Snow Leopard: Day 1

There seems to be a big hubbub about the new release of Mac OS X 10.6, code named “Snow Leopard”. Rumours flying around the Interweb about anti-virus, Exchange integration and all that. I will be covering none of that. I will give you my impressions of the OS from my now rather brief interactions with it.

Installation.

After spending the R329 at the rather useless but very easy to spend millions iStore at Gateway, you get a very skinny, but as with everything Apple, very pretty DVD case with some gumph about the awesome that is Snow Leopard, a couple of stickers and the install DVD.

The install itself was a breeze. After running through the fix permissions stuff in Onyx as suggested by the sloping fore-headed man at the aforementioned iStore the actual install too roughly an hour. After which you reboot into the Snow Leopard desktop. I must mention that I only had 9Gig left on my 13″ MacBook so the fact that the install went through without a hitch is a big green tick to Apple and their techies…

The desktop itself shows now major changes to the previous iteration of Mac OS X. It does seem to be a bit snappier. Finder opens that little bit quicker and yes, I do have around 6Gig more space than when I started. That’s a big plus in my books.

Quicktime has got a major work over and it now looks much snazzier. Which is, as we all know, a major plus for everyone, because we all use Quicktime every day

Day to day stuff
On a daily basis I use the following to get through my day…

I could go through the list of everything I use on a daily basis, but that would make for a very boring blog post to be honest. I have checked with the above list and it all seems to be working fine. I am working through my SANS course with the Tunnelblick, I’ve sent through a couple of emails and Vmware seems to be behaving itself. Big plus there…

So what doesn’t work ?

On my system ? Nothing doesn’t work. There were a couple of little things like the iStat Menus which I used, but that’s really not a show stopper. If anything, my machine is a little snappier, a little quicker off the mark but I have absolutely no technical proof of this. Sorry.

It’s the little things

Terminal. Terminal has a little button on the top right that looks like a little split screen. Click that little bad boy and you get…a split terminal screen. Awesome !!! For people like me it’s a very cool little add-on. It’ll be interesting to see how this works over the next few days.

So yeah. So far so good. Snow Leopard isn’t a major overhaul of the OS. But it was never meant to be. It was a fine tuning of the OS. A refining process. And from my point of view, it seems to have worked. I’ll keep you posted on how it goes over the course of the week. No doubt I will be very vocal on Twitter if anything goes awry….