Snow Leopard Reviewer's Guide

Mac OS X Snow Leopard Version 10.6 Reviewer’s Guide August 2009

Reviewer’s Guide Mac OS X Snow Leopard

Contents

Page 4

Quick Look at Snow Leopard Refinements Exchange Support New Technologies

Page 6

Dock Dock Exposé Stacks

Page 8

Finder

Page 9

Installation

Page 10

QuickTime X QuickTime Player HTTP Streaming

Page 13

Preview PDF Text Selection Import from Scanner New Annotations Toolbar Higher-Quality Image Scaling Contact Sheet View

Page 15

Safari 4 Top Sites Full History Search Smart Address and Search Fields Crash Resistant

Page 18

Universal Access VoiceOver Braille Support Web Browsing

Page 20

Exchange Support Simple Setup Mail iCal Address Book

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Reviewer’s Guide Mac OS X Snow Leopard

Page 23

New Technologies 64-Bit Computing Grand Central Dispatch OpenCL

Page 27

Performance

Page 29

Other Refinements iChat Chinese Character Input Text Substitution All-New Thesaurus Services Automatic Updates for Printers Quick, Reliable Eject More Efficient File Sharing Core Location

Page 31

Product Details

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Reviewer’s Guide Mac OS X Snow Leopard

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Quick Look at Snow Leopard

Mac OS X Snow Leopard is an even more powerful and refined version of the world’s most advanced operating system. Snow Leopard builds on the success of Leopard with hundreds of refinements, out-of-the-box support for Microsoft Exchange, and new core technologies that take advantage of the powerful hardware in every Mac. It enhances the entire Mac experience in big ways and small, making the Mac more reliable and easier to use.

Refinements From installation to shutdown, Mac OS X Snow Leopard includes hundreds of improvements that will help make your Mac faster, more responsive, and more reliable than ever. Mac OS X Snow Leopard provides key refinements in many areas, including the following: • Dock. Now integrated right in the Dock, Exposé gives you a quick and easy way to see all of the open windows of an application. In the Dock, simply click and hold an application icon: All of the open windows unshuπe on the desktop so you can quickly locate a window and move right to it. • Finder. The Finder has been completely rewritten using the modern Cocoa framework in Mac OS X, taking advantage of the new technologies in Snow Leopard—including 64-bit support and Grand Central Dispatch. The familiar Finder interface is unchanged, but you will discover the Finder is faster and more responsive. It also includes an enhanced icon view with live file previews, so you can thumb through a multipage document or even watch a QuickTime movie. • Installation. Snow Leopard makes upgrading your Mac easier than ever. The entire installation process is simpler and more streamlined, and is now up to 50 percent faster.1 Refinements make installation more reliable as well. Once installed, Snow Leopard actually frees up about 7GB of space on your computer. • QuickTime X. The next-generation media technology, QuickTime X powers the audio and video experience in Snow Leopard. It debuts a completely new QuickTime Player application with a clean, uncluttered interface as well as an easy way to record, trim, and share your media. • Preview. Preview in Snow Leopard includes a number of refinements that make it even better for viewing PDFs and image files. Preview delivers increased performance for opening PDFs and JPEGs, and brings accurate text selection to multicolumn PDFs. Sophisticated artificial intelligence algorithms infer the layout of each page to identify the columns. So now when you select text from a particular column, Preview gives you just the text you need.

Reviewer’s Guide Mac OS X Snow Leopard

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• Safari 4. The latest version of Apple’s blazing-fast web browser includes a range of great new features like Full History Search, Smart Search and Smart Address fields, and an innovative way to view your most frequented sites called Top Sites. In Snow Leopard, 64-bit technology improves JavaScript performance in Safari 4 by up to 50 percent.2 Safari 4 is also more resistant to crashes because plug-ins now run separately from the browser. If a plug-in crashes, Safari keeps running. • Universal Access. Snow Leopard advances the built-in VoiceOver technology that makes Mac OS X accessible for those who are blind or have low vision. It includes a unique way to control and navigate the Mac using the Multi-Touch trackpad. • Performance. Snow Leopard delivers a number of performance improvements across the system that speed up many of the common tasks you do on your Mac. To name a few: Installation is up to 50 percent faster than Leopard1; wake from sleep is as much as 2 times faster; shutdown is up to 1.8 times faster; initial Time Machine backups to Time Capsule are up to 80 percent faster than Leopard.2

Exchange Support Snow Leopard includes out-of-the-box support for Microsoft Exchange Server 2007 in Mail, iCal, and Address Book, so it’s easier than ever to take your Mac to work. You get the features you expect from Exchange—like email, contacts, calendar invitations, and access to the Global Address List—while also enjoying the powerful and innovative features in Mac OS X such as Spotlight for instantly searching through all of your mail, Quick Look for previewing attachments, and Data Detectors for acting on important information in an email message.

New Technologies Every new Mac ships with a new generation of hardware that includes gigabytes of RAM, 64-bit dual-core processors, and graphics processing units that are capable of enormous raw processing power. Snow Leopard includes advanced technologies that enable developers to take advantage of this incredible hardware in their applications. These technologies make Mac OS X Snow Leopard the world’s most advanced operating system and set up the Mac for future innovation. • 64-bit. Computing with 64-bit technology shatters the 32-bit memory limit by enabling applications to address a theoretical 16 billion gigabytes of memory. All major applications in Snow Leopard have been written in 64-bit so they can address all of that memory as well as perform faster.3 Snow Leopard makes the transition to 64-bit simple, with one version of the operating system that runs both 64-bit and 32-bit applications. • Grand Central Dispatch. The performance in today’s processors is being driven by more cores, not faster clock speeds. Grand Central Dispatch (GCD) is a revolutionary approach to multicore computing. Woven throughout the fabric of Snow Leopard, GCD combines an easy-to-use programming model with highly efficient system services to radically simplify the code needed to optimize the multiple processors. • OpenCL. The performance of graphics processing units (GPUs) has grown exponentially, with the most powerful GPUs capable of more than 1 trillion operations per second (1 teraflop). OpenCL in Snow Leopard takes the power of the GPU beyond graphics, making it available for general-purpose computing. OpenCL is an open standard supported by the biggest names in the industry, including AMD, NVIDIA, and Intel.

