On Friday the Apple OS X Snow Leopard DVD turned up and I didn’t waste anytime installing the upgrade. This was the first OS X upgrade I’ve done since switching to a Mac from Windows and I was pleased with how quick and simple the process was. In total the process took less than 45 minutes. The end result is a faster system and as a bonus the upgrade returns disk space. There isn’t much to see in terms of a change to the GUI in this release with just one very big exception which I haven’t really seen discussed in detail elsewhere on the web. I may be alone in thinking this but the new dock which now incorporates the Exposé function.
I always found that on Windows I’d end up with a very cluttered taskbar as I opened lots of documents. On Leopard it could be difficult to find the exact document you were looking for when you’d opened several. This all changes in Snow Leopard; now you just press and hold down the application icon in the dock and Exposé then shows all the open windows for the application. This is fantastically easy to use and nothing short of brilliant. I could imagine this working really well on a Mac Tablet (iPad) touch screen device!
The overall performance has improved in the applications I use most, those being Safari, Photoshop CS4 and Dreamweaver CS4.
For people using their Mac in companies who use Microsoft Exchange the built in support in the new OSX for Exchange will be well received. Personally this doesn’t affect me as we use Google to host our e-mail and we’ve always been very pleased with that.
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