Weighing in less than 0.5 kg, the pack­age arrived late Friday after­noon. Apparently they don’t deliver on week­ends, so accom­pa­nied by a friend I decided to head over to DHL’s stor­age facil­ity, and self-collect the pack­age instead. That was the begin­ning of what will become a very excit­ing weekend.

Announced just a year ago by CEO Steve Jobs, Apple set a date for September release; but being Apple they just couldn’t wait and deliver Snow Leopard almost 1 month early on August 28^th last week, the news came fast too, no big press gath­er­ing, no big launch party, just a hum­ble notice over at their online store a few days before the launch date say­ing that Snow Leopard is avail­able for pre-order, ship­ping Aug 28^th. The blo­gos­phere went mad, tech geeks, writ­ers & blog­gers tweet, write and reviewed this dif­fer­ent kind of OS upgrade, peo­ple loved it, and I can’t wait for myself to put my hands on it, did, and now I can see what the fuzz is all about.

How unusual Snow Leopard as an OS upgrade is? Well, let’s start with the big news. Rather than adding new fea­tures, they wanted to stick with the exist­ing ones (Leopard has enough of that, really) and decided to do what oth­ers never done before, what oth­ers promised and failed to deliver: faster, smaller & more reli­able OS. Boy, they did it. They did it mar­velously; 1 month ear­lier than promised, $100 less than its pre­de­ces­sor with count­less improve­ments across the board.

We pho­tog­ra­phers live & die with our machines, it’s the air that we breath, the food we eat & the con­stant com­pan­ion that never betrays, along the way, we picked up a cou­ple of things or two to com­ple­ment our machines to help us live bet­ter, do a bet­ter job, so we depend on those Apps also. Being impa­tient kills in this indus­try, and only those who are crazy enough (like me) will dare to take the risk, but they said no risk, no gain, right?

Lucky enough, there are peo­ple who were there first, those blog­gers I was talk­ing about? They’ve been run­ning & test­ing Snow Leopard for months much ear­lier than the rest of us, Apple gave them access to new beta/test builds since the day it was announced, and some of the have been post­ing their thoughts, reports & find­ings for the world to see. Lovely. Days prior to the launch, Macworld, the ivy-league pub­li­ca­tion of the Mac posted many use­ful things, some ded­i­cated group reported and lists Snow Leopard Apps Compatibility, Apple also pub­lished a sim­pler ver­sion of sim­i­lar list but only the incom­pat­i­ble ones, while Macrumors put together links to Snow Leopard com­pat­i­ble offi­cial printer dri­vers .

With the pre­flight checks off, I’m all set and Snow Leopard is cleared for landing.

First Impressions

Snappy, snappy, snappy.

With a smaller install base and shorter instal­la­tion time, this new OS is indeed faster (espe­cially with 64-bit capa­ble, Core 2 Duo machines) by all mea­sures; visual effects, graphic ani­ma­tions, UI inter­ac­tions all feels snap­pier. Upon my first restart, a quick check on my Macintosh HD shows 17gb more disk space avail­able before instal­la­tion began on my old 10.5.8 Leopard install, while retain­ing my old system’s cus­tom set­tings & addons–this may have some­thing to do with Snow Leopard’s new disk space cal­cu­la­tion method, but it’s always a good thing when we see more space remain­ing on our drive regard­less of the cal­cu­la­tion method.

Snow Leopard’s new Gamma set­ting (2.2, old one was 1.8) gives a slight boost in over­all con­trast across the desk­top with­out loos­ing too much shadow integrity & sat­u­ra­tion, this means that you have a closer image ren­di­tion to your Windows-using printer vendor.

Next is the Finder. Along in its list of refine­ments are the big rewrit­ing of the Finder, it’s now a fullyCocoa based App like the rest of Apple’s default. Changes are almost invis­i­ble out­side, Apple made sure of that, but it’s a totally dif­fer­ent story under the skin.

Spaces

Without the lux­ury of a sec­ond, or third dis­play, I relied heav­ily on Spaces’ to man­age my work­space. Mail & Safari on Space 1, Writing & Blogging App on Space 2, Imaging Apps on Space 3, Windows Visualization on Space 4, etc. Yet, it often breaks rather than improv­ing my over­all work­flow, this writeup by John Gruber will explain how frus­trat­ing Spaces can become. This prob­lem, how­ever, may not be Apple’s after all, being the appli­ca­tion that expe­ri­ences dif­fi­cul­ties deal­ing with Spaces are those behe­moth com­ing from Redmond & San Jose, California., the over­all behav­ior of Spaces is largely improved in Snow Leopard, not only it’s snap­pier, but ani­ma­tions & move­ments appear more liq­uid and solid than before.