Reviewer’s Guide Mac OS X Snow Leopard

Dock

The Dock provides users with an easy way to quickly access the applications, folders, and files they use most from a convenient location at the bottom of the screen. Snow Leopard includes a number of refinements that make the Dock even better, including Dock Exposé so you can instantly view the open windows of an application as well as conveniently scroll through and navigate folders in stacks.

Dock Exposé Exposé has a whole new look in Snow Leopard. Open windows are now displayed in an organized grid, making it even easier to find the one you are looking for. Using the tab key, you can flip through all running applications to preview the open windows. Windows in Exposé are spring-loaded, so you can drag and drop items between windows. For example, if you drag a document from the Finder onto the Mail icon, Exposé instantly activates, showing you all of your Mail windows so you can add the document as an attachment. Easily reorganize your windows You can reorganize the windows using keyboard shortcuts: Press Command-1 to arrange the windows alphabetically; press Command-2 to arrange by application.

Exposé is more convenient than ever in Snow Leopard. Click and hold an application icon in the Dock: All of the application’s open windows instantly unshuπe on the desktop, making it easy to find the window you are looking for.

To select a window, simply click on it. To get a full-size preview of a window in Exposé, hover over the window, click the Space bar, and the window scales up so you can view its contents full size.

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Reviewer’s Guide Mac OS X Snow Leopard

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Stacks Stacks are now scrollable in grid view, so you can easily view all items in the stack. In Snow Leopard, you navigate folders in a stack to see all of the files inside. And you can easily return to previous folders by clicking the return path icon in the upper-left corner of the stack. Folder navigation arrow

Scroll bar

Reviewer’s Guide Mac OS X Snow Leopard

Finder

The Finder has been completely rewritten using the modern Cocoa framework, taking advantage of the technologies in Snow Leopard, including 64-bit computing and Grand Central Dispatch. The result is a more responsive Finder from top to bottom that delivers snappier performance while maintaining the same easy-to-use interface that users have grown accustomed to. The Finder improvements in Snow Leopard make browsing and finding files even easier. A more responsive Finder PDF icon refresh is up to 80 percent faster than with Leopard, and JPEG icon refresh is up to 40 percent faster.2

With the enhanced icon view that provides live file previews in the Finder, you can flip through a multipage PDF, play a QuickTime movie, and even preview Microsoft PowerPoint documents without opening an application.

To preview a file, hover over the icon and the controls will fade in, allowing you to play a QuickTime movie or flip through a multipage document.

Use the slider to adjust the size of the icons to see the files more clearly. Snow Leopard lets you increase the size up to 512 by 512 pixels, four times the resolution in Leopard.

Change the default behavior of Spotlight to search the currently selected folder or your most recent search location. Using the Action menu, you can also sort your search results by name, date modified, date created, size, kind, and label.

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Reviewer’s Guide Mac OS X Snow Leopard

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Installation

Snow Leopard makes upgrading your Mac even easier. The entire process is simpler and more streamlined, and is up to 50 percent faster than for Leopard.1 The redesigned Snow Leopard installer has a single, optimized process that delivers a comprehensive and reliable installation. And, as with other versions of Mac OS X, the upgrade to Snow Leopard leaves your data and applications in place. You don’t need to erase your disk drive first. In addition to being easier and faster, the installer is more reliable. During installation, Snow Leopard checks your applications for compatibility, and sets aside any incompatible applications that are known to create instability in Snow Leopard. The installer also has a safe redo, so if your installation is interrupted by something like a power outage, it will resume once your power is restored, without losing any data. When you have completed the Snow Leopard upgrade, you will notice that about 7GB of space has been freed up on your Mac. That’s because Snow Leopard takes up less than half the space of Leopard, giving you room, for example, to add about 1,500 more songs or a few thousand more digital photos.4

Reviewer’s Guide Mac OS X Snow Leopard

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QuickTime X

Snow Leopard introduces QuickTime X, a major leap forward that advances modern media and Internet standards. Since 1991, QuickTime has stood at the forefront of video, delivering the first software-based video on a computer, followed by Internet video streaming. QuickTime X marks another major milestone for this incredible technology by rebuilding it on top of the core technologies in Mac OS X Snow Leopard—such as Core Audio, Core Video, and Core Animation—to deliver greater efficiency and higher quality. QuickTime X also includes a brand-new QuickTime Player application that delivers a clean interface for playing back movies and an easy way to record, trim, and share your media.

QuickTime Player QuickTime X debuts a new version of QuickTime Player with a redesigned interface that offers a clean, uncluttered movie-viewing experience.

QuickTime Player sports a completely redesigned interface that leverages the power of Core Animation technology to provide sleek, translucent controls that fade from view when they are not needed. Move your mouse, and they come right back.

Click the Share button to easily convert your movie for use on iPod, iPhone, or Apple TV, using the optimal settings for each destination. You can also upload your movie directly to MobileMe5 or YouTube.

Click the arrow to take your movie full screen. When in full screen, you can toggle between viewing modes, for zooming in the content to fill the screen or watching in widescreen mode.

Reviewer’s Guide Mac OS X Snow Leopard

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Quick trimming To trim your media to the ideal length, QuickTime Player displays frame-based thumbnails to help you make the perfect edit.

Greater color accuracy QuickTime X in Snow Leopard takes advantage of the ColorSync technology in Mac OS X to ensure color fidelity across the various devices where your media will be viewed.

QuickTime Player makes it a snap to trim your video to the ideal length by removing an unwanted portion from the beginning or end. Using the frame-based thumbnails, drag the slider to the desired frames for the beginning and end of your video.

Click the Trim button to remove the unwanted portions at the beginning and end.

Click the Play button to preview the new clip.

Video and screen capture With a single click, QuickTime Player can now capture audio or video using the built-in camera and microphone in your Mac to make a podcast or send a short video to a friend. You can also catch the action taking place on your screen with screen recording. Start recording and QuickTime Player captures the activity on your screen and creates a movie file. It’s perfect when you want to teach your friends how to do something on the Mac.

