I haven't had a lot of time to try out the new version of Mac OS X thoroughly, but I still want to take up on Michael's tradition and share a few personal impressions ere.
More Space (1)
As Michael has already noticed as well, the calculation of drive and file sizes has changed in Mac OS X. Traditionally, file sizes are calculated in steps of 1024 Bytes: One Megabyte (MB) then has 1,048,576 Bytes. Hard drive vendors, however, have been using steps of 1000 Bytes for a long time. For them, 1 MB only had 1,000,000 Bytes. Which had the effect that the nice new 250 GB drive you got in the shop was shown to have only 232 GB (both on Mac OS X and Windows).
Mac OS X 10.6 changes that and now uses steps of 1000 Bytes as well – a bold move that might confuse some people.
More Space (2)
But installing Snow Leopard does actually free up more space. Before the installation, 235 GB were occupied on my harddrive (this is already according to the new calculation of file sizes), afterwards, it was only 222 GB. Installing the Apple development environment XCode (and overwriting the old version) freed up 1 GB more. What probably contributed to that is that I didn't install all language variants anymore (which is the default on Mac OS X). But still, that is an impressive achievement.
The first disappointment
I had been looking forward very much to the Chinese handwriting recognition. I had tried out the feature at Gravis and was thrilled: Apple did a very good job with this one. Unfortunately, the handwriting recognition is not recognized on my barely one and a half year old MacBook Pro…
Incompatible Software
I haven't encountered any major problems with incompatible software so far. Logic 8 and almost all plugins work fine. I only had problems with three free plugins: Luxonix LFX-1310 (as presented recently) as well as the Light Guitar Plugin I downloaded for evaluation purposes don't pass the AU validation anymore. However, both plugins had problems before. And Pluggo caused Logic to hang when quitting. But after running the Pluggo Audio Unit Scan again, that was settled.
For Menu Meters, I had to install an Update. After that, it worked fine. And the good old Peripheral Vision sometimes shows weird descriptions, but otherwise works. (It's a pity Apple hasn't included this functionality in their OS yet!)
Improvements under the hood
Overall, the visible improvements are more subtle. There's an overview on the Apple pages. It's a new feeling to install an OS update without it looking somewhat different, but it does feel different: System applications like Mail or Safari seem to be faster to me than before.
I have to praise Apple for improving their accessibility features yet again. Like the Chinese handwriting recognition it is a feature that only few people need – but for the people that need it, it's revolutionary.
The improvements under the hood are impressive as well. Especially their implementation of 64 Bit support is phenomenal compared to how others do it.
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