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After upgrading this morning to the last major release of Apple’s Mac OS X I decided to share with you what my first impressions of the new system where.

I did an “in-place-upgrade” on my early-2008 MacBook Pro which was previously running Leopard in version 10.5.8. The upgrade took place in about 45 minutes and there were special things to note. This was my first upgrade from one version of Mac OS X to another version and it turned out to be as hassle-free as anything else on this platform. In no way comparable to upgrading Windows.

Let’s break the following down in positive and negative experiences:

Positive:

• My system runs noticeably smoother, not to say “faster” now. Applications like Mail are snappier than ever. Another example would be iTunes: when scrolling through the album artwork everything is now very very smooth. Same with Aperture which now deals with thousands of RAW-shot photos like this was nothing…
• I gained about 12 GB disk space by that installation – pretty well done!
• None of my killer apps was removed or didn’t work. (see below for not so important exceptions)
• Mac OS X now has a default monitor gamma of 2.2 instead of 1.8 in previous versions and though I had already fixed that for myself the colors now look far vibrant than ever
• the upgrade again was a proof of fact that things in “the Mac world” are much easier than anywhere else and I again noticed that I was mostly worrying too much and thinking too complicated about things like upgrading and so on
• lots of little refinements: things like “Put back” in the trash or to know how far Time Machine is with checking what it has to back up (which by the way is done faster than ever before) and many many more that I just have started to discover…

Negative:

• After the upgrade the first thing I noticed was that LittleSnitch was not starting (would have been great to at least be notified that it’s not compatible with Snow Leopard and I have to update it)
• the only peripheral that didn’t work is my ExpressCard-eSATA-adapter which is not so nice because I used this for my backup volume which made it much faster than using USB – and at the moment there is no update of the Mac driver in sight :-(
• all my system alert sounds (which I had always left on the Leopard default) were gone after the upgrade because due to whatever system sounds were enabled but set to zero volume in System Preferences – weird!
• Spotlight had to reindex all of my disk which made it impossible to use it as a program launcher for that 30min. And it has still not gotten that confident at finding my things like the one on Leopard – but this will only take some time.
• the new Cocoa-based Finder is great but sometimes very buggy when dragging items around the place and using the spacebar.

Conclusion

All in all I have to say that the upgrade was worth every cent! For 29€ this is just great.

And from what I experienced with OS upgrades in the past: it’s not usual to have a system that is faster and snappier on less weight (both memory and disk space) when upgrading on the same hardware. But the propably best thing after all is: this release set Mac OS X up for the next years – allowing even more and even cooler features in the future.

Well done Apple!

I’m glad to tell you that I’ve finally got one of my next big topics done: Jacqueline is now publicly available and open sourced at Google Code, available under the conditions of the Apache license 2.0. I hope this will also help me to improve Jacqueline’s core architecture in future releases to heavily improve performance. Jacqueline uses Maven as a build system, it relies on it in every key aspect. Jacqueline uses JTidy, Sushi, Apache Batik, …

One of the next projects in my free time is to optimize Jacqueline for multi-threaded execution which I hope will dramatically improve performance.

Make sure to check it out (literally) and tell me your thoughts.