Reviewer’s Guide Mac OS X Snow Leopard

HTTP Streaming QuickTime X also introduces a new way to deliver live video over the Internet using standard HTTP protocols. To date, live video has been broadcast over the web using special streaming servers with special protocols. Now, QuickTime X delivers a breakthrough in media delivery by streaming live audio and video from any standard web server. Because the same infrastructure that powers the web is used, you don’t have to worry about firewalls or wireless router settings. Plus HTTP live streaming is designed with mobility in mind, so it can dynamically adjust video quality to match the speed of the network, ensuring an uninterrupted playback experience whether you are watching on a computer or iPhone or iPod touch.

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Reviewer’s Guide Mac OS X Snow Leopard

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Preview

Improved performance With Snow Leopard, opening a JPEG is up to 2.3 times faster than with Leopard, and opening a PDF is up to 1.4 times faster.2

The Preview application in Mac OS X allows you to quickly and easily view and work with PDF and image files without the need for any additional software. Preview in Snow Leopard delivers a number of refinements, including performance improvements for opening PDF and JPEG files as well as more accurate text selection in PDFs. By applying sophisticated artificial intelligence algorithms, Preview infers the layout of each page to identify the columns. So now when you select text from a particular column, you’ll get just the text you need.

PDF Text Selection With Leopard, when you use a PDF viewer such as Preview, selecting text from a PDF document that contains more than one column can be a challenge. Sometimes, instead of highlighting just the text in a specific column, the cursor selects all of the text across the page, giving you a jumble of words from each column.

Snow Leopard solves this problem by applying sophisticated artificial intelligence algorithms that analyze the layout of the PDF in real time to identify the contents of each column. So when you select text that falls in a single column, only the text you want is highlighted. Built into the core of Mac OS X, this feature is available almost anywhere you view PDFs, including Preview and Safari.

Reviewer’s Guide Mac OS X Snow Leopard

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Import from Scanner Choose Import from Scanner in the File menu and your images will be available in Preview. With Snow Leopard, you can now scan, view, and correct your files and images in Preview. The scanning interface even detects the placement of images or documents on the scanner to automate the selection of regions to scan.

New Annotations Toolbar Get easy access to all of the annotation tools in Preview, including shapes, comments, links, strikethrough, and highlighting, as well as two new annotation types: text and arrows.

Higher-Quality Image Scaling The Adjust Image Size command in Preview uses the advanced Lanczos interpolation algorithm to provide higher-quality scaling with fewer blurry artifacts compared with traditional interpolation algorithms.

Contact Sheet View View multiple images or pages of a PDF as a contact sheet so you can see them at the same time in a thumbnail view.

Reviewer’s Guide Mac OS X Snow Leopard

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Safari 4

UP TO

50% FASTER

64-bit technology in Snow Leopard improves JavaScript performance in Safari 4 by up to 50 percent.2

Snow Leopard includes Safari 4, the latest version of Apple’s web browser. With this version, Safari strengthens its industry leadership: Its Nitro JavaScript engine lets you enjoy blazingly faster browsing, even on the most demanding Web 2.0 sites. In addition to the faster speed, Safari 4 includes a host of new features such as Full History Search, Smart Search and Smart Address fields, and Top Sites—an innovative way to quickly view the sites you visit most frequently.

Top Sites Thanks to Top Sites, you can enjoy a stunning, at-a-glance preview of your favorite websites that makes it easy to jump to a site with a single click. When you click a website thumbnail, Safari expands the site full page so you can immediately start browsing. As you browse, Safari automatically recognizes your favorite websites based on how often and how recently you have visited them. As you explore the web and discover new sites, Safari automatically adjusts your Top Sites previews to match your evolving interests.

Top Sites button. Just click the Top Sites button in your Bookmarks bar to get back to Top Sites, no matter where you are.

Top Sites. A wall of graphical previews makes it easy to find the site you want to visit.

Customize Top Sites. Customize the position and number of sites by clicking the Edit button.

Fresh news. A star in the upper-right corner of a site’s thumbnail image lets you know the site has been updated.

Reviewer’s Guide Mac OS X Snow Leopard

Full History Search Zero in quickly Safari stores all of the text from every page in your browser history, so you can instantly track down an article or posting that you want to revisit. Of course, you can prevent Safari from storing pages by using Private Browsing.

Even if you remember only a snippet of the text, page title, or web address of a site you’ve visited, Safari can find it. Safari stores all of the text from every page in your browser history, so you can easily track down that article or posting that caught your interest. When you enter a term in the Full History Search field, Safari immediately starts delivering results using Cover Flow, so you can visually flip through websites to quickly find the one you’re looking for. To start a full history search, just enter a word or phrase in the Full History Search field in Top Sites.

Cover Flow. Flip through your history just like you glide through album covers in iTunes.

Clear History button. Clear your history at any time by clicking the button. Full History Search field. When you enter a term, Safari searches the text of every page in your browser history to find matching results.

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Reviewer’s Guide Mac OS X Snow Leopard

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Smart Address and Search Fields The redesigned address field in Safari 4 has been fine-tuned to make it even easier to find the website you’re looking for. Simply enter an address and Safari displays a Top Hit (the most likely match), the closest matches from your browsing history, and the closest matches from your bookmarks. Smart Search Field. When you enter text, Safari recommends relevant searches courtesy of Google Suggest and your recent search history to help you find what you’re looking for. Smart Address Field. Just start typing and Safari auto-completes the web address and offers a list of useful suggestions. Top Hit. Safari highlights the most likely match, called the Top Hit, so you can get to it with one click. History. Safari provides a pull-down list of relevant suggestions drawn from your browsing history. Bookmarks. In the same pull-down menu, Safari lists sites from your bookmarks, so you can jump to one without typing its address.

Crash Resistant Safari 4 in Snow Leopard is more resistant to crashes. Because browser plug-ins are the number-one cause of crashes in Mac OS X, Safari has been redesigned so that plug-ins run separately from the browser. Now if a plug-in crashes on a web page, Safari keeps running.

If the plug-in crashes, Safari keeps running.

Simply refresh the page to start the plug-in again.

