7 ms·

John Siracusa's in-depth review of Snow Leopard on Ars Technica

141 points by glhaynes 17y ago

chris24 17y ago
It's split onto 23 pages? Uh, wow.
- dasil003 17y ago
  Yeah, this is the first time I'm actually using a "bookmark" as such.
mikedouglas 17y ago
Previous reviews: http://bit.ly/osx10-5 http://bit.ly/osx10-5 http://bit.ly/osx10-4 http://bit.ly/osx10-4 http://bit.ly/osx10-3 http://bit.ly/osx10-3 http://bit.ly/osx10-2 http://bit.ly/osx10-2 http://bit.ly/osx10-1 http://bit.ly/osx10-1 http://bit.ly/osx10-0 http://bit.ly/osx10-0
- Derrek 17y ago
  I'm curious, why use URL shortners on HN? It's not like you're constrained to 140 characters. (I'm not trying to be a jerk, just trying to understand your reasoning.)
  - ZeroGravitas 17y ago
    Also, did you just take those URLs from the last page of the article, and if so why not just link there: http://arstechnica.com/apple/reviews/2009/08/mac-os-x-10-6.ars/23 http://arstechnica.com/apple/reviews/2009/08/mac-os-x-10-6.a...
  - mikedouglas 17y ago
    Siracusa tweeted the links the day before, so I had them in a textfile on the desktop. Because the URLs were easier to read than the originals, I didn't think it would be an issue.
sachinag 17y ago
Summary: "Should you buy Mac OS X Snow Leopard? If you're already running Leopard, then the answer is a resounding 'yes.' If you're still running Tiger, well, then it's probably time for a new Mac anyway. When you buy one, it'll come with Snow Leopard." I love Ars; a lot of 'em are here in Chicago, but man, this shit can get out of hand. At least they do the summary themselves on the last page.
- dcurtis 17y ago
  I'm actually sick of reading countless shallow reviews that just reiterate the crap that you can find by booting Snow Leopard on your own. This article has an amazing amount of information that has not been previously publicized in detail.
e1ven 17y ago
I always love John's OSX reviews; I've been hitting refresh compulsively for the last few days, reloading the URL where it would be. What I find interesting is what he chooses to cover and not cover- The review is 23 pages, which is quite a codex, but choices had to be made.. There is a page dedicated to the specifics of GCD's C interface, but only a paragraph about the revised Services design. In all, I think that Ars does a wonderful job with these reviews, and like 10.6 itself, a lot of the depth is built on top of previous (excellent) releases. For example, we know that John thinks the hybrid finder, which is neither Spacial or truly a file browser, is a strange beast, and he's linked to his epic discussions about the finder in the past. In this review, all that is needed is discussing the changes that bring us into SL, and the review does that well. I've joked to my friends before that sometimes I'm more excited about the Ars review of a new release than I am about actually installing it, and the new version delivers as promised. Snow Leopard looks to be doing a great job in laying the foundation for the next few years of OSX- It's interesting to watch how the relationship between the iPhone and Mac code continues to evolve.
- masklinn 17y ago
  > I've been hitting refresh compulsively for the last few days, reloading the URL where it would be. Wow, I'm glad to learn I wasn't the only guy doing that.
- gommm 17y ago
  The two greatest tech reviewers I've read are John Siracusa for OSX and Anand Lal Shimpi (love his series on SSDs).
hyperbovine 17y ago
23 pages when you're gonna buy it anyways.
- neilc 17y ago
  I think you obviously don't read a review like this because you want to understand whether to plunk down your $29 -- you read this because you want to understand Snow Leopard.
  - unalone 17y ago
    I'm slowly drifting away from being a tech geek, and so articles like Siracusa's let me see in ridiculous detail what's going on with a piece of technology that I love. It's a damn good read for the sake of reading.
jsz0 17y ago
I was relieved when Apple announced there would be no major UI changes in Snow Leopard. I like the OSX GUI a lot. Some minor tweaks are fine but there's always so much pressure to 'make it look different' that we often give up perfectly functional UIs for the promise of something indescribably better. It rarely works out in the end. Radical GUI overhauls almost have to be tied into radical UI toolkit overhauls to force developers to adopt your fancy new ways of doing things. I am surprised he didn't cover the changes to the Services menu. I feel like it's one of the biggest obvious changes to Snow Leopard. I doubt many people used, or even understood, what the Services menu was in previous versions. It's now an incredibly useful context sensitve feature that appears to be extensible through Automator. This could be the biggest stealth UI paradigm shift in SL. My only gripe is discoverability. Apple did a great job fixing this feature but people who are used to ignoring it will continue to do so. Something simple like an icon next to the menu entry might have caused people to give it another glance. Overall this is a fantastic review. I am a little disappointed that 10.7 came out around page 13. I'll never catch up now.
huyegn 17y ago
That was one of the best technical reviews I've ever read. His composition style flowed incredibly well.
- masklinn 17y ago
