Snow Leopard

[Viro]

Originally Posted by Giaguara

Anyone remember how small and compact 10.0 or 10.1 updates were?

I also remember how crap 10.0 and 10.1 were though

[Captain Code]

I really doubt the Spring release. More like WWDC 09 or after. I know they are touting no new features but that's not really going to be true. The applications team, for example Mail or iCal aren't going to be letting those apps sit for a year. No doubt there will be some new features. Obviously the previously mentioned Exchange support but no doubt ever other app in the system will be changing. Also, every app is moving to 64 bit binaries. Whether they only have 64 bit x86 binaries in the GM or not, I don't know. From what I've read there's still some PPC binary code in a lot of the system so either it will support PPC at GM or they haven't finished ripping that out yet.

[whitesaint]

Yeah I agree with Captain Code and Viro. Viro is probably right that localizations take up so much space. I just checked this on TextEdit, and each localization of the interface takes up around 1.2 MB. That can easily add up to 22 MB for TextEdit, especially with 20 localizations or whatever.

And Captain Code, I totally agree. They are completely adding features to Mail and iCal, and removing bugs for the new features of these apps. It would be silly to think they would just add one or two features and not add any other features. It's so easy to add features too. That and I think it would be foolish not to support PowerPC processors for Snow Leopard, I'm sure there are still millions of PowerPC users out there that should be capable of running Snow Leopard, unless the optimizations made in Snow Leopard are exclusively for Intel processors. But if they were optimizing Snow Leopard for lower power devices, such as the iPhone, this might not be the case as the iPhone uses the much more efficient ARM architecture. So it would be nice to keep Mac OS X processor-independent, but who knows.

But anyway, I think Leopard does need a lot of additional speed and stability. Some apps hang, some apps are total memory hogs, there's still a bunch of bugs, and I'm just pretty sure a lot of optimization can be done here and there.

One example of a major bug I can think of is external DVD burners in 10.5.1. In 10.5.1, my external DVD burner didn't work period. Discs wouldn't even show up. And it supports all kinds of discs, not just DVDs. But 10.5.2 fixed this problem flawlessly. Don't get me wrong, I love Mac OS X, but of all the versions it feels as if Leopard is the buggiest.

I wish Apple would do more with speech without that stupid bubble around all the time.

[Mario8672]

If what I hear is true, Snow Leopard doesn't deserve the 0.1 update to the version. It's not that big of a difference. Look at what changed from 10.1>10.2>10.3>etc. Those were more than just performance fixes. Snow Leopard should just be an alternate version to Leopard; same version number.