Reviewer’s Guide Mac OS X Snow Leopard

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Universal Access

Every Mac comes standard with a wide range of assistive—or Universal Access— technologies that help people with disabilities experience what the Mac has to offer. Many of these unique features are built right into Mac OS X. Snow Leopard continues this support with a host of innovative features that advance accessibility even further.

VoiceOver With the release of Tiger in 2005, Mac OS X was the first operating system to include a built-in screen reader, called VoiceOver. More than just a simple text-to-speech tool, VoiceOver makes its possible for those who are blind or have low vision to control and enjoy their computer by using the keyboard. It features a unique voice called Alex— based on speech technology invented by Apple—that delivers natural intonation and amazing intelligibility even at speaking rates up to 700 words per minute. With Snow Leopard, VoiceOver has become even more powerful and easy to use. VoiceOver in Snow Leopard offers a breakthrough way to take control of your computer even if you cannot see the screen, using gestures on the Multi-Touch trackpad on your Mac notebook. The entire surface of the trackpad represents the active window on the screen, with each corner representing absolute window coordinates. By leveraging the incredible Multi-Touch trackpad, users who are blind or have low vision can quickly move around in an active window or between different windows by using simple gestures: • Tap the trackpad to hear the various elements of the windows spoken to you. • Drag your finger to hear items continuously as you move along the trackpad. • Flick with one finger to move to the previous or next item. • Touch the corresponding location to jump directly to an item in a window.

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Braille Support The Mac is the only computer that supports braille displays right out of the box. Just plug in the display and you are ready to go. Snow Leopard improves upon this by including the latest drivers for over 40 models, including wireless Bluetooth displays. Snow Leopard also includes a new feature called braille mirroring that allows multiple USB braille displays to be connected to one computer simultaneously. It’s perfect for classroom settings, where teachers can lead all of their students through the same lesson at the same time, even if the students are using different display models.

Web Browsing Not only does VoiceOver provide a great screen reader that lets users hear about the items in an application window, it also delivers a world-class web browsing experience to those who are blind or have low vision. For these users, Snow Leopard offers new capabilities that provide a much more intuitive way to browse the web. VoiceOver begins reading an entire web page automatically after it loads, and you can use key commands or Multi-Touch gestures to control VoiceOver as it’s talking. To help you more quickly size up web pages you haven’t visited before, VoiceOver can provide a customizable web page summary, including the title, number of tables, headers, links, form elements, and more. Snow Leopard fully supports HTML web tables without the need for a forms or table mode. You navigate tables using the same commands you already know. You can hear the contents of a table, including the column title and column and row number, by dragging your finger across the trackpad or using simple keystrokes.

Reviewer’s Guide Mac OS X Snow Leopard

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Exchange Support

More and more, people want to bring their Mac from home to work. Mac OS X has a long history of compatibility with Windows environments. It can run Microsoft Office, plug into Active Directory managed networks, connect to Windows file and printer servers, and run native Windows applications using Boot Camp or virtualization software. Apple is taking this compatibility one step further in Snow Leopard by including built-in support for Microsoft Exchange Server 2007—something even Windows PCs don’t have. Now you will be able to use your Mac at home and at work. Mail, iCal, and Address Book in Snow Leopard support Exchange, giving you access to your email, calendars, and contacts from the applications you already know and love. Using the Autodiscovery feature in Microsoft Exchange Server 2007, setup is a breeze, so you will be up and running in no time. Mail, iCal, and Address Book work seamlessly together so you can accept calendar invitations right in Mail, access your Exchange contacts from iCal, or create a meeting with a group of contacts by simply dragging the group folder into iCal. Snow Leopard includes the features you would expect from Exchange—like email, calendar invitations, notes and tasks, and access to the Global Address List—combined with powerful Mac features such as Spotlight, Quick Look, and Data Detectors.

Simple Setup

• • • • • • • •

Everything you expect Snow Leopard support for Exchange includes the features you expect to enjoy: Email Calendars Contacts Global Address List Invitations in email Notes Tasks Availability

Setting up your Mac for Exchange is a snap. If Autodiscovery is enabled on your Exchange Server 2007, all you do is enter your Exchange user name and password and Snow Leopard will grab all the pertinent information from the server and configure your settings, so you can start using your applications right away.6 Snow Leopard also supports manual configuration of your Exchange server settings, and remote setup and access of Exchange through most VPN connections.

Reviewer’s Guide Mac OS X Snow Leopard

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Mail Integration with Address Book Composing messages with Mail is a breeze. Mail has access to all of your contacts in Address Book and autocompletes names directly from the Global Address List.

Mail in Snow Leopard includes built-in support for Microsoft Exchange Server 2007, so now you can access your work email right alongside your personal mail in one application. Mail in Snow Leopard gives you full access to your messages, folders, and notes and tasks right from the Exchange Server—all while using the great features in Mail like Spotlight, Quick Look, and Data Detectors.

Access your Exchange email right alongside your personal mail. Access notes and tasks from the Exchange server. Easily access the contents of your folders from the Exchange server, which appear in the Mail sidebar.

Instantly preview attachments without having to open them in a separate application using Quick Look.

Use Spotlight to search through all of your messages almost instantly to find the one you are looking for. You can save your searches as Smart Mailboxes.

View and respond to calendar invitations from within Mail.

Click the iCal icon to launch iCal and view the invitation.

You can accept or decline a meeting right from the email message.

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iCal Integration with Mail With iCal, you can send a meeting invitation to people outside of your organization in addition to your Exchange contacts using email. They will receive an .ics attachment that, when opened, will add the appointment to their iCal calendar.

iCal is the elegant desktop calendar application in Mac OS X that makes it easy to keep the events in your life organized. With Exchange support in Snow Leopard, you can now view your work events and your personal activities in one convenient location.

View your Exchange calendars alongside your personal calendars. You can view them all at the same time or one calendar at a time.

View and reply to calendar invitations.

Check availability for everyone invited to the meeting. If someone is busy, iCal automatically finds the next available time when everyone is free.

Create calendar invitations and use the inspector to add contacts from the Global Address List and your local contacts in Address Book. Invitations are automatically sent via email. Schedule meeting rooms and resources.

Address Book Simple scheduling of groups Access your contact groups from the Exchange server so you can easily send an email or invitation to a group of people.