  Check out his previous OSX reviews as well, they're glorious: http://arstechnica.com/apple/reviews/2000/10/macos-x-beta.ars http://arstechnica.com/apple/reviews/2000/10/macos-x-beta.ar... http://arstechnica.com/apple/reviews/2001/04/macos-x.ars http://arstechnica.com/apple/reviews/2001/04/macos-x.ars http://arstechnica.com/apple/reviews/2001/10/macosx-10-1.ars http://arstechnica.com/apple/reviews/2001/10/macosx-10-1.ars http://arstechnica.com/apple/reviews/2002/09/macosx-10-2.ars http://arstechnica.com/apple/reviews/2002/09/macosx-10-2.ars http://arstechnica.com/apple/reviews/2003/11/macosx-10-3.ars http://arstechnica.com/apple/reviews/2003/11/macosx-10-3.ars http://arstechnica.com/apple/reviews/2005/04/macosx-10-4.ars http://arstechnica.com/apple/reviews/2005/04/macosx-10-4.ars http://arstechnica.com/apple/reviews/2007/10/mac-os-x-10-5.ars http://arstechnica.com/apple/reviews/2007/10/mac-os-x-10-5.a...
  - cubicle67 17y ago
    This is interesting; you've posted the exact same set of links as mikedouglas below, but 4 hours later, and yet (at the time of writing) your comment's got 3 points, and his is on -1 Is it because he used bit.ly? (I'm not being snarky, just curious)
    - tvon 17y ago
      No clue, I voted him up and was tempted to vote masklinn down for being redundant (but didn't).
    - masklinn 17y ago
      > Is it because he used bit.ly? (I'm not being snarky, just curious) Might be. I hadn't seen his comment yet when I posted mine (was just scrolling down) and just wanted to point the previous reviews to huygen (I'd kinda missed they were on the last page and he'd already got the links through the article itself).
ajtaylor 17y ago
I had the pleasure of working with John a few years ago in Boston. Very smart guy. A bit quirky, but aren't we all in some way? :-) His reviews have always been of special interest to me because he peers into the cracks that most reviewers don't even notice, must less explore.
railsjedi 17y ago
John got me incredibly excited about Grand Central Dispatch. I'm almost tempted to start tinkering with Macruby to see if I can't get that functionality without having to relearn C.
- cubicle67 17y ago
  agreed. best explanation I've seen by a very long shot http://arstechnica.com/apple/reviews/2009/08/mac-os-x-10-6.ars/12 http://arstechnica.com/apple/reviews/2009/08/mac-os-x-10-6.a... and http://arstechnica.com/apple/reviews/2009/08/mac-os-x-10-6.ars/13 http://arstechnica.com/apple/reviews/2009/08/mac-os-x-10-6.a... Edit: you've gotta get excited when you see examples like this before: for (i = 0; i < count; i++) { results[i] = do_work(data, i); } total = summarize(results, count); after: dispatch_apply(count, dispatch_get_global_queue(0, 0), ^(size_t i) { results[i] = do_work(data, i); }); total = summarize(results, count); And there you have it: a for loop replaced with a concurrency-enabled equivalent with one line of code. No preparation, no additional variables, no impossible decisions about the optimal number of threads, no extra work required to wait for all the independent tests to complete. (The dispatch_apply() call will not return until all the tasks it has dispatched have completed.) Stunning.
  - dagw 17y ago
    How does this really differ from what we've been able to do for a good while now with openMP #pragma statements?
    - Keyframe 17y ago
      It doesn't. It, hopefully, alleviates you from counting on explicit thread numbers and threadpool mamagement - offsetting those to the OS, which presumably knows better since it has a larger scope picture of what is going on in the system. Basically a threadpool as any other, but managed by the OS - not you.
  - masklinn 17y ago
    <puts on nazi hat> then again, it's always been utterly trivial to do that in Erlang, just replace Results = lists:map(DoWork, data) by Results = pmap(DoWork, data) with `pmap` being implemented with 15 lines of Erlang.
mhansen 17y ago
Wow. I saw the 23 pages and closed it, but after seeing comments here I'm reading it and I've learnt a hell of a lot. This isn't your everyday review!
- randallsquared 17y ago
  As e1ven mentioned, it really is pretty normal for this guy. :)
mronge 17y ago
I see how GCD is going to make putting long running tasks on a separate thread easy, but I have a bone to pick. In his GCD example he has this example of code - (IBAction)analyzeDocument:(NSButton *)sender { dispatch_async(dispatch_get_global_queue(0, 0), ^{ NSDictionary *stats = [myDoc analyze]; dispatch_async(dispatch_get_main_queue(), ^{ [myModel setDict:stats]; [myStatsView setNeedsDisplay:YES]; [stats release]; }); }); } It takes a potentially long running operation, analyze, and put it on a background thread. Once it's done, the UI is updated on the main thread. GCD made that ridiculously easy, but, this is assuming that the objects reference from your block are thread-safe. It may be that the analyze method isn't thread safe, and mutates some state inside the myDoc object. So it made one part of creating async/multi-threaded apps easier, but you still need to be careful with mutating state like that.
- antonovka 17y ago
  It may be that the analyze method isn't thread safe, and mutates some state inside the myDoc object. So it made one part of creating async/multi-threaded apps easier, but you still need to be careful with mutating state like that. Yes. I believe many Mac developers attempting to leverage GCD are going to get a long-overdue wakeup call regarding their extremely prevalent use of mutable state.
mrshoe 17y ago
What does the y-axis on the graph on the first page represent? I might be missing something, but that curve looks completely arbitrary...
- pohl 17y ago
  He explains in the text: "The releases are distributed uniformly on the Y axis". In other words, there is an equal amount of space between each release. Although someone does point out in the comments that he has left out the initial release of Tiger/x86, which was arguably a 0-features follow-on to Tiger/PPC. That would have changed the shape of the curve. The choice is completely arbitrary.

