I’ve been reading about Snow Leopard the last few days and everything seems quite similar to Leopard, very little has changed that you can see. What follows are the few things I have noticed so far.
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File sizes, hard drive sizes, SD Card sizes… Everything other than RAM itself is now defined in base 10 instead of base 2. So where before 1 Kilobyte was 1,024 bytes, in Snow Leopard 1 Kilobyte is 1,000 bytes. And this continues up the chain:
- 1MB is 1,000,000 bytes (0.95MiB) instead of 1,048,576
- 1GB is 1,000,000,000 bytes (0.93GiB) instead of 1,073,741,824
- 1TB is 1,000,000,000,000 bytes (0.91TiB) instead of 1,099,511,627,776
All of which means that now, when a hard drive says it’s “250GB”, it actually appears that way in the Finder and in Disk Utility, where before it used to be reported as ~232GB.
It’s strange and unusual but I’ll get used to it. The main thing to remember is that files other people give you will probably be “bigger” than they say, and files you give other people will probably be “smaller” than you say.
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Movie file icons now have a Play button in the middle (if you have “Show icon preview” ticked in the Finder’s “View Options”). You can watch things straight in the icon itself, though the glossy swoosh might distract you. Said icons can now be scaled up to 512x512px.
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When you rearrange icons using the “Arrange By” menu, they move into place with a smooth animation rather than instantly.
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When you rearrange a window’s icons, rather than the “Arrange By” option staying as it was, it now changes to “None” and the window no longer uses your default settings if it did before.
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The new Quicktime Player has far fewer options than version 7. There are no “A/V Controls” anymore, so the image and sound can’t be adjusted, nor is there the “Movie Properties” window, which allowed for individual track modification.
The controls appear in front of the video you want to watch, rather than below it, get in the way a lot and don’t fade away fast enough.
The Chapters implementation is even more distracting; where before you could choose a chapter from a pull-down menu, you now have to enter a special mode, which pauses the video.
Version 7 is included as an optional install on the Snow Leopard disc, is installed by default if you have QuickTime Pro already installed in Leopard, else you have to tick the box yourself.
And that’s about it. My MacBook is a 32-bit machine, so I won’t get any 64-bit related speed-ups, and my graphics card is too weak for OpenCL or H.264 hardware acceleration. It looks and feels just like Leopard, apart from the items mentioned above.