Along with your personal contacts, access your Exchange contacts from the server. Create custom Address Book groups from your contacts, making it a cinch to send an email or invitation to a group of people.

Address Book in Mac OS X gives you a central location to store your contact information, where it can be accessed from almost any application, including Mail, iCal, and iChat. In Snow Leopard, you can also access your Exchange contacts and search the Global Address List.

Search the Global Address List to locate contact information.

Reviewer’s Guide Mac OS X Snow Leopard

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New Technologies

Every new Mac ships with a new generation of hardware that includes gigabytes of RAM, 64-bit dual-core processors, and graphics processing units that are capable of enormous raw processing power. Snow Leopard includes advanced technologies that enable developers to take advantage of this incredible hardware in their applications. These technologies make Mac OS X Snow Leopard the world’s most advanced operating system and set up the Mac for future innovation.

64-Bit Computing All major system applications are 64-bit In Snow Leopard, all major system applications—including the Finder, Mail, Safari, iCal, and iChat—are now built with 64-bit code. So not only are they able to take full advantage of all the memory in your Mac, but the move to 64-bit applications also boosts overall performance.

Snow Leopard takes advantage of the 64-bit processors in every new Mac, delivering all major system applications in 64-bit—and enabling them to run faster and address all of the physical memory in the computer.3 Snow Leopard makes the transition to 64-bit simple, with one version of the operating system that runs both 64-bit and 32-bit applications. Breaking the 4GB barrier Today’s Mac systems can be configured with up to 32GB of memory; however, any 32-bit application on the system can access only up to 4GB of memory at a time. The 64-bit computing shatters this barrier by enabling applications to address a theoretical maximum of 16 billion gigabytes of memory. Increased performance In addition to addressing massive amounts of memory, 64-bit also delivers increased speed. The 64-bit applications can crunch up to twice the data per clock cycle, dramatically speeding up numeric calculations. In fact, math operations in Snow Leopard are up to two times faster than with 32-bit operations. Faster with 64-bit 1.5x

Safari JavaScript QuickTime Player launch

1.3x

Open a large PDF

1.2x

Baseline

1.0x

Times faster than 32-bit Testing conducted by Apple in August 2009 comparing prerelease Mac OS X v10.6 Snow Leopard with shipping Mac OS X v10.5.8 Leopard. Testing was conducted on a shipping 2.0GHz MacBook system and a shipping 2.66GHz iMac system, both configured with 2GB of RAM. JavaScript benchmarks based on the SunSpider Performance test. Performance will vary based on system configuration, network connection, and other factors. These tests reflect the approximate performance of Mac OS X.

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More secure Beyond the performance benefits of 64-bit, Snow Leopard takes advantage of features in the underlying 64-bit hardware to improve security, adding extra protection to help prevent certain types of malicious code from ever running. The 64-bit applications benefit from a more secure function argument-passing mechanism and the use of hardware-based execute disable for heap memory that helps protect their data. In addition, memory on the system heap is marked using strengthened checksums, helping to prevent attacks that rely on corrupting memory. Easy transition The goal at Apple has been to make the move to 64-bit computing as simple as possible for the user. Since Jaguar, Apple has been adding 64-bit capabilities to Mac OS X, and throughout this transition there has always been a single compatible version of Mac OS X running both 32-bit and 64-bit native applications side by side. In addition, Mac OS X enables developers to deliver their applications as a single version that runs on both 64-bit and 32-bit Mac systems. This has resulted in a seamless transition; users have not had to deal with the complexity of choosing between 32- and 64-bit versions of Mac OS X or between 32- and 64-bit versions of applications. Snow Leopard takes the next big step in the transition to 64-bit, making Mac OS X faster, more secure, and completely ready for the future.

Grand Central Dispatch Historically, microprocessors have gained speed by running at faster and faster clock speeds. Consequently, software has run faster as the clock speeds increased—without programmers having to do any additional work. However, processor clock speeds began to reach a limit because power consumption and heat became problematic. Because of these issues, CPU vendors shifted their focus from increasing clock speed to putting multiple processor cores into a single CPU. CPUs with multiple cores can deliver more performance while consuming less power than CPUs running at higher clock speeds, but software does not automatically run faster on multicore processors. Benefits of GCD Grand Central Dispatch provides a wealth of benefits across the system: improved responsiveness, dynamic scaling, better processor utilization, and cleaner code.

To harness the full power of multicore processors, software developers must use a special programming technology called threads. Threads are a way of splitting up a program such that multiple processors or cores can work on different parts of an application at the same time. Each application is responsible for creating and managing its own threads, and applications that create too many or too few threads for a given system and workload can reduce the overall efficiency of the system. Because threads can be difficult to program, many developers don’t invest the time to make their applications multicore aware, resulting in applications that don’t take advantage of the power of multicore systems. Built-in support for multicore Grand Central Dispatch (GCD) in Snow Leopard solves these problems with a revolutionary, pervasive approach to multicore processing that builds multicore right into the operating system. Because it is built into Mac OS X at the most fundamental level, GCD not only can simplify how developers build their code to take advantage of multicore processors, but also can deliver better performance and efficiency than traditional thread approaches. With GCD, threads are handled by the operating system rather than the individual applications.

Reviewer’s Guide Mac OS X Snow Leopard

New model for programming multicore Snow Leopard makes it much easier for developers to harness the power of multicore processors in their applications. GCD gives developers a simple way to describe the different pieces of work that applications need to do, and an easy way to describe how those pieces might be dependent upon one another. Units of work are described as blocks in the code, while queues are used to organize blocks based on how they need to be executed. By using blocks and queues, developers no longer need to worry about threads, thread managers, or locking data. Mac OS X handles all of that.