141 points by glhaynes 17y ago

chris24 17y ago

It's split onto 23 pages? Uh, wow.

dasil003 17y ago
Yeah, this is the first time I'm actually using a "bookmark" as such.

mikedouglas 17y ago

Previous reviews: http://bit.ly/osx10-5 http://bit.ly/osx10-5 http://bit.ly/osx10-4 http://bit.ly/osx10-4 http://bit.ly/osx10-3 http://bit.ly/osx10-3 http://bit.ly/osx10-2 http://bit.ly/osx10-2 http://bit.ly/osx10-1 http://bit.ly/osx10-1 http://bit.ly/osx10-0 http://bit.ly/osx10-0

Derrek 17y ago
I'm curious, why use URL shortners on HN? It's not like you're constrained to 140 characters. (I'm not trying to be a jerk, just trying to understand your reasoning.)
- ZeroGravitas 17y ago
  Also, did you just take those URLs from the last page of the article, and if so why not just link there: http://arstechnica.com/apple/reviews/2009/08/mac-os-x-10-6.ars/23 http://arstechnica.com/apple/reviews/2009/08/mac-os-x-10-6.a...
- mikedouglas 17y ago
  Siracusa tweeted the links the day before, so I had them in a textfile on the desktop. Because the URLs were easier to read than the originals, I didn't think it would be an issue.

sachinag 17y ago

Summary: "Should you buy Mac OS X Snow Leopard? If you're already running Leopard, then the answer is a resounding 'yes.' If you're still running Tiger, well, then it's probably time for a new Mac anyway. When you buy one, it'll come with Snow Leopard." I love Ars; a lot of 'em are here in Chicago, but man, this shit can get out of hand. At least they do the summary themselves on the last page.

dcurtis 17y ago
I'm actually sick of reading countless shallow reviews that just reiterate the crap that you can find by booting Snow Leopard on your own. This article has an amazing amount of information that has not been previously publicized in detail.

