Monday 15 June 2009

MacOS X 10.6 Preview, day two. SSD anyone?

Another day of using Snow Leopard. So far I love it, however I am really disappointed with lack of Dock Expose in this build. I would really hope this would be at least as good as Aero Peak introduced in Windows 7, but again, simply can't test it :(
You can hold mouse button as long as you won't, but you won't get Dock Expose :(

OS start-up

Another change I noticed, comparing to MacOS X 10.5 is a booting up time. Unfortunately, despite of what we've heard during WWDC, it's hard to call it an improvement. I tend to keep my MacBook asleep as opposite to switching it off, however when I do, I never waited longer than 15 - 20 seconds for my login screen to appear. Now however, since upgrade to 10.6, I have a questionable pleasure of staring at Apple logo alone for minimum of 30 seconds, before first signs of desktop appear. Now in all fairness this could be due to operating system still being under heavy development, as well as fact of me upgrading from Leopard rather than performing fresh install. I would expect most Apple users to follow upgrade path though, so I hope boot time is going to be radically reduced before hitting Golden Master. Hope, hope, hope :)

What am I missing???

One of the features I read about, and I am pretty sure that was implemented in one of the developers builds, was "Restore" option available for files within Trash. It supposed to work the same way as it does in Windows - restore file to its original location. After quick check - this feature seems to be missing from 10A380 build. :(
No "Restore" option for files in Trash...

I remember back in 2000, when Steve Jobs, demoing MacOS X for the very first time, showed us fancy animation of window being minimized down to the dock. I distinctively remember him showing us Mission Impossible movie being minimized and saying:

"Pretty cool, huh? [...] and we are going to make it so you can even watch them when they're in the dock."

Well... when? It's 9 years later, and it still didn't happen. What did happen however was that Microsoft added this very cool functionality in 2006 to Windows Vista, and greatly improved it in Windows 7. And it's not about watching video in the dock I am talking specifically. What I would love to see is real-time window preview down in the dock. I am bit intrigued, that this has been omitted first two years ago when dock has been redesigned into 3D, but also again during Finder rewrite, or at least during changes being made to the Stacks...

On top of all the new technologies in the back of Snow Leopard I couldn't help but wonder... did anything change in regards to Solid State Drives? This is another area where Microsoft prepared plenty of improvements for it's upcoming Windows 7, not only boosting performance, but also wearing off such drives by reducing it's I/O operations (some of them are specifically enabled when SSD drive is detected). Of course, MacOS by design is much lighter for our I/O than Windows ever will, however before I let Leopard put it's claws on my brand new €600 SSD drive, I would like to know that something has been done to assure that I'll enjoy my investment as long as possible... Any comments on this, Apple?

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