Review: Apple Snow Leopard Improves Productivity

Incredible shrinking OS

During tests, the amount of free disk space increased on every system I upgraded to Snow Leopard. This comes largely from the fact that Snow Leopard does not install every printer driver, but instead installs only drivers for recently used printers and those found nearby on the network. Apple has also shed support for PowerPC hardware, further reducing the disk footprint.

In any case, I saw an increase of between 7GB and 12GB of disk space as a result of installing Snow Leopard.

Installing and using printers found after installation requires Internet access so that Snow Leopard can access the Apple support site to get the needed drivers. IT managers also can pre-install print drivers for mobile users.

Snow Leopard also shrinks installation time (to 39 minutes on the MacBook and 64 minutes on the Mac mini), and requires user intervention only in the first 5 minutes. Startup and shutdown are also a little more snappy, although they were pretty fast on my test systems with the older version of the OS.

Exchange Support – within limits

Snow Leopard has built-in support for Microsoft Exchange Server 2007, but, as I said earlier, only for SP1 Rollup 4. Still, the support is good news for IT managers who need to support Macs in a Microsoft messaging environment.

Working with a test email server maintained at managed email provider Rackspace, I was able to set up and use the built-in Exchange support to enable the Snow Leopard Mail client to access my Exchange account—all in less than three minutes. I could then process all of my email, plus contacts and calendar data (including meeting invitations) through the Mail client. This is a big step toward a unified mail and calendaring application that would bridge the choppy waters that have separated the Mac client from Exchange e-mail services. Exchange is supported in on-premise and hosted environments.

While many of Snow Leopard’s improvements are under the covers, some will be more noticeable to end users.

Expose is now integrated into the Dock, providing quick and convenient access to application windows. I could click and hold an application icon to unshuffle the open windows on the desktop, leaving only the window of the application that was of immediate interest to me.

A related convenience improvement can be seen in the improved Finder. I used the live file preview to thumb through the pages of PDF and Word documents and to preview QuickTime movies while remaining in the Finder icon view.

These improvements are real productivity enhancements and are intuitive enough for current Mac users to avoid much, if any, additional training on the part of IT.

The Stacks feature, which enables users to place frequently accessed files or applications in a special folder in the Dock, can now be viewed as a grid. I was able to view large numbers of files using the grid that would have been nearly impossible to manage in the fan view available in Leopard (although the Fan view is still available).

There is also a return path icon in the navigation screen that made it easy to trace my path back to the folder I had originally opened.

Other enhancements include the new QuickTime X media player, as well as improvements to iChat so that it uses fewer resources, to Spotlight so that results can now be customised and to Preview so that text can be correctly selected in a column.

Conclusion

End users may not immediately see the improvements in Mac OS X, but they will quickly notice an increase in productivity – all without significant IT impact. Snow Leopard is an evolutionary step that speeds up common tasks and tightens the fit and finish of the now entirely 64-bit based operating system. The upgrade also adds built-in support for Microsoft Exchange Server, but it’s limited to Service Pack 1 Rollup 4.

Technical Director Cameron Sturdevant can be reached at csturdevant@eweek.com.