What about Graphics?

Snow Leopard sports an inte­grated RAW image for­mat sup­port for major cam­era man­u­fac­tur­ers, not only that I need not to install Nikon View for the Mac to rec­og­nized Nikon’s NEF for­mat, ren­der­ing speed has been vastly improved. Opening a full-size D700 RAW file in Preview takes less than a sec­ond (it usu­ally takes about 3–4 sec­onds pre­vi­ously with my leopard):

Snow Leopard sup­ports RAW image files from over a hun­dred dig­i­tal cam­era mod­els from most major man­u­fac­tur­ers, includ­ing Canon and Nikon. By using the GPU-accelerated pixel pro­cess­ing capa­bil­i­ties of Core Image, Snow Leopard lets you quickly view your RAW images in the Finder, Quick Look, and Preview with­out plug-ins or addi­tional software.

A quick test with RAW files from Canon, Ricoh & other man­u­fac­turer showed con­sis­tent results, bril­liant pre­views with accu­rate color ren­der­ing are dis­played with a blaz­ing speed; com­bined with the new Cocoa-based Finder, icons can now dis­played up to 512 pix­els, which means that you no longer need to rely heav­ily on image man­age­ment app for edit­ing your pho­tographs, just adjust the icon size from the new icon size slider on the bottom-right edge of a Finder’s win­dow and you’re Finder is your new light-table!

Another small improve­ments in Finder, is the abil­ity to ‘Put Back’ deleted files right where it belongs, I have prob­lems in the past in delet­ing dupli­cated backup files/folders and not being able to restore it back to its orig­i­nal par­ent folder, this solves that par­tic­u­lar annoyance.

The new Quicktime X is also an awe­some upgrade, it no longer requires reg­is­tra­tion to unlock some of the Pro fea­tures, and the HUD styled UI is amaz­ingly clean & fun to inter­act with.

3^rd party App Compatibility

As the list sug­gested, major apps are com­pat­i­ble with Snow Leopard, I have yet to record any crash/problems with Apple Aperture, Adobe CS4, Expression Media, iLife, TechTool Pro 5, etc. Those of you who rely on some 3^rd party add-ons/plug-ins might have to wait for a bit before everything’s back to normal.

Due to the 64-bit nature of most Apple’s built-in Apps, none of the exist­ing plug-ins seem to work in Snow Leopard (e.g. Safari’s GreaseKit, WideMail, includ­ing those of SIMBL/InputManager based plugins).

By the end of the day, this is an upgrade like no oth­ers, Snow Leopard has shown that reli­a­bil­ity, speed & refine­ments are the most impor­tant & rel­e­vant upgrades a tech­nol­ogy con­sumer can ever get, fea­tures are nice, but only as good as how well & easy it works for the users, this could spur a dif­fer­ent trend in future devel­op­ments where other indus­try could also learn a thing or two, includ­ing how to put a price tag on technology.

As a fin­ish­ing touch, Snow Leopard now has the capa­bil­ity to set time zone auto­mat­i­cally based on your loca­tion (good news for trav­el­ing pho­tog­ra­phers) & let appli­ca­tion min­i­mize to the orig­i­nal icon dock, instead of next to the trash can (good news for power users), these are one of those tiny fea­tures that makes up big time.

update:

Nikon USA just issued a state­ment urg­ing users of Nikon’s pro­pri­etary imag­ing soft­ware not to upgrade:

Initial test­ing of Nikon soft­ware with Apple’s new “Snow Leopard” Mac OS 10.6 indi­cates that there are incom­pat­i­bil­i­ties with Nikon Capture NX 2, Nikon View NX and Nikon Scan, users of these appli­ca­tions should not upgrade their OS at this time. When more com­pat­i­bil­ity infor­ma­tion is avail­able it will be posted on the Nikon web site.

Head over to Ars for an exten­sive review about Snow Leopard.

P.S. Head-2-Head Blog has a related piece, go check it out.