Snow Leopard

As everyone already knows – the new MacOS 10.6 was shipped last Friday and I got my official copy around noon.  The FedEx guy told me that he usually didn’t work on Fridays but that they had to call in all the troops in order to fulfill all of the orders they had.  I’m pretty sure this didn’t happen when Vista came out. Unfortunately, I didn’t have time to install it on my Macbook Pro until this weekend but it was worth the 24 hour wait.

I’m a business user so my main excitement for Snow Leopard was the native ActiveSync support for Mail, iCal, and Address Book so that we can hook into our company’s Exchange 2007 server.  I have been using Microsoft’s Entourage (as part of Office 2008 for Mac) for the past year and was hoping that things were going to be better as – yes I said it – I actually have been missing Outlook since I switched from a PC. I was also wondering if anything was going to run faster since this OS was rewritten under the hood.

The Upgrade
So I upgraded my laptop on Saturday morning. OK – this was really easy. One DVD, one button push and about 45 minutes later, my Leopard operating system had been upgraded to Snow Leopard. I logged in and was immediately blasted by the new Welcome video – this is something I could have done without early on a Saturday morning. I opened up Finder and yes, there it was, I had reclaimed about 7 Gigabytes of disk space. Now that’s cool.

Performance & Compatability
Maybe it’s me wishing it but the operating system seems to run a little more quickly. All of the native 64 bit apps are good but even my non 64-bit apps seem to open faster (i.e. Word, Excel, Dreamweaver). Despite the heavy debate to the contrary, Adobe’s Creative Suite CS3 seems to run just fine. We also don’t have any reports so far of issues with our Dreamweaver extensions and our engineering team is busy verifying everything. The biggest performance gain I’ve noticed is using the Finder to connect to remote network devices such as my (gasp) Vista desktop machine. Connecting is much faster, and it loads the folders without a noticeable lag. Copying files goes much quicker and it reconnects after my laptop wakes up from sleeping. All great things since I often transfer files between my laptop and desktop.

Mail, iCal, Address Book versus Entourage
As I said before, this is the new set of features that interests me the most. To my delight, it looks like I’ll be shelving Entourage (hopefully for good).  Overall, Mail, iCal & Address Book are a better solution than Entourage but still not as good as Outlook (yeah, I said it). That being said, the solution is robust enough to support most casual and business users. If you’re a super duper business user like some folks I know, then I guess you’ll still have to run XP in a Parallels session and get your email fix that way.  Here are a list of things that I like and don’t like (remember, these are only the features that are important to me)

Pros:

• Integrates with tasks and notes on your Exchange server
• Message threading (way cool)
• It’s faster than Entourage (seriously, that was a no brainer)
• You can use attachments with event invitations (must have for me)
• Shared calendars are color coded and open in the same view
• You can add your own personal mail accounts and calendars into the same app

Cons:

• You can’t add your own personal note when you Accept/Deny event invitations (huge issue for me)
• No out of office support
• No rules support (Entourage didnt’ support this either)
• No support for proposing a new meeting time
• It’s not truly push email – the fastest  you can sync is “Every Minute”

When I put it all together, I’m pretty happy with what Apple has done – especially for a $29 upgrade price. I would have to think that they’re going to keep upgrading Mail (and other apps) for us business users and who knows, maybe one day in the not to distant future we won’t have to compare Mail to Entourage/Outlook.

Tags: mac os, snow leopard
Categories: Tech