e1ven 17y ago

I always love John's OSX reviews; I've been hitting refresh compulsively for the last few days, reloading the URL where it would be. What I find interesting is what he chooses to cover and not cover- The review is 23 pages, which is quite a codex, but choices had to be made.. There is a page dedicated to the specifics of GCD's C interface, but only a paragraph about the revised Services design. In all, I think that Ars does a wonderful job with these reviews, and like 10.6 itself, a lot of the depth is built on top of previous (excellent) releases. For example, we know that John thinks the hybrid finder, which is neither Spacial or truly a file browser, is a strange beast, and he's linked to his epic discussions about the finder in the past. In this review, all that is needed is discussing the changes that bring us into SL, and the review does that well. I've joked to my friends before that sometimes I'm more excited about the Ars review of a new release than I am about actually installing it, and the new version delivers as promised. Snow Leopard looks to be doing a great job in laying the foundation for the next few years of OSX- It's interesting to watch how the relationship between the iPhone and Mac code continues to evolve.

masklinn 17y ago
> I've been hitting refresh compulsively for the last few days, reloading the URL where it would be. Wow, I'm glad to learn I wasn't the only guy doing that.
gommm 17y ago
The two greatest tech reviewers I've read are John Siracusa for OSX and Anand Lal Shimpi (love his series on SSDs).

hyperbovine 17y ago

23 pages when you're gonna buy it anyways.

neilc 17y ago
I think you obviously don't read a review like this because you want to understand whether to plunk down your $29 -- you read this because you want to understand Snow Leopard.
- unalone 17y ago
  I'm slowly drifting away from being a tech geek, and so articles like Siracusa's let me see in ridiculous detail what's going on with a piece of technology that I love. It's a damn good read for the sake of reading.

jsz0 17y ago

I was relieved when Apple announced there would be no major UI changes in Snow Leopard. I like the OSX GUI a lot. Some minor tweaks are fine but there's always so much pressure to 'make it look different' that we often give up perfectly functional UIs for the promise of something indescribably better. It rarely works out in the end. Radical GUI overhauls almost have to be tied into radical UI toolkit overhauls to force developers to adopt your fancy new ways of doing things. I am surprised he didn't cover the changes to the Services menu. I feel like it's one of the biggest obvious changes to Snow Leopard. I doubt many people used, or even understood, what the Services menu was in previous versions. It's now an incredibly useful context sensitve feature that appears to be extensible through Automator. This could be the biggest stealth UI paradigm shift in SL. My only gripe is discoverability. Apple did a great job fixing this feature but people who are used to ignoring it will continue to do so. Something simple like an icon next to the menu entry might have caused people to give it another glance. Overall this is a fantastic review. I am a little disappointed that 10.7 came out around page 13. I'll never catch up now.

huyegn 17y ago

That was one of the best technical reviews I've ever read. His composition style flowed incredibly well.

masklinn 17y ago
Check out his previous OSX reviews as well, they're glorious: http://arstechnica.com/apple/reviews/2000/10/macos-x-beta.ars http://arstechnica.com/apple/reviews/2000/10/macos-x-beta.ar... http://arstechnica.com/apple/reviews/2001/04/macos-x.ars http://arstechnica.com/apple/reviews/2001/04/macos-x.ars http://arstechnica.com/apple/reviews/2001/10/macosx-10-1.ars http://arstechnica.com/apple/reviews/2001/10/macosx-10-1.ars http://arstechnica.com/apple/reviews/2002/09/macosx-10-2.ars http://arstechnica.com/apple/reviews/2002/09/macosx-10-2.ars http://arstechnica.com/apple/reviews/2003/11/macosx-10-3.ars http://arstechnica.com/apple/reviews/2003/11/macosx-10-3.ars http://arstechnica.com/apple/reviews/2005/04/macosx-10-4.ars http://arstechnica.com/apple/reviews/2005/04/macosx-10-4.ars http://arstechnica.com/apple/reviews/2007/10/mac-os-x-10-5.ars http://arstechnica.com/apple/reviews/2007/10/mac-os-x-10-5.a...
- cubicle67 17y ago
  This is interesting; you've posted the exact same set of links as mikedouglas below, but 4 hours later, and yet (at the time of writing) your comment's got 3 points, and his is on -1 Is it because he used bit.ly? (I'm not being snarky, just curious)
  - tvon 17y ago
    No clue, I voted him up and was tempted to vote masklinn down for being redundant (but didn't).
  - masklinn 17y ago
    > Is it because he used bit.ly? (I'm not being snarky, just curious) Might be. I hadn't seen his comment yet when I posted mine (was just scrolling down) and just wanted to point the previous reviews to huygen (I'd kinda missed they were on the last page and he'd already got the links through the article itself).

