Submitted by Ars Technica’s John Siracusa has published his in-depth review of Mac OS X Snow Leopard. As always, this is the only review you really need to read. Great stuff, as usual – even if you don’t care about or don’t use Mac OS X. He concludes: “Snow Leopard is a unique and beautiful release, unlike any that have come before it in both scope and intention. At some point, Mac OS X will surely need to get back on the bullet-point-features bandwagon. But for now, I’m content with Snow Leopard. It’s the Mac OS X I know and love, but with more of the things that make it weak and strange engineered away.”
Personally, I found this review rather interesting:
http://www.reghardware.co.uk/2009/08/25/preview_os_apple_snow_leopa…
The Ars review is a review. What you linked there looks like cliff notes in comparison…
Granted, a 23 page review is not everyone’s cup of tea, but if you are only going to read one review then John’s would be the one you would get the most out of.
If you depend on MacPorts you should probably wait a few weeks to install Snow Leopard. Quite a few packages don’t install properly. I did indeed clean up in /opt as suggested in their uninstall howto, and I did indeed install Xcode for Snow Leopard but still.
If you compile this stuff using g++ in Snow Leopard:
Test.cpp
——–
#include <stdio.h>
int main()
{
printf(“Width: %d\n”, sizeof(char*));
return 0;
}
do you get “8” instead of “4”??
If that’s the case, all your new applications will be compiled using 64-bit g++ by default.
Edited 2009-09-01 15:42 UTC
$ cat test.c
int main() {}
$ gcc -o test test.c
$ file test
test: Mach-O 64-bit executable x86_64
$ gcc -arch i386 -o test test.c
$ file test
test: Mach-O executable i386
$ gcc -arch i386 -arch x86_64 -o test test.c
$ file test
test: Mach-O universal binary with 2 architectures
test (for architecture i386): Mach-O executable i386
test (for architecture x86_64): Mach-O 64-bit executable x86_64
wow! thank you! I could not have had a better answer
Now that Ars came back from being slashdotted (no doubt because of this article) – this was truly a great read. And indeed I couldn’t care less about “Snow Leopard” or Apple stuff in general, but this has lots of meat for technologists in general.
Amen. John Siracusa is just about the only journalist I trust when it comes to detailed analysis of Apple products – he seems to be one of the few who doesn’t err to the extremes of fanboyism or anti-fanboyism.
Yup. Lots of respect for the guy, I can’t even stand in his shadow when it comes to reviews. I learn a lot from reading his work.
+1 for you
I read John’s 10.5 leopard review and was very impressed.
This is the exact heavy weight review I am expecting. Compared to other reviews floating around on the net these days, this one tells you more background knowledge and is in a very objective way…
I really enjoy it…
Edited 2009-09-02 04:38 UTC
Wow he must have been writing around the clock all weekend to get such a thorough review of this length out in this little time!
I love John’s analogy to BeOS’ multithreading to explain the workings of Grand Central Dispatch. That was totally written for me in explaining what GCD is & is not compared to a concept very familiar to me. Now I finally feel like I have a sufficient grasp of the concept.
He had Snow Leopard for more than a couple of days… Developers got the final build before the release (for the 1st time since I can remember). Not much, but a few days before. He also mentions that he’s been using it since a couple of weeks (i don’t remember exactly as I’ve read the review the day before yesterday)
I figured as much 😉 But still he deserves a great deal of respect for writing nothing short of a novel. Haven’t come across any spelling errors (so he probably needed to get the review out to a very good editor at least one day before the publication, too).
Also GCD is Global Cool Down in massively online multi player games
Reminds me of the BeOS programming book I have lying around here somewhere – programmers being warned where some threads are good but if you go over board with their creation it can bog down the system. Its going to be interesting to see whether Apple will start to push GCD to greater use in their applications – hopefully resulting in ‘teh snappier’ Safari and other applications that have been bogged down due to thread happy spawning.
They got finally focused on quality, not only the new *features* … good.