Mac OS X debuted on September 13, 2000. And on its 10th anniversary, Ars Technica rerun a review of Mac OS X Public Beta by John Siracusa which was published on October 15, 2000.
Makes you feel old or nostalgic?
With Snow Leopard’s low upgrade price and performance boost, many Mac OS X users are expected to upgrade if not already done so. The upgrade to most users so far has been smooth, most are inconvenient by certain third party apps that are not running well with the new OS. The following are 32 things that are new or changed in Snow Leopard, helpful info before your upgrade.
Apple has published in a support document a list of incompatible software for Mac OS X 10.6 Snow Leopard.
When you install Snow Leopard or upgrade to Snow Leopard, the operating system by default moves known-incompatible software to a folder named “Incompatible Software” on your hard drive. The list of incompatible software includes:
Snow Leopard also prevents known-incompatible software from opening. The list of software that Snow Leopard will not open and run:
Visit Apple’s Snow Leopard Support Page for more help on installation, manuals and tutorial.
Updated
For a more comprehensive list of what software runs with Snow Leopard, visit Mac OS X 10.6 Snow Leopard Compatibility List at Wikidot.com.
Apple has announced that Mac OS X 10.6 will go on sale this Friday August 28 and Apple online store is now accepting pre-orders.
If you have an Intel Mac, Snow Leopard is a no-brainer upgrade with loads of refinements to 10.5 Leopard and its $29 low upgrade price. Among them are: core support for 64-bit processor, system applications such as Finder, Mail, iCal, iChat, Safari etc are now 64-bit; more responsive Finder; Mail loads messages up to twice as fast; Time Machine backups 80 percent faster for initial backup; build-in Microsoft Exchange Server support; new QuickTime X; 64-bit of Safari that is up to 50 percent faster.
Mac OS X 10.6 Snow Leopard will be released next month, but you can pre-order your copy from Amazon and have it shipped to you as soon as it is officially released. Snow Leopard can run only on Intel-based Mac.
Please note that if you have purchased a new Mac on or after June 8, 2009, you can upgrade to Snow Leopard cheaper for $9.95 plus tax under Apple’s Snow Leopard Up-to-Date program. Visit Apple website for detail on this program.
Available for pre-order on Amazon are:
Mac OS X 10.6 Snow Leopard single user edition at $29. This is for users who has Mac OS X 10.5 Leopard installed. Apple priced the upgrade at low price to entice adoption. If you have Tiger or earlier Mac OS X version, you need to purchase the Mac Box Set in order to get Snow Leopard.
Mac OS X 10.6 Snow Leopard Family Pack (5-User) at $49. This is Snow Leopard upgrade for Leopard users for up to 5 Macs.
Mac OS X Server 10.6 Snow Leopard at $499. This is the server version of Snow Leopard.
Mac Box Set With Snow Leopard at $169. Box Set includes Snow Leopard, iLife 09 and iWorks 09.
Mac Box Set Family Pack With Snow Leopard at $229. Box Set includes Snow Leopard, iLife 09 and iWorks 09, for up to 5 Macs.
When you are editing text under Mac OS X, you can use the following keyboard shortcuts:
You can use the above keyboard shortcuts in TextEdit, when you enter URL address in Safari browser, in the command line on the Terminal app etc. In fact it applies to all apps that make use of the Mac OS X edit control.
This is one Mac OS X behavior every new Mac users must keep in mind, especially for those coming from Windows: when you copy/move a folder to a location containing a folder with the same name, Mac OS X will replace the entire content of the folder with the new one you are copying/moving over. Under Windows, the files under the two folders will be merged together.
Let say you have five photos under your folder ~/Pictures/Photos/ with the file names feb001.jpg, feb002.jpg, feb003.jpg, feb004.jpg and feb005.jpg. And on your USB thumbdrive you have a folder named Photos which has three photos with the file names feb004.jpg, feb005.jpg and feb006.jpg.
Under Mac OS X, when you copy the Photos folder from your USB thumbdrive to your ~/Pictures folder, the system will prompt you to confirm. If you proceed by clicking on the “Replace” button, the ~/Pictures/Photos content will be replaced by the content on your thumbdrive, thus you will have the files feb004.jpg, feb005.jpg and feb006.jpg. Files feb001.jpg, feb002.jpg and feb003.jpg are gone!
Under Windows, system will merge the contents of the two folders, result in six files feb001.jpg to feb006.jpg. Files feb004.jpg and feb005.jpg will be overwritten with the version on the USB thumbdrive.
As you can see this OS X behaviour can be damaging if you are not being careful, imagine having your whole year’s photos wipe out by a folder copy.
Two iPhone technologies, CoreLocation and Multi-Touch, are coming to the Mac. These software frameworks are included in the latest developer seed of the upcoming Mac OS X 10.6 Snow Leopard, allows developers to add CoreLocation (ability to identify the current latitude and longtitude of your Mac) and multi-touch features to Mac applications.
In the iPhone, CoreLocation makes use of the hardware’s GPS or WiFi to identify its location. Current Macs will make use of less accurate WiFi method for obtaining the location since there is no GPS technology included. We suspect that future Macs especially MacBooks will have built-in GPS technology as standard.
Current Macs already have multi-touch support via the multi-touch trackpad in newer MacBooks. By including the multi-touch APIs framework, Apple is making it easier for developer to multi-touch enabled their application. We are guessing Apple will extend the support for multi-touch to include touch-panel LCD in future Macs.
You do not always have to use the Dock or the Finder application folder to start an application under Mac OS X. There are other ways and techniques you can accomplish such trivial task, some are obvious, some are improvements and some might appeal to your way of working. Choose your pick.
Apple on Monday evening posted the update 10.5.4 for its Mac OS X Leopard operating system. This release “includes general operating system improvements that enhance the stability, compatibility, and security of your Mac.”, Apple said. This release is believed to contain codes that support the upcoming MobileMe online service that will debut on July 11. The 88MB download is available via OS X’s Software Update mechanism or from Apple Downloads website.
Apple Mac OS X Leopard 10.5.4 update includes all recent security updates and resolves issues with several system and third-party applications, such as saving and re-opening Adobe Creative Suite 3 files on a remote server. It adds RAW image support for additional digital camera, improves L2TP VPN client reliability and solves AirPort reliability issues. The update also delivers fixes to improve the stability of iCal calendaring application. Read Apple’s support document for details of Mac OS X 10.5.4 update.
This update is widely believed to support Apple’s new MobilMe online services that will replace the .Mac service coming July 11. MobileMe costs $99 per year and comes with 20GB of storage, an email account with a @me.com domain, contacts, calendar, photos and file sharing services. You can synchronizes these information between Macs, PCs and iPhones so that everything is up to date.
Besides Mac OS X 10.5.4 Leopard update, Apple also released security updates for Mac OS X Tiger, Mac OS X Tiger Server as well as Safari 3.1.2 for Mac OS X Tiger. These updates replicate the security fixes featured in 10.5.4 Leopard update.
