I installed Snow Leopard on my MacBook Pro as soon as possible this morning. Installation took just over 45 minutes. As others have noted, Snow Leopard is sightly (but noticeably) faster and more responsive than Leopard with nice usability touches scattered about. For example, I like having Exposé available in the Dock, and I appreciate how windows gathered by Exposé are highlighted when moused over. The new contextual menus in the Dock pop are easier to scan. I really like QuickTime X; playback of HD video is silky smooth, and the new minimalist playback pane is excellent.
Bootup time is improved by about 20 seconds, and it’s 20 seconds I can really feel. Also, because of the substantial under-the-hood improvements in Snow Leopard, I expect speed enhancements to be more pronounced in the near future with application and general software updates.
Out of curiosity, I launched an old version PowerPC version of Dreamweaver to see what would happen. Snow Leopard simply asked asked if I wanted to install the Rosetta code required to run older PowerPC apps. I chose not to, to save hard drive space; it’s nice to know I have this option in the future, though I don’t anticipate installing or uing older PowerPC-based software.
We’ll test Snow Leopard in depth and report our findings in a future article!