Threads in Leopard Mail In Leopard, Mail uses the same number of threads when idle or busy. Busy

Idle

Threads in Snow Leopard Mail In Snow Leopard, Mail uses more threads when it needs them; but when idle, it releases those valuable system resources for another application to use. Busy

Idle

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Comprehensive GCD is deeply integrated into Mac OS X, providing a comprehensive multicore implementation that gives developers everything they need to take advantage of multicore in their applications. This includes the following: • • • •

Language extension to C, C++, and Objective-C An efficient, scalable runtime engine A rich, low-level system API and a convenient, high-level Cocoa API Sophisticated analysis and debugging tools With Grand Central Dispatch, Snow Leopard delivers a new foundation on which Apple and third-party developers can innovate to exploit the enormous power of today’s hardware as well as the hardware of the future. Scalable, e∑cient engine GCD has a scalable, multicore execution engine that automatically adjusts the workload of an application based on the number of cores in a system. This allows GCD-based applications—and the entire operating system—to efficiently scale from a system like a dual-core Mac mini to an 8-core Mac Pro without requiring developers to do any manual tuning. GCD is also extremely efficient, dynamically scaling the number of threads used to execute an application. For example, without GCD, if an application needs 20 threads when at maximum capacity, it might set up 20 threads and consume the associated resources even when it has nothing to do. GCD, by contrast, frees resources when it’s not using them, allowing them to be used by another application and helping to keep the whole system more responsive.

OpenCL Modern graphics processing units (GPUs) have evolved from single-purpose chips into flexible processors that offer levels of performance once reserved for room-size supercomputers. OpenCL is a new API, language, and runtime in Mac OS X Snow Leopard that lets any application tap into the vast computing power of the GPU, opening up incredible performance opportunities. Variety of applications OpenCL brings parallel computation to accelerate a wide range of applications, from entertainment software to scientific solutions to image and video processing, and it handles both task- and data-parallel computing.

Each new generation of GPUs pushes the graphics-rendering envelope forward by delivering increased realism, fidelity, and resolution. As a result, today’s GPUs are capable of rendering billions of pixels per second. In fact, GPUs are performing operations at supercomputer performance levels, with the fastest GPUs performing around 1 trillion computations per second (1 teraflop). To harness the incredible power of these GPUs, developers use a programming standard called OpenGL. However, because OpenGL is designed specifically for graphics rendering, GPUs have been limited to graphics-related applications such as games and 3D software—even though they possess the power to do so much more.

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GPU Performance Growth Gflops 1200 1000 800 600 400 200 0

2002

2003

2004

2005

2006

2007

2008

2009

Source: NVIDIA

Apple realized that the trends in GPU designs offered an incredible opportunity to take the GPU beyond graphics. All that was needed was a nongraphics API that could engage the emerging programmable aspects of the GPU and access its immense power. OpenCL is that technology, delivering the means for any application to access the supercomputer-like performance of the modern GPU. Optimized With OpenCL, developers do not have to worry about which graphics card is in a particular Mac. It automatically optimizes for the kind of graphics processor in the Mac, adjusting itself to the available processing power. OpenCL provides IEEE 754–based numeric precision and accuracy, fixing a problem that has hampered GPU-based programming in the past. Easy to adopt OpenCL uses a C-based programming language with a structure that will be familiar to programmers, who can simply use Xcode developer tools to adapt their programs to work with OpenCL. Developers don’t have to completely rewrite applications to use OpenCL—they need only rewrite the most performance-intensive parts in OpenCL C. The vast majority of application code can be left unchanged. Khronos OpenCL working group 3DLABS, Activision Blizzard, AMD, Apple, ARM, Broadcom, Codeplay, Electronic Arts, Ericsson, Freescale, Fujitsu, GE, Graphic Remedy, HI, IBM, Imagination Technologies, Intel, Los Alamos National Laboratory, Motorola, Movidia, Nokia, NVIDIA, Petapath, QNX, Qualcomm, RapidMind, Samsung, Seaweed Systems, S3, STMicroelectronics, Takumi Technology, Texas Instruments, and Toshiba.

Open standard While initially developing OpenCL, Apple realized that the technology offered an opportunity for the industry to work together to define a standard for parallel programming. With the support of AMD, Intel, and NVIDIA, Apple proposed OpenCL to the Khronos Group consortium as the basis for a new standard. Demonstrating the strength of the proposal, OpenCL was expanded to include digital signal processors (DSPs) and other specialized processor architectures. It was ratified as a royalty-free open standard in December 2008. Mac OS X Snow Leopard ushers in a new generation of computing performance with OpenCL. Using this powerful new technology, Mac developers can easily tap into the incredible performance potential of the GPU for more than just graphics tasks.

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Reviewer’s Guide Mac OS X Snow Leopard

Performance

Snow Leopard delivers a number of performance improvements across the entire system that accelerate the things you do on your Mac every day. Here are some key areas where you’ll notice the improvements: Faster at Common Tasks Up to 2x faster than Leopard 2.0x

Wake from sleep 1.8x

Shut down Baseline

1.0x

Times faster than Leopard

A More Responsive Finder Up to 1.8x faster than Leopard PDF icon refresh

1.8x

JPEG icon refresh

1.4x 1.0x

Baseline

Times faster than Leopard

Speedier Initial Backup of Time Machine to Time Capsule Up to 1.8x faster than Leopard Snow Leopard

1.8x

Baseline

1.0x

Times faster than Leopard Testing conducted by Apple in August 2009 comparing prerelease Mac OS X v10.6 Snow Leopard with shipping Mac OS X v10.5.8 Leopard. Testing was conducted on a shipping 2.0GHz MacBook system and a shipping 2.66GHz iMac system, both configured with 2GB of RAM. Performance will vary based on system configuration, network connection, and other factors. These tests reflect the approximate performance of Mac OS X.

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Faster Installation Up to 1.5x faster than Leopard Snow Leopard

1.5x

Baseline

1.0x

Times faster than Leopard Testing conducted by Apple in August 2009 comparing prerelease Mac OS X v10.6 Snow Leopard with shipping Mac OS X v10.5.8 Leopard. Testing was conducted on a production 2.16GHz MacBook system and a production 2.4GHz iMac system, both configured with 1GB of RAM. Performance will vary based on system configuration, data sets, and other factors. These tests reflect the approximate performance of Mac OS X.

