version of Mac OS X.

 

[SimonJ]

While I agree with you that the genie effect is incredibly smooth, I can't say the same about Exposé. That's been very jerky for me. Have you experienced that?

Sorry if this is hijacking your thread..

 

[bmcgrath]

I'm happy to hear this news. I'm on a 2.2ghz MBP with the 8600m GT. Sometimes leopard displays the genie and dock effects perfectly and sometimes it can he horrid with it's slow jerkiness.
Looking forward to upgrading to SL sometime next week!

 

[iLog.Genius]

I've noticed that too and was the first thing I noticed after booting Snow Leopard for the first time. Animations/transitions in the dock and expose are way better than what Leopard offered. I don't know if it's drivers or an OS tweak but it's awesome.

 

[FSMBP]

I'm happy to hear this news. I'm on a 2.2ghz MBP with the 8600m GT. Sometimes leopard displays the genie and dock effects perfectly and sometimes it can he horrid with it's slow jerkiness.
Looking forward to upgrading to SL sometime next week!

That's the Mac I have, and Leopard's animations (dock and others) were CHOPPY. I had Tiger on it, and it ran smooth as butter.

I have Snow Leopard on my MBP now, and let me tell you - the animations are smooth/the way they should be. It seems the 64-Bit Dock really does make a difference.

The only thing I noticed was choppy is expose sometimes but I've noticed that all on Macs when the doing CPU intensive stuff.