Posts Tagged ‘snow leopard’

The Difference Between an Apple and Microsoft Upgrade

Like a good little Apple fan, I went out and purchased a copy of the new Snow Leopard OS from my local Mac store yesterday. I got it home, popped open the box, popped the DVD into my MacBook, told it to upgrade and in 45 minutes or so I was playing with the new features of Snow Leopard. This really was my first operating system upgrade as an Apple fan and I have to say I was impressed. I was an Apple fan before the Leopard release, but I didn’t do an in-place upgrade for other reasons at the time.

Why is this cool or even worth noting? Because that was all I did. I didn’t look at some chart to see which copy of Snow Leopard was right for my computer. I didn’t have to double-check that I was running the 32-bit version instead of 64-bit. I didn’t run my computer and peripherals through some software to make sure they were compatible. All I cared about was that I had a MacBook running Leopard, so I purchased Snow Leopard and popped the DVD in the drive. And guess what? My computer now runs faster! In fact, I am now using something like 6 GB less disk space than before.

The other cool part was that I didn’t reinstall any software, nor did I re-activate anything. Unlike doing an upgrade with Microsoft software involved, I wasn’t treated like a pirate and required to jump through hoops to use my software again. I just loaded it again. The user experience from the store to upgrade complete was very smooth and straight-forward.

While it’s certainly true that the upgrade from Leopard to Snow Leopard was far less of a jump than Windows XP to Vista or even Vista to 7, but it really doesn’t matter. I had to put far less care into the upgrade and just did it. And that (among a few other things) is why I do, and will continue to do for the foreseeable future, recommend Apple products to those who ask me their opinion on what computer to buy.

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Filed under Tech Trends : Comments (4) : Aug 29th, 2009

Native Zimbra Syncing to OS X Snow Leopard, But Not The Way We All Thought

One of the biggest features that Apple is touting of the new version of OS X is native Exchange integration. Native Exchange integration is a great feature for Apple since not even Windows offers it. Being a Zimbra fan, I was hoping that Snow Leopard had implemented this via ActiveSync rather than Exchange’s Web Services. It turns out that this is not the case, but it looks like we may still get native syncing just not the way we all thought.

According to a Zimbra forum thread, this will likely happen via CardDAV and CalDAV. Zimbra has CardDAV support slated for version 6.01 which is supposedly scheduled around the same time as Snow Leopard. One of the new, not-so-hyped features of Snow Leopard is the use of CardDAV for Address Book Server along with (of course) support for CardDAV on the client side. OS X as well as Zimbra have supported CalDav for some time so calendar syncing. While it’s not quite as simple as we would have liked, it appears we’re still getting the native syncing that we were hoping for, just not the way that seemed obvious from the beginning.

Update: As @thebitnix points out, it’s not a bad thing that native sync with Zimbra isn’t happening via the Exchange protocols. It was just unexpected that it would happen via different methods.

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Filed under News : Comments (1) : Jun 19th, 2009

Apple Asks Third Party Developers to Test OS X 10.6

Apple has released a pre-release version of the new 10.6 version of OS X to a select few outside developers to test their applications’ stability on the new OS. Mac OS X Snow Leopard was promised after a year from last June’s WWDC so we should be seeing a release in the next six months or so. Apple has been fairly quiet about its new OS, unlike competitor Microsoft’s whose image took a beating with the release of Vista and is pushing the release of its Windows 7. Snow Leopard is a more or less a cleanup release after making a lot of changes when going to Leopard. One of the biggest new features, though, will be native support for Exchange 2007 syncing of mail, calendars, and contacts to the built-in Mail, iCal, and Address Book applications. Snow Leopard will also include support for OpenCL which allows developers to utilitze unused clock cycles in graphics processors as general purpose processors to boost CPU processing speeds on the OS. The change should help the OS be much more responsive as it can steal clock cycles from the GPU should the CPU be busy or waiting on I/O.

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Filed under News : Comments (1) : Feb 5th, 2009