Snow Leopard Build 10A286 Seeded to Developers

[AccordionNoir]

Features vs. Quality and performance

It's semantics I know, but it's momentarily entertaining to see all the "quality and performance improvements" that would have been added to the tally of "new features" in previous releases.

They sound nice though. I even understand the performance gained by excluding ppc machines like mine. Win some, loose a little five years later, that's ok.

 

[Saladinos]

So, I don't know what Quicktime X actually looks like, but reading over the descriptions in this thread, I did a quick Photoshop of what I think it might look like. I just hope Apple's lawyers don't come after me

Round the corners, add a dropshadow and give the buttons a blue hue and you're there.

 

[NT1440]

Round the corners, add a dropshadow and give the buttons a blue hue and you're there.

=/

Does the rounded corners interfere with the video at all?

I like the mockup because it really looks like your manipulating the movie file itself, not using a program to play it (kinda like how opening up a single picture looks).

 

[Catfish_Man]

Do cocoa built apps have a performance edge over carbon apps? Thought I remembered reading that it is a better framework that uses newer components of the OS.

That's a tricky question to answer, actually. The short answer is "maybe". The long answer is this:

"Old-style" Carbon apps will tend to be slower. Things that qualify as "old-style" would be WaitNextEvent() based event handling, QuickDraw use, FSSpec use, and a few other things.

"New-style" (HI*/CarbonEvent using) Carbon apps should be slightly faster than their Cocoa equivalents due to avoiding ObjC overhead, except when the Cocoa app is taking advantage of fast APIs unavailable to Carbon like CoreImage. However, most Carbon apps would probably just splash in a bit of Cocoa if they needed to use those.

Cocoa apps in general will be quicker to write and easier to integrate with the system since so much is handled automatically. Potentially, an app developer could use the time gained in development to spend more time optimizing, and end up with a quicker app that way.

 

[coleridge78]

Ah, okay. Out of curiosity, how does one separate reads and writes for mail on Apples mail server?

What do you mean, exactly? Apple doesn't have a mail server; their servers do ship with an open-source mail server package (Dovecot for sure, maybe others).

Like everything else in the universe other than Exchange, it uses the IMAP standard to mediate all interaction between the mail client and mailstore.

 

[Stridder44]

I miss the old style Aqua like when the Public Beta was released back in 2000.
They've toned it down so much since then..
I hope Snow Leopard's Marble Interface will look good enough to eat, as did Aqua.

Aqua was cool...in 2001. I mean at the time it was nice. But that time is long gone and it needs to move on. Honestly I'm excited about this new "marble" theme. Hopefully it's a drastic nice change from any of the current themes.

In a perfect world we'd be able to switch between all the themes via System Preferences. That'll be the day.

 

[allbrokeup]

I have just cried for the first time in 6 years!

My pooooooor olllllld iMac Intel Core Duo 1.86 GhZ with 1 GB of RAM will probably be unable to handle Snow Leopard. And if it manages to scrape through, 10.7 will mean my iMac stays with 10.6 or gets downgraded to Leopard if necessary.

Looks like, for the first time...I will have to disable some stuff on Snow Leopard, like the Transparent Menu Bar, Dashboard and revert to Safari 3.2.1..........

Brought-to-you by, a VERY VERY sad, allbrokeup.

 

[danny_w]

I have just cried for the first time in 6 years!

My pooooooor olllllld iMac Intel Core Duo 1.86 GhZ with 1 GB of RAM will probably be unable to handle Snow Leopard. And if it manages to scrape through, 10.7 will mean my iMac stays with 10.6 or gets downgraded to Leopard if necessary.

Looks like, for the first time...I will have to disable some stuff on Snow Leopard, like the Transparent Menu Bar, Dashboard and revert to Safari 3.2.1..........

Brought-to-you by, a VERY VERY sad, allbrokeup.

I don't think that there is any reason that your iMac won't be able to run SL, it just won't be able to run it in 64-bit mode.

 

[Stridder44]

What I really hope, and I posted about it before, is that Spotlight windows in the Finder will be revamped so that they work like those in Tiger. (And I'm not talking about the Tiger special Spotlight windows, but the search results windows integrated to the Finder)

In Tiger, a Finder Spotlight window would behave just like any other Finder windows, you could have any number and type of column you wanted.

In Leopard, for some reason they crippled the Spotlight windows with only three columns (Name, Kind and Last Opened) that you can't change, as the "View option" palette will not work on these windows.

I would hope that with the Cocoa Finder, the code would be more modular so that making Spotlight windows behave like other Finder windows would be easier.

Oh my God yes!!! I was so pissed when they changed this. In Tiger when you do a Spotlight search and then click on "Show All" it gave you a nice detailed list, separating everything by files/folders/videos/etc. and listed EVERYTHING.

In Leopard, you get a window that shows everything bunched together, unorganized, and certain files are no longer shown.

 

[Stridder44]

Why would it be stupid? First of all, how many quad G5s are there out there? Is it really enough to justify the extra development and test costs for Apple? Secondly, would there really be any performance benefit? x86 CPUs get a big benefit with 64-bit because of the extra registers available in the x64 architecture; PPC already had plenty of registers to begin with and might actually incur a performance penalty due to 64-bit addressing.

You cannot level with these kinds of people. They either are still bitter about Apple switching to Intel (one of the the best things they've ever done) or they will want to work on their G5 for the next 10 years.

 

[tkermit]

So, I don't know what Quicktime X actually looks like, but reading over the descriptions in this thread, I did a quick Photoshop of what I think it might look like. I just hope Apple's lawyers don't come after me

Hey - I like that approach and don't know what QT-X looks like, either - Here's my humble attempt at imagining what it looks like:
(note that I don't have any actual access to SL builds!)