Improved Mail Performance Up to 2x faster than Leopard Move messages

2.0x

Search

2.0x

Launch

2.0x 1.0x

Baseline

Times faster than Leopard Testing conducted by Apple in August 2009 comparing prerelease Mac OS X v10.6 Snow Leopard with shipping Mac OS X v10.5.8 Leopard. Testing was conducted on a shipping 2.0GHz MacBook system and a shipping 2.66GHz iMac system, both configured with 2GB of RAM. Performance will vary based on system configuration, network connection, and other factors. These tests reflect the approximate performance of Mac OS X.

Improved Preview Performance Up to 2.3x faster than Leopard Open JPEG

2.3x

Open PDF

1.4x 1.0x

Baseline

Times faster than Leopard Testing conducted by Apple in August 2009 comparing prerelease Mac OS X v10.6 Snow Leopard with shipping Mac OS X v10.5.8 Leopard. Testing was conducted on a shipping 2.0GHz MacBook system and a shipping 2.66GHz iMac system, both configured with 2GB of RAM. Performance will vary based on system configuration, network connection, and other factors. These tests reflect the approximate performance of Mac OS X.

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Other Refinements

iChat Snow Leopard makes the world’s best video chat more reliable and more accessible than ever. iChat includes technology to address many common router incompatibilities, ensuring a successful connection for video chats.7 The bandwidth requirement for 640-by-480 video chat has been reduced from 900 Kbps to 300 Kbps, and iChat Theater now offers 640-by-480 resolution, four times greater than before.

Chinese Character Input Snow Leopard offers a breakthrough new way to enter Chinese characters by leveraging the Multi-Touch trackpad on a Mac notebook. Simply draw the character on the trackpad and it will appear onscreen in a new input window that recommends characters based on what you draw. Just tap the trackpad to choose the right character. The input window even offers suggestions for subsequent characters based on the one you choose.

Text Substitution Snow Leopard includes support for text substitution in applications such as Mail, iChat, Safari, and TextEdit. Text substitution lets you create shortcuts for phrases you use frequently, which expand automatically as you type. Common substitutions are built in—for example, (c) changes to a copyright symbol (©) and fractions convert to the smaller-style fractions (1/2 to ½). You can also add your own substitutions; for example, “pnc” can expand to “privileged and confidential,” and your initials can expand to your full name. Text substitution can be configured in the Language and Text pane of System Preferences and can be enabled in each application.

All-New Thesaurus Snow Leopard includes the Oxford American Writer’s Thesaurus, Second Edition. New features help you to differentiate between easily confused words, and find the right shade of meaning. The thesaurus also provides the words in context and gives you background on words through the writing of well-known authors.

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Services The Services menu in Snow Leopard has been reinvented to provide more streamlined, simplified, and helpful options. The menu is contextual, showing you only the services relevant to the application or content you are viewing. Access services by right-clicking a file or selection. You can configure which services appear in System Preferences and even create your own services using Automator.

Automatic Updates for Printers To help you get the most from your printer, Snow Leopard makes sure you always have the most up-to-date printer driver. When you plug in your printer, Mac OS X can download the driver from the Internet. It also periodically checks to make sure you have the latest version of the software; if not, it downloads the newest version through Software Update.

Quick, Reliable Eject Mac OS X has probably informed you more than once that a disc or external drive could not be ejected because it was in use. Now Snow Leopard improves the process, so you’ll get fewer of these error messages; and if you do get one, a dialog tells you which application is using the drive so you can quit it and eject the disc or external drive properly.

More Efficient File Sharing The Bonjour technology in Mac OS X makes file and media sharing a breeze, without the need for complex setup. Plus, Bonjour in Snow Leopard makes sharing more energy efficient. Previously, if you had a computer at your home or office that shared files, you would have to leave the computer on all of the time, an inefficient use of energy. In Snow Leopard, with a compatible Airport Extreme or Time Capsule base station, your Mac can go to sleep while continuing to share files, waking only when you need it and sleeping when you don’t.

Core Location Snow Leopard uses Core Location technology to locate known Wi-Fi hotspots to determine your current location.8 Using this information, it automatically sets the appropriate time zone in System Preferences—so no matter where in the world you are, your Mac will be set to the right time. Core Location also lets developers build location-awareness into their applications. To see a list of the refinements in Snow Leopard, visit www.apple.com/macosx/refinements/enhancements-refinements.html.

Reviewer’s Guide Mac OS X Snow Leopard

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Product Details

Pricing and Availability Leopard users can upgrade to Snow Leopard for $29; the Mac OS X Family Pack, which includes a five-computer license, is $49.9 Both can be purchased from the Apple Online Store (www.apple.com/store), Apple Retail Stores, and Apple Authorized Resellers. Volume licensing and maintenance programs for customers who need 10 or more licenses are available directly from Apple. Anyone running a Mac with an Intel processor can purchase the Mac Box Set, which includes Mac OS X v10.6 Snow Leopard; iLife ’09, with the latest versions of iPhoto, iMovie, GarageBand, iWeb, and iDVD; and iWork ’09, Apple’s productivity suite for home and office including Pages, Numbers, and Keynote.

How to Upgrade Upgrading to Snow Leopard is easy, fast, and preserves all of your data, so you are ready to go as soon as the upgrade is done. To install Snow Leopard on your Mac, insert the DVD, double-click the installer icon, and follow the onscreen instructions. To install Snow Leopard on a MacBook Air without an attached DVD drive, insert the Snow Leopard DVD in a Mac or PC and enable “DVD or CD Sharing” in the Sharing preferences on the MacBook Air. Select the remote disk in the sidebar of the Finder, double-click the installer, and follow the onscreen instructions.

General System Requirements • Mac computer with an Intel processor • 1GB of memory • 5GB of free space • A DVD drive for installation • Some features require a compatible Internet service provider; fees may apply. • Some features require Apple’s MobileMe service; fees and terms apply.

