Incredible.

No...wait...

I mean "great."

It's ...

...

amazing?

...

or the spanish inquisition?

That was truly unbelievable.

I can report that SLeopard for me is faster and snappier than Leopard in all respects, including start up time. It's a real difference.

Yabor, I installed Snow Leopard a few weeks ago on my Intel Mac that I bought back in March. You are right. It is an improvement over Leopard. It is a bit smaller and faster. I suppose by now you've figured out how you got an apparent 17 GB reduction in system size.

Only about 2 GB is due to a reduction in the size of the system itself, much of that because of the removal of PowerPC code. About 6 GB is due to fact that the installer no longer by default installs every damn print driver for every damn printer made. I'm guessing the remaining 9 GB you saw isn't a reduction at all. It probably has to do with how Snow Leopard is reporting disk and file sizes.

Snow Leopard is supposed to be a no new features upgrade to the under the hood system, but there are still small interface improvements throughout. One of more significant ones that is barely mentioned anywhere is that Apple has decided to stop reporting file and disk sizes in that crappy base 2 format that computer manufacturers have been using since the beginning of time and instead report in base 10, you know the numbering system that we use every day. Hard disk manufacturers have always used base 10 where 1K always equaled 1000 rather than base 2 where 1K equals 1024. Under Snow Leopard my 500 GB hard disks now read 500 GB as they should instead of 465 GB. Actually they read 500.11 GB because hard disks are usually a bit bigger than stated probably to leave room for formatting. I like this a lot more. I've always thought 1000 (1K) should equal 1000. It does equal 1000! It doesn't equal 1024. Calling 1024 "1K" doesn't make it so. The only reason 1024 became known as 1K is because 1000 isn't a power of 2. 1024 is 2 raised to the 10th, as close as you can come to 1000 using powers of 2, but who cares? It is not 1000. It should have never have been called 1K. Besides, we are human beings. We think and calculate in base 10. Excel and other number crunching programs never forced us to use a base 2 numbering system just because they run on a computer. If someone finds they need to convert to base 2 presumedly they are smart enough to do it on their own and leave the rest of us out of it.

Right now reporting in base 10 has a minor downside because other than disk manufacturers Snow Leopard is the only system doing it so if you download a file from some other system that report file sizes, say the Internet or some other computer or device, that system will report a file as being, for example, 350 MB (base 2) and when it lands on the your system the Mac will report it as 367 MB (base 10) Also, presently other programs on the Mac that report file and disk sizes, like Toast, also still report in base 2 until they are updated. No matter, it is still a real convenience to know what size a file and disk is in a numbering system we actually think in and in an operating system where 1K means 1K. This should have been done long, long ago.

I'm very glad to hear from you, HH. I was wondering how you were doing. Hope you and your loved ones are well. Petra sends her love.

I hadn't figured out where that 17 GB came from, but I realized that number couldn't be right.

My Intel Mac has never given me trouble. In a few weeks' time we're going to install Windows 7 on it, via Bootcamp.

Did you buy that Canon DSLR?

Yabor, Everything is quite well with me and I send love right back at the cute Petra. But don't tell her husband about this exchange of love sentiments. I hear he is a really rough tough guy, touchy as a snake and as dangerous as a grizzly bear.

brother HH! Great to see you back here.

I wish I could install Snow Leopard, but I don't have an intel based machine yet. I've got to get through these tough times before I can think about splurging on an Intel tower. Would love to hear more about the new OS from a user, though. Especially regarding the Finder, which I understand has been totally rewritten.

Brother Thalo, the Great, the Mighty, how the hell are you?

Glad to see you guys are still going strong on thalo.net.

It's doubtful that I can tell you any more about Snow Leopard than Yabor can. It's not likely that either one of us can really tell you what you need to know because we don't stress the system the way you do.

As for the Finder, it looks pretty much the same to me. I did notice you can sort in columns view. I don't use columns view much but I don't think you could do that in Leopard. Both Yabor and myself commented that Snow Leopard is a bit faster overall.

Double H what machine did you pick up?

We bought some new Towers for the office. They are exponentially faster than the G5 Towers we were using. No comparison with the G4 Towers we still had running.

Hope things are well with you and your family.

What camera did you finally settle on too?

Would love for you to contribute to the Camera thread.

I'm doing great brother HH! I mean happy and healthy... of course the economy still sucks, and work has been slow, my client base decimated.

You can sort columns in Leopard, but you have to do it with "View Options"... and then in the View Options window you can say arrange by "Date modified" for example.

Can you sort right in column view now, as you can in list view? That's something I've been asking for. The thing I'm most interested in, is how the Finder acts when the number of items in a folder is friggin' ginormous. In directories that are really loaded, I get extremely poor performance now, takes forever for the icon previews to load. Especially over the gigabit network.

I've also been hoping they'd redo LABELS. Oh! God, how I hate them now. It was so much better when you could just tint the icon with a color.

How about Spotlight? Does it seem to work any better? I still have issues with it not finding stuff I know is there. Again, I think it has trouble when you have a directory that's really got thousands of files in it.

Snow Leopard... I still don't use it, no special reason but lazyness to upgrade.

But now i have read that SL no longer supports contextual menu plugins (e.g. Finderpop). WTF is that? With Finderpop my user-experience finally got acceptable and pretty effective.

All this seems to do with the 32bit/64bit modes of SL, don't know exactly what that is all about.

Hmmm

quote:

Originally posted by thalo:
You can sort columns in Leopard, but you have to do it with "View Options"... and then in the View Options window you can say arrange by "Date modified" for example.

Can you sort right in column view now, as you can in list view? That's something I've been asking for.

Oh yes, that's exactly what i was thinking too. It would be so easy to do. It would be a charm to use then. Because of the lack of sorting-options at your fingertips i often use list-view instead of column-view.