Software > Operating Systems

Snow Leopard – is it for you?

By Lasa Information Systems Team

This article takes a look under the hood of Apple’s upgraded operating system to see what users will get and help to make the upgrade decision easier.

Snow Leopard Mac OS 10.6

Autumn 2009 has seen the release of Microsoft’s Windows 7, Ubuntu Linux 9.10 and Apple’s Mac OS 10.6, aka Snow Leopard. All three operating systems feature significant improvements – are any of them likely to change the way you work?

Why upgrade?

Snow Leopard focuses mostly on improving processing speed and connectivity with Microsoft Windows and Exchange Server. Unlike the licensing complexity that is Windows 7, Snow Leopard currently comes in one version at one price (under £25GBP from Amazon.co.uk) for business and home users. Users of Windows and Linux will probably not be enticed to switch to Mac - unless they were already planning to - but this is a useful and nicely priced upgrade for existing users of Apple’s OS 10.5.

Microsoft Exchange Server support

Snow Leopard’s biggest new feature is support for Microsoft Exchange, Microsoft’s e-mail, contact, and calendar server.  Connecting the Mac to the server is as simple as adding an Exchange account in Apple’s Mail application, and it will automatically synchronise e-mail messages in Mail, contacts in Address Book, and Exchange calendars and tasks in iCal.  This makes it even easier to integrate the Mac into organisations that have standardised on Microsoft Exchange.

64 bit speed boost

Under the bonnet, the biggest change is that almost every Apple application included in Snow Leopard has been rewritten to run in 64-bit mode.  The computing world is slowly moving towards 64 bit computing for two main reasons:  (i) 64-bit computing is necessary if you want programs on your computer to have access to more than 4GB of RAM and (ii) certain intensive tasks - processing large video or images files – will run much quicker.  You’ll need a newer Mac powered by an Intel Core 2 Duo processor or an Intel Xeon processor to take advantage of the extra processing power. 

Compare to this Microsoft which ships the 32 bit version of Windows 7 in four different flavours, and the 64 bit version in Home Premium, Professional and Ultimate, all at different price points.

Preview

Apple’s Preview app – which is able to preview PDFs and image file formats like TIFF, JPEG and GIF - gets an upgrade.  Preview can now detect and import images directly from a USB-connected digital camera or scanner.   It also provides some basic image correction tools for your imported images. 

Preview also gets a new Annotations Toolbar.  This enables you to add annotations or comments to document or image opened in Preview.

Accessibility?

The Mac OS has always been well known for good usability and design, and VoiceOver, the Mac’s inbuilt screen reader that narrated whatever was on the Mac’s display, gets a major upgrade.  VoiceOver is now able to read a summary of a Web page - including the title, number of tables, headers and links.  It can also tag areas of your favourite web pages, a very handy feature of you want prefer to jump to certain parts of a page such as “Top Stories”, etc.

Make the computer easier to see

Display magnifier
Colour and contrast adjustment
Custom icon sizes

Ability to use without a display

Screen reader
Work with Braille displays
Dialogue box talking alerts
Talking clock

Use computer without mouse or keyboard

On screen keyboard
Handwriting recognition (with suitable input device)
Speech recognition

Make the mouse easier to use

Change size of mouse pointer and cursor
Use keyboard to control mouse
Multi-touch laptop mouse pad

Make keyboard easier to use

Adjust for sticky keys
Adjust for key repeat
Adjust for slow keys

Use text and visual alternatives for sounds

Visual Alerts available

To compare accessibility features in Apple Snow Leopard, Windows and Ubuntu 9.10 take a look at the Operating System Accessibility Chart (pdf).

Malware Check

Mac’s have also long enjoyed a reputation for being more secure and less virus prone than other operating systems.  Snow Leopard introduces Malware Check to provide a certain degree of built-in protection against dangerous software downloaded from the Internet or disk images mounted from external drives.

In conclusion

The three operating systems we’ve covered offer significant upgrades to their existing users, and if you're perfectly happy with your existing OS, there is unlikely to be a compelling reason to make the jump to a new OS.