# Snow Leopard



## Rhisiart (Jun 24, 2008)

So 10.6, due to be released next Spring, will not include any new features, but will be slimmer with a greater focus on performance.

The Utilities folder will slim down from 468 MB to just 111 MB. Mail will go from 287 MB to 91MB and iCal & iChat will both half in size (source here).

I wonder whether the cost of Snow Leopard may slim down too?


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## Viro (Jun 24, 2008)

> I wonder whether the cost of Snow Leopard may slim down too?



Many cars have a sports GT version, that is slimmed down and the excess baggage all removed. No carpets, no stereo, lighter seats, etc. You'd think that with less material being put into the car, it'd be cheaper...

Same deal here with OS X. Performance optimization can frequently be a daunting challenge. Sometimes, even more daunting than writing the app in the first place.


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## pds (Jun 24, 2008)

On RoughlyDrafted I saw a graphic of the savings in different apps... amazing.

From what I see there, a large portion of the savings will come in the localization files. Because of the resolution independence, screen characters will be all vector graphics, totally scalable to a look good at any resolution, so that the many sized bitmaps that were packaged to make the screen font look smooth can be eliminated.

There are lots of other things Snow Leopard will do, but I understand that this is what will give the size savings.


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## Rhisiart (Jun 24, 2008)

Viro said:


> Many cars have a sports GT version, that is slimmed down and the excess baggage all removed. No carpets, no stereo, lighter seats, etc. You'd think that with less material being put into the car, it'd be cheaper...
> 
> Same deal here with OS X. Performance optimization can frequently be a daunting challenge. Sometimes, even more daunting than writing the app in the first place.


So you watch Top Gear too?


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## ElDiabloConCaca (Jun 24, 2008)

pds said:


> On RoughlyDrafted I saw a graphic of the savings in different apps... amazing.



What's strange is that my TextEdit is already 2MB, not 22MB as that graph claims.  My Stickies is also 1MB, not 9MB as the graph claims.

Both of those applications of mine report that they're "Universal", and sure enough, when I copy them to my PowerPC Mac, they open and run just fine.

What's going on here?


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## Viro (Jun 24, 2008)

Rhisiart said:


> So you watch Top Gear too?



Yeah. I love it


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## Viro (Jun 24, 2008)

ElDiabloConCaca said:


> What's strange is that my TextEdit is already 2MB, not 22MB as that graph claims.  My Stickies is also 1MB, not 9MB as the graph claims.
> 
> Both of those applications of mine report that they're "Universal", and sure enough, when I copy them to my PowerPC Mac, they open and run just fine.
> 
> What's going on here?



The 22 MB that article quotes is counting the 18 translations that TextEdit supports. You've either used xslimmer or you've been sensible and chosen not to install the languages you do not need.


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## Giaguara (Jun 25, 2008)

I just tested slimming down manually TextEdit. 

In my 10.5.3, the original installation (10.5) was made using ONLY English and 2 selected languages out of way too many.

On every subsequent Apple software update, the initial selection of installed languages is not respected, and all language packs are installed for all installed applications. This has been occurring since Mac OS X first versions came out, and has never been fixed, and most likely will never be fixed (even to have only two software update options: English only vs International including all localizations).

So, my system that was installed in 3 languages in total, not all 20+ included in system, has all the added localizations I will never need, every time softwareupdate is run.

Because of this, TextEdit in 10.5.3 was 22.1 MB. After manually removing all the localizations no one will ever use on the Mac, the size of the application went down from 22.1 MB to 4.2 MB. If I removed the other 2 out of 3 remaining localizations, I would be at 2 MB. 

And a similar space saving can be done additionally to all those universal applications that install PPC code on your Intel Mac, or Intel code on your PPC. 

Monolingual and Delocalizer remove the localizations you don't need but it can also be done manually.

I hope this marketing material for Snow Leopard will mean that your 2 MB TextEdit that gets to a bloated 22 MB with all the localizations you'll never use (the maximum languages I know anyone know is barely around 10, and even they don't use their computers in ALL the languages they know) will be 2 MB if you select to install it in English only, and stay 2 MB because it will never add Korean, Polish, Norwegian, Dutch, Portuguese of Portugal, Greek, Russian, Traditional Chinese and a number of other languages.

I find it huge bandwidth waste to force all downloads be with both architecture and all languages even when user has indicated in initial installation that they want US English (or some other language) only. In 10.4 the updates were in average 100-200 MB as they had a few less localizations, and were hardware specific (PPC and Intel versions separate). Now they seem to be over 300 MB for each . update. 300 + MB for 10.5.1, the same for 10.5.2 and so on. 
Anyone remember how small and compact 10.0 or 10.1 updates were?


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## Viro (Jun 25, 2008)

Giaguara said:


> 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


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## Captain Code (Jun 25, 2008)

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.


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## whitesaint (Jun 25, 2008)

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.


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## Mario8672 (Jun 26, 2008)

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.


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