I’ve used Snow Leopard for almost 10 days now. Here are my impressions of the new, cooler cat.
Faster
The first and most important part for me is that my system is now much faster. The finder has gone from avarage to instant fast, starting up from sleep mode is instant, and booting is faster. Other built in software is also slightly faster, but not very noticeable as they were faster already.
iTunes 9 is also faster, but I think that is more because of the new iTunes, not Snow Leopard. I expect third party software to take more advantage of Snow Leopard to speed up in the future also. All in all, the system feels snappier and more effective to work with. Safari seems much faster too, but I use Firefox as my default browser so I don’t notice that on a daily basis.
Smaller
Snow Leopard gave me about 10GB hard drive space back. It helps a lot with my rather small 120GB HDD. The memory footprint is also slightly smaller, it seems.
Polished
If you had some tiny issues with some of Leopard’s features, chances are they have been fixed with Snow Leopard. You can now scroll in the stacks, you can trigger Exposé from the dock, and many features have new animations, showing exactly where files are going, for example. When you try to eject a disk, Snow Leopard tells you which programs use it if you can’t eject it. All of these little things make the experience just a bit more polished and pleasant.
Exchange support
If the IT administration of the Norwegian courts would bother to enable external Exchange connections and upgrade to Exchange 2007, I bet this would be feature #1 for me. They haven’t, so I haven’t tried this feature yet. But if it works as announced, and I bet it does, this is a great feature for anyone using Exchange for their mail and calendar. No more Entourage.
QuickTime X
I haven’t tried this much, but it seems like an important upgrade to QuickTime, bringing the aging media player up to date. They have rebuilt the framework the player is built on, giving it hardware acceleration support and more. The interface is also slicker, and contains built in video trimming and sharing.
Conclusion
All in all this is a great upgrade. They didn’t try to fix things that wasn’t broken, they just polished them. The system feels pretty much the same, except that almost all those little annoyances are gone. For $29 this is a no brainer.
I haven’t experienced any issues with this release, and all my programs still work. Still Apple seems determined to make this release as good as possible, already having released 10.6.1 with fixes to some of the specific issues some people have reported.
Pros:
- A highly polished OS for $29
- Many small annoyances fixed
- Exchange support
- Smaller
- QuickTime X, now with previous pro features for free
- Faster
Cons:
- Few entirely new features
Highly recommended!
Background story
Once upon a time, I was an avid gamer. I played many of the biggest titles in the late 90′s and early 00′s. One of the games which I still remember is Max Payne. It was the first FPS that had it all: A great, exciting story, great music, convincing graphics and cool slow motion features.
I still believe that Max Payne is one of the best First Person Shooters of all time. And that is why I finally decided to buy and watch Max Payne on DVD. And I regret it. Really really much. I read reviews ranging from 1/6 to 5/6, and believed that maybe only those who played the game really understood the movie. I was wrong.
What’s wrong?
First, the movie plot is altered to the unrecognizable. I could recognize some of the scenes, but not many. Also, they mixed the story of Max Payne and Max Payne 2, and I didn’t even play the sequel! Thank you for the spoiler (I was seriously planing to play it some time, but I am not so sure anymore).
Already you probably understand why I didn’t like the movie. But there was more. The acting was alright, but the weird CGI effects? They could at least have given them the same look and feel as the game.
And the worst is yet to come: They didn’t use the game’s musical theme! Max Payne has one of, if not the, best musical theme of any computer game. It is right up there with Halo and the Battlefield series. And not just the main theme (below) either, but many of the background themes of the game.
Conclusion
If you haven’t watched this movie yet, don’t. If you have, my condolences.
Black Clouds & Silver Linings
A short song-by-song review:
A Nightmare To Remember is a heavy metal inspired song, but with some really cool riffs and breaks.
A Rite Of Passage is more like DT-pop, a song for newcomers to the band.
Wither is the album’s ballad, probably my favorite DT ballad so far.
The Shattered Fortress is the last song in the Twelve-step Suite, a collection of DT songs that deals with drummer Mike Portnoy’s fight with alcoholism. It contains many parts from the three other songs in the suite, and is probably even better for DT fans than newcomers as they should know the riffs and the story already.
They even repeat and tweak some of the lyrics from the previous song, without ruining this song’s unique feel.
The Best Of Times is a song Mike Portnoy wrote about his father, who died of cancer. The intro is mellow, but it soon picks up the pace and gives you some of the most catchy DT riffs ever. The song is about the good memories they had, and has a quite happy tune.
The Count Of Tuscany is based on a true story that guitarist John Petrucci experienced at Tuscany.
Summary
All in all this is yet another progressive masterpiece by Dream Theater. Only six songs you ask? Yes, but the playtime is still over 75 minutes. The songs vary in length from 5:25 (Wither) to 19:16 (The Count Of Tuscany).
This is not your average radio-music, this music is enjoyed best if you sit down and listen to it, maybe day dreaming and drinking your favorite drink (be it coke or whiskey).
I recommend the 3-CD Deluxe Edition, as it also includes a disk with 6 cover songs, and a disc with the whole album as instrumentals. Great if you want to listen to the instrumental genius of the band, or maybe try to learn some of the songs yourself.