ajtaylor 17y ago

I had the pleasure of working with John a few years ago in Boston. Very smart guy. A bit quirky, but aren't we all in some way? :-) His reviews have always been of special interest to me because he peers into the cracks that most reviewers don't even notice, must less explore.

railsjedi 17y ago

John got me incredibly excited about Grand Central Dispatch. I'm almost tempted to start tinkering with Macruby to see if I can't get that functionality without having to relearn C.

cubicle67 17y ago
agreed. best explanation I've seen by a very long shot http://arstechnica.com/apple/reviews/2009/08/mac-os-x-10-6.ars/12 http://arstechnica.com/apple/reviews/2009/08/mac-os-x-10-6.a... and http://arstechnica.com/apple/reviews/2009/08/mac-os-x-10-6.ars/13 http://arstechnica.com/apple/reviews/2009/08/mac-os-x-10-6.a... Edit: you've gotta get excited when you see examples like this before: for (i = 0; i < count; i++) { results[i] = do_work(data, i); } total = summarize(results, count); after: dispatch_apply(count, dispatch_get_global_queue(0, 0), ^(size_t i) { results[i] = do_work(data, i); }); total = summarize(results, count); And there you have it: a for loop replaced with a concurrency-enabled equivalent with one line of code. No preparation, no additional variables, no impossible decisions about the optimal number of threads, no extra work required to wait for all the independent tests to complete. (The dispatch_apply() call will not return until all the tasks it has dispatched have completed.) Stunning.
- dagw 17y ago
  How does this really differ from what we've been able to do for a good while now with openMP #pragma statements?
  - Keyframe 17y ago
    It doesn't. It, hopefully, alleviates you from counting on explicit thread numbers and threadpool mamagement - offsetting those to the OS, which presumably knows better since it has a larger scope picture of what is going on in the system. Basically a threadpool as any other, but managed by the OS - not you.
- masklinn 17y ago
  <puts on nazi hat> then again, it's always been utterly trivial to do that in Erlang, just replace Results = lists:map(DoWork, data) by Results = pmap(DoWork, data) with `pmap` being implemented with 15 lines of Erlang.

mhansen 17y ago

Wow. I saw the 23 pages and closed it, but after seeing comments here I'm reading it and I've learnt a hell of a lot. This isn't your everyday review!

randallsquared 17y ago
As e1ven mentioned, it really is pretty normal for this guy. :)

mronge 17y ago

I see how GCD is going to make putting long running tasks on a separate thread easy, but I have a bone to pick. In his GCD example he has this example of code - (IBAction)analyzeDocument:(NSButton *)sender { dispatch_async(dispatch_get_global_queue(0, 0), ^{ NSDictionary *stats = [myDoc analyze]; dispatch_async(dispatch_get_main_queue(), ^{ [myModel setDict:stats]; [myStatsView setNeedsDisplay:YES]; [stats release]; }); }); } It takes a potentially long running operation, analyze, and put it on a background thread. Once it's done, the UI is updated on the main thread. GCD made that ridiculously easy, but, this is assuming that the objects reference from your block are thread-safe. It may be that the analyze method isn't thread safe, and mutates some state inside the myDoc object. So it made one part of creating async/multi-threaded apps easier, but you still need to be careful with mutating state like that.

antonovka 17y ago
It may be that the analyze method isn't thread safe, and mutates some state inside the myDoc object. So it made one part of creating async/multi-threaded apps easier, but you still need to be careful with mutating state like that. Yes. I believe many Mac developers attempting to leverage GCD are going to get a long-overdue wakeup call regarding their extremely prevalent use of mutable state.

mrshoe 17y ago

What does the y-axis on the graph on the first page represent? I might be missing something, but that curve looks completely arbitrary...

pohl 17y ago
He explains in the text: "The releases are distributed uniformly on the Y axis". In other words, there is an equal amount of space between each release. Although someone does point out in the comments that he has left out the initial release of Tiger/x86, which was arguably a 0-features follow-on to Tiger/PPC. That would have changed the shape of the curve. The choice is completely arbitrary.