Dustin’s Blog

There is a bit of buzz on the internet right now about Apple’s announcement of OS X Snow Leopard which is to replace Leopard sometime next year. Word on the street is that it won’t be luring people in with hundreds of new features but Apple is instead concentrating on stability of the OS. This is amazing to me for a couple of reasons. One, Apple seems to be admitting that it is out of ideas! Two, when is the last time you’ve heard of a big software company just going back and streamlining their OS? This is fantastic because as I wrote before, I’m liking Leopard more now than I did when it was initially released but compared to Tiger it’s just not as polished. Boot times for instance could be improved as Leopard takes nearly 50% to twice as long to boot compared to Tiger.

Along with the Snow Leopard client comes Snow Leopard Server and here is my prediction. Apple hasn’t told us everything (as usual) and based on the direction Apple is taking the iPhone, I believe Snow Leopard is going to be Apples biggest attack on the business/enterprise market yet. They have already admitted that ZFS will be included in Snow Leopard and they are talking about better Exchange support. Virtualization is a huge topic lately and I won’t be the least bit surprised to hear Apple announce virtualization support in Snow Leopard Server and maybe even in the client version. My guess is for the support of any OS including OS X itself..

What are your thoughts? Leave them in the comments area!

Well by now it’s no secret to any of my friends that I’ve become a bit of an Apple fan but I’m not so much a fan that I can’t criticize what they do. I’m not that rabid yet.

So it was with trepidation that I gave Leopard a try, twice no less, before finally making the switch to it permanently. I wanted to be sure the kinks were worked out and that it would work as well as Tiger did. I had read about and had my own issues with Leopard on my mini including poor animations, apps failing to start and just a general clumsiness to it that just was not what OS X should be like. While I’m not convinced it is quite there yet, the latest update has brought it a long ways in my mind.

The latest update, 10.5.3, seems to fix a lot of the big issues I was running into with Leopard. The biggest issue was actually with some iLife apps like iMovie. Either through luck or an actual fix iMovie now runs on Leopard. In previous versions I couldn’t get iMovie to open fully and when it did working with video was problematic and importing video was terrible. While I have yet to import video since installing 10.5.3 I’m fairly confident it’ll work much better than it has in the past based on how well it runs otherwise.