 

[karlfranz]

Yes, but how FAST is it?

Everybody's talking about all the "improvements", bugs, GUI changes, or what not on SL, but I have yet to hear any beta testers comment on whether they see a real, tangible improvement in the overall speed of their system when compared to the same hardware running 10.5. I'm sure that a subjective comment on speed would not be a violation of the NDA.

I'm just curious, system crashes and other beta-related instabilities aside, do you notice a real benefit in speed from SL? Could we expect our existing Macs to run 25% faster? 50%? After all, this is being touted as one of the reasons we will all want to buy it in the first place. If not, Apple is going to have a hard time convincing many people to cough up the bucks to upgrade.

 

[Peace]

Everybody's talking about all the "improvements", bugs, GUI changes, or what not on SL, but I have yet to hear any beta testers comment on whether they see a real, tangible improvement in the overall speed of their system when compared to the same hardware running 10.5. I'm sure that a subjective comment on speed would not be a violation of the NDA.

I'm just curious, system crashes and other beta-related instabilities aside, do you notice a real benefit in speed from SL? Could we expect our existing Macs to run 25% faster? 50%? After all, this is being touted as one of the reasons we will all want to buy it in the first place. If not, Apple is going to have a hard time convincing many people to cough up the bucks to upgrade.

I opened Mail in 1/2 bounce. It didn't even have a chance to bounce actually.

 

[Eric S.]

I opened Mail in 1/2 bounce. It didn't even have a chance to bounce actually.

On which system?

 

[Peace]

On which system?

Early 2008 iMac 3.06 w/ 4GB RAM and 3 partitions with various O/S's on it.

3/4 bounce on the unibody Macbook 2.0

 

[bobertoq]

Hey - I like that approach and don't know what it looks like, either - Here's my humble attempt at fake-breaking Apple's NDA :

I thought that was an actual screenshot I hope 10.6 will look something like that. I wish they could mix iTunes in with Finder, and set Quick Look as a default for opening images, videos, etc. (if you can't already) I'm really hoping for an interface makeover soon. Hopefully, if it does happen, it will be very minimalistic and look something like yours.

I'm reaaaaly hoping for a surprising leap in performance, OS size, and application size for 10.6. Hopefully applications will open in a blink like Chrome does on Windoze.

 

[Jayomat]

I opened Mail in 1/2 bounce. It didn't even have a chance to bounce actually.

on first start or "re-start" of mail?

 

[Mr. Wonderful]

I opened Mail in 1/2 bounce. It didn't even have a chance to bounce actually.

Oh yeah? Well I heard the new Mac Pros can open mail in a 1/32 of a bounce. 70 bounces for second.

 

[nado]

Well, according to Wikipedia, Apple has already registered "Lynx" and "Cougar" as trademarks.



Huh? Why should the pace of innovation slow any in the future? I expect the desktop may evolve at a faster rate than it has over the past eight years.

Hopefully Mac OS X Lynx is where they'll replace Safari with tabs at the top by good old Lynx, the browser!

 

[macpro2000]

on first start or "re-start" of mail?

That is a very valid question...On restart of mail, my 2.66 Quad Xeon does it in 3/4th of a bounce.

 

[ehendel]

Finder

Does the new cocoa Finder look any different visually? Any UI tweaks?

 

[MacsBestFriend]

Well remember the pro apps (Aperture, Final Cut Pro, Logic, Photoshop) are all going to be updated this year, and they you are going to need a Core i7 (and Snow Leopard) to run them anyway near their full potential.

So I would say that the Core i7 is going to be the minimum requirement for Snow Leopard in 12 months time.

So I want to buy a MacBook this summer after the release (Student discount)... are you saying to wait another year?

 

[diamond.g]

What do you mean, exactly? Apple doesn't have a mail server; their servers do ship with an open-source mail server package (Dovecot for sure, maybe others).

Like everything else in the universe other than Exchange, it uses the IMAP standard to mediate all interaction between the mail client and mailstore.

Well I am curious how other mail systems deal with i/o on the hard disks. With Exchange it is recommended you have your database on one drive and your log files on another. This is to separate reads from your writes. I guess I wonder how other systems deal with tons of i/o traffic without using a backend database where your reads can be separated from your writes more easily.

This is all assuming that other Mail server applications actually have mail stored like how Mail.app does it.

 

[Catfish_Man]

So I want to buy a MacBook this summer after the release (Student discount)... are you saying to wait another year?

He's wrong, don't worry about it.

 

[t0mat0]

Parallelism

Coming from a pessimistic (some may say more realistic) viewpoint - what if Apple demos at WWDC, opens it up more to developers and shows more about how Apple is dealing with concurrency - and give developers a version that can let them get their heads around the various parts they need to rewrite code in a more Snow Leopard optimised way. (is there any way they could automate some of this?)
Would they just drop the new features on developers with no lead time to get familiar with the new changes? Seems strange for them to.
Apple might have a strong version 3 iPhone planned and a decent SL demo and new build for developers to sink their teeth into (have developers really seen most of what Apple themselves are publicly proclaiming as new features for Snow Leopard?
WWDC will invariably have a lot of interest for the iPhone side. Takes the heat off them whilst they wind down Leopard and get (if they are going to get) the v3 iPhone announced at WWDC. Why the 3 rather than 2,2 wasn't explained a while back. No one has really discussed what the iPhone will get from Snow Leopard - and when.


There is as mentioned a lag between the Mac Pro with Nehalem and the rest not. Will the current iMac be a stop gap? Apple have already changed the internal design for the Pro recently - what's to stop them having a shorter than normal cycle for the current non mac pro desktops? Or are they moving towards longer cycles?
We await Intel anyhow. Any more chips they have up their sleeve they're not telling us about?