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Feature-Specific Requirements iChat • Audio chats require a microphone and a 56-Kbps Internet connection. • Video chats require an iSight camera (built-in or external), USB video class (UVC) camera, or FireWire DV camcorder; and a 128-Kbps upstream and downstream Internet connection. • Backdrop effects when using a DV camcorder require fixed focus, exposure, and white balance. • Some iChat features offer better performance and quality with higher system capabilities. Exchange support • Microsoft Exchange Server 2007 Service Pack 1 Update Rollup 4 • Auto-setup requires enabling the Autodiscovery feature of Microsoft Exchange Server. QuickTime X movie capture iSight camera (built-in or external), USB video class (UVC) camera, or FireWire DV camcorder QuickTime H.264 hardware acceleration Mac with a NVIDIA 9400M graphics processor Developer tools An additional 3GB of available disk space OpenCL NVIDIA GeForce 8600M GT, GeForce 8800 GT, GeForce 8800 GTS, GeForce 9400M, GeForce 9600M GT, GeForce GT 120, or GeForce GT 130; or ATI Radeon 4850 or Radeon 4870 64-bit support Mac with a 64-bit processor Grand Central Dispatch Mac with a multicore processor

What’s Included with Mac OS X v10.6 Snow Leopard Applications • Address Book • Automator • Calculator • Chess • Dashboard • Dictionary • DVD Player • Font Book • Front Row • iCal • iChat • Image Capture • iSync • iTunes • Mail • Photo Booth • Preview

Reviewer’s Guide Mac OS X Snow Leopard

• QuickTime Player • Safari • Stickies • System Preferences • TextEdit • Time Machine Development • Apache web server • AppleScript • AppleScript Studio • Automator 2 • Complete Java JDK, including javac, javadoc, ANT, and Maven tools • Dashcode • DTrace (original project by Sun) • GCC compiler and toolset (original project by FSF.org) • Instruments • Perl • PHP • Python • Ruby and the Ruby on Rails frameworks • Shark • SQLite • Xcode 3 IDE with Interface Builder 3 Key technologies • AppleScript • Aqua • Bonjour • CDSA security architecture • Cocoa, Carbon, and Java • ColorSync • Core Animation • Core Audio • Core Image • Core Video • Grand Central Dispatch • H.264 • Inkwell • OpenCL • OpenGL • PDF • Quartz Extreme • QuickTime X • 64-bit computing • Sync • Unicode 5.1 • Universal Access • UNIX • USB and FireWire peripheral support • Xgrid

Languages • English • Japanese • French • German • Spanish • Italian • Dutch • Swedish • Danish • Norwegian • Finnish • Traditional Chinese • Simplified Chinese • Korean • Brazilian Portuguese • Portuguese (Portugal) • Russian • Polish Utilities • Activity Monitor • AirPort Utility • AppleScript Editor • Audio MIDI Setup • Bluetooth File Exchange • Boot Camp Assistant • ColorSync Utility • Console • DigitalColor Meter • Disk Utility • Exposé • Grab • Grapher • Java Preferences • Keychain Access • Migration Assistant • Network Utility • Podcast Capture • RAID Utility • Remote Install Mac OS X • Script Utility • Spaces • System Profiler • Terminal • VoiceOver Utility • X11

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Reviewer’s Guide Mac OS X Snow Leopard

For More Information For more information about Mac OS X v10.6 Snow Leopard, visit www.apple.com/macosx.

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1Testing

conducted by Apple in August 2009 comparing prerelease Mac OS X v10.6 Snow Leopard with shipping Mac OS X v10.5.8 Leopard. Testing was conducted on a production 2.16GHz MacBook system and a production 2.4GHz iMac system, both configured with 1GB of RAM. Performance will vary based on system configuration, data sets, and other factors. These tests reflect the approximate performance of Mac OS X. 2Testing conducted by Apple in August 2009 comparing prerelease Mac OS X v10.6 Snow Leopard with shipping Mac OS X v10.5.8 Leopard. Testing was conducted on a shipping 2.0GHz MacBook system and a shipping 2.66GHz iMac system, both configured with 2GB of RAM. JavaScript benchmarks based on the SunSpider Performance test. Performance will vary based on system configuration, network connection, and other factors. These tests reflect the approximate performance of Mac OS X. 3All system applications except DVD Player, Front Row, Grapher, and iTunes have been rewritten in 64-bit. 4Based on 4 minutes per song and 128-Kbps AAC encoding; actual capacity varies by encoding method and bit rate. 5The MobileMe service is available to persons age 13 and older. Annual subscription fee and Internet access required. Terms of service apply. 6Requires Autodiscovery feature of Microsoft Exchange Server 2007. 7Video chatting requires a broadband Internet connection; fees may apply. 8Location information depends on data collected by third parties. These data services are subject to change and may not be available in all geographic areas, resulting in location information that may be unavailable, inaccurate, or incomplete. 9Prices are Apple Store prices as of August 2009, do not include taxes or shipping, are subject to change, and are listed in U.S. dollars. © 2009 Apple Inc. All rights reserved. Apple, the Apple logo, AirPort, AirPort Extreme, AppleScript, Apple TV, Aqua, Bonjour, Boot Camp, Carbon, Cocoa, ColorSync, Cover Flow, Exposé, FireWire, GarageBand, iCal, iChat, iDVD, iLife, iMac, iMovie, iPhoto, iPod, iPod touch, iTunes, iWork, Jaguar, Keychain, Keynote, Leopard, Mac, MacBook, MacBook Air, Mac OS, Numbers, Pages, Photo Booth, Quartz, QuickTime, the QuickTime logo, Safari, Spotlight, SuperDrive, Tiger, Time Capsule, Time Machine, Xcode, and Xgrid are trademarks of Apple Inc., registered in the U.S. and other countries. Finder, iPhone, iWeb, Multi-Touch, OpenCL, and Snow Leopard are trademarks of Apple Inc. Apple Store is a service mark of Apple Inc., registered in the U.S. and other countries. MobileMe is a service mark of Apple Inc. The Bluetooth word mark and logos are registered trademarks owned by Bluetooth SIG, Inc. and any use of such marks by Apple is under license. Intel is a trademark of Intel Corp. in the U.S. and other countries. Java and all Java-based trademarks and logos are trademarks or registered trademarks of Sun Microsystems, Inc. in the U.S. and other countries. OpenGL is a registered trademark of Silicon Graphics, Inc. UNIX is a registered trademark of The Open Group. Other product and company names mentioned herein may be trademarks of their respective companies. Product specifications are subject to change without notice. This material is provided for information purposes only; Apple assumes no liability related to its use. August 2009 L414798A