Although Apple is marketing Mac OS X Snow Leopard as an operating system update with “no new features,” under the hood improvements will actually translate into a slew of new enhancements, five of which are described herein.
Five Undisclosed Features of Apple’s Mac OS X Snow Leopard
About The Author
Eugenia Loli
Ex-programmer, ex-editor in chief at OSAlert.com, now a visual artist/filmmaker.
Follow me on Twitter @EugeniaLoli
Did I miss something?
If I remember correctly, there is a company that is transforming your common MacBook into a Table PC:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Axiotron_Modbook
I do not know if the device has been introduced to the end-user audience though… But it was announced at MacWorld 2007.
As far as I know, it is an authorized mod… (i.e. You won’t get sued by Apple)
Edited 2008-06-24 04:09 UTC
Personally, I’d very much enjoy ZFS and finally delete my HFS+ partition.
I would too, but are the pillocks over at Adobe going to support it? Currently, if you try to use the case-sensitive version of HFS+, while everything else in the world will work, Photoshop will complain that you are running on an unsupported filesystem and will refuse to run.
Edited 2008-06-24 15:21 UTC
Are you serious? I was not aware that Adobe software were sensitive to case-sensitive filesystem (No pun intended).
I suppose I am lucky to have no adobe-application installed on my Mac (I do not need them)… However, this kind of limitation is kinda sad (And feel a bit amateurish)
Are all Adobe Application behave the same way? or just Photoshop?
Just use case-insensitive ZFS.
Can someone running OS X confirm the sizes of some of those apps… How the heck is this TextEdit application 22mb? AbiWord compiled for Linux x86 is 5mb and I have to assume something called “TextEdit” has less features (again, I don’t use OS X so maybe that assumption is my problem).
Then again, look at these other apps:
iChat 111mb / Pidgin 2mb
Mail 287mb / Thunderbird 33mb
Safari 64mb / Firefox 4mb
(Note that even the upcoming versions of all the Mac apps are still substantially larger)
Of course, as I am sure someone will point out, the size of the install might have little to do with performance (both theoretically and empirically). It could be a difference between binaries on OS X and Linux? Or perhaps Mac apps have tons of documentation? Or perhaps the old apps contain both PowerPC and x86 binaries?
Or perhaps Linux apps make use of a lot more shared libraries hence the applications themselves need to implement less functionality. On the other hand, I would think that a private company (Apple) could facilitate sharing of code more effectively than an amorphous group of worldwide developers (OSS)…
Edited 2008-06-24 05:02 UTC
The size of an application in MacOS X paints a different picture than in other operating systems. While Pidgin weighs in at 2MB it relies on other libraries and packages installed on your machine. iChat on the other hand includes all needed files included the code to run on both PowerPC and Intel as well as about 18 language packs.
That’s the difference between apps on the Mac and elsewhere. For the most part, if made correctly, apps on the mac are just one icon that is really a package of all needed files. Linux you have the binary and the libraries and packages in multiple folders within your root drive.
Just my 2 cents into why
Yep. It makes installing and uninstalling applications very easy, at the cost of duplicating some libraries that might be shared otherwise.
mb = millibits?
Most applications built for Leopard are complex binaries that include PowerPC and Intel code.
Firefox 3 on my PowerPC machine runs a hefty 45.3 MB once installed. That doesn’t include my user data. Thunderbird 2.0.0.16pre is a whopping 64 MB.
iChat is more than a simple chatting application now. It contains code to connect with the other user and share that user’s “screen”. It also has code for voice and for video.
I suspect the slim down in Snow Leopard is partly the fact that there are no PowerPC binaries involved at this moment (and perhaps, in the future).
Generally, the multiple language resources are there and with Mac OS X, many, many languages are supported by the default installation.
Also, if resolution independence is well-supported, they may have dumped their bitmapped graphics for SVG or another vector format.
As with all developer releases, things will change significantly before the final release and bloat will likely happen naturally, as slim and fast rarely work correctly.
Those are bogus sizes. Here’s what I get on my Mac (rounded to nearest MB):
Automator — 2 MB
Calculator — 2 MB
Chess — 4 MB
Dictionary — 1 MB
Font Book — 2 MB
iCal — 28 MB
iChat — 22 MB
Image Capture — 2 MB
iSync — 15 MB
Mail — 45 MB
Preview — 3 MB
QuickTime — 31 MB
Safari — 51 MB
Stickies — 1 MB
TextEdit — 1 MB
Stickies and TextEdit are actually less than one MB each (444 KB and 992 KB respectively), but I rounded them up. The only ones even close to the chart are Safari and Chess, and some are down right laughable! A 13 MB calculator? A 22 MB rich text editor? I know AppleInsider has been prone to speculation and exaggeration in the past, but what the hell?
As others have pointed out, one must consider that a Mac .app is actually a special folder with all components necessary to run the application; it’s roughly equivalent to compiling every necessary library and support file into the executable on other platforms. Because of this, Mac apps are generally a little bit bigger than their Windows and *nix counterparts, but not by nearly as much as the article makes out. This method also nullifies dependency hell (DLL hell for the Windows camp) which means much less stress on the end user.
Those article reports the correct application size if you used the default OS X install and installed support for all 18 languages.
I thought about that right after I posted. I always strip out every language but US English when I install OS X; even though I speak Spanish and a little Japanese, I don’t work in those languages or any of the others so they are unnecessary.
I still think it’s a sensationalist article though. I wouldn’t be a bit surprised if their “Snow Leopard” figures are actually just plain Leopard with the languages removed.
I can honestly say I’ve never seen dll hell on my Windows machine since moving to win2k. What is this thing you’re talking about?
Maybe you’ve used Xslimmer, removed languages or whatever. The original sizes were pretty accurate. From Macbook Air 10.5.3 with default install:
Mail: 289 MB
iCal: 91 MB
TextEdit: 22 MB
For TextEdit, the universal binary itself is only 264 kB. Every language seems to consume about 1 megabyte of space, and there are many languages. The language packs consist of lots and lots of files, 8 to 200 kB in size. Strings, html help texts (400 kB), icons (200 kB) etc.
in fact, apple takes it even further with both PPC and Intel binaries shipping in every package.
proper package management and deployment stories deal with the issues around shared libraries. on modern windows and linux machines, it is a complete non issue, and keeps the size of binaries very small.
If you browse the safari package, you’ll see that the Safari executable weighs in at 3 MB. I believe that’s with X86, PPC (with PPC 64 and x86-64?) support thrown in to the mix. Knowing that, it’s actually quite slim.
60+ MB is dedicated to resources. The breakdown of the resources are as follows:
– There are 18 translations for Safari, each translation weighs in at about 3.5 MB. That includes all the UI strings and help files.
– About 500 KB for the various icons used.
So if you threw away the stuff you didn’t need, the executable size could drop to 1.5 MB or 750 KB, depending on what it currently supports. The 60+ MB resources can drop to 3.5 MB.
edit: Firefox 3 on OS X weighs in a 45.5 MB, and that’s only including the English language support!
Edited 2008-06-24 07:05 UTC
The reason why OS X applications have such sizes are several:
– First yes, each application bundle (represented by a simple application icon to the user so that she/he does not have to know what is gong on) has powerPC and Intel binaries. This is the first factor of increasing the size of the application that the user sees.
– The second reason is localization. By default (the user can change that during the OS installation) all supported languages are installed for each application of the system. That means that every application has its own interface localization included in the bundle. Again the user does not know that (and he/she does not need), the correct language will be loaded by the OS according the language set by the user. This power has a cost, localization is size consuming so each application has a bigger requirement for its storage on disk.
– OS X supports 32 and 64 bits applications in the same time. That means that one application bundle can not only have powerpc and intel binaries but also the 64 binaries. In this case this is a 4-ways universal binary, because the bundle encapsulates then a binary for 32 bits power, one for 64 bits powerpc, one for intel 32 bits and one for intel 64 bits. This is required because 64 bits applications do not work on 32 bits processors. The user sees only one application but in reality there can be up to 4 independent binaries that the OS can load on the basis of the type of the architecture. TextEdit on Leopard is an example of that, as it is a 64 bits app that you can use to open files bigger than 4 GB. It is easy then to understand that a 4-ways universal binary will have a much bigger requirement for storage but you get a tremendous flexibility in different architectures support.
On Snow Leopard, Apple is presumably implementing new technics to reduce the size of their applications (bundles). One way is to centralize the localization of the application in one container so that each application does not need to to have its own localization resources. Instead, they can dynamically load the appropriate localization from one single location. This alone will reduce significantly the size of the applications.
The other referred solution is to use vector graphics instead of bitmapped raster graphics. With the generalization of resolution independence in OS X, this is a natural move and it will also contribute a lot to reduce the applications size.
Lastly, Apple may remove the support of powerpc, so that powerpc (32 or 64 bits) binaries are not included in order to reduce the overall application size. I am not sure if is already done because from the Snow Leopard screenshots that i could see, all buit-in applications in Snow Leopard are still Universal Binaries (as shows from the Finder on the screenshots) so maybe the reduce in size observed between Leopard and Snow leopard does not even include removing powerpc binaries yet.
In other words, if Apple decided to drop powerpc support, we may see even smaller sizes….
Windows has 64 and 32 bit support, and doesn’t solve the deployment issues by packaging everything possible together. Linux has 32 and 64 bit support, and support for every platform under the sun, and they have found ways to not package every possible configuration either.
hey – it’s a feature!
i like the ability to switch start-disks and programs between my ppc & intel machines. comes in handy if there is a problem. and sometimes, you even need the ppc-version on an intel-mac, because you want to use an old plugin which is ppc-only.
and it’s easy to remove the binaries you don’t want if you really care. but as has been said before, the localizations use much more space.
$cd /Applications/Mail.app/Contents/MacOS
$ls -lt
$-rwxrwx-x 1 root admin 1M Jan 3 17:11 Mail
That’s the size of the executable on Tiger 10.4.11.
As has already been pointed out the application bundles include dylibs redundant in many cases, all localizations, both PPC/Intel and more.
The more Cocoa the OS the smaller you’ll see these “bundles” become.
TextEdit is actually fairly full featured, it has rich text (i.e. fonts, italics, etc.), and it even has Microsoft DOC compatibility. TextEdit is only 4.5 MB here though, because I use xslimmer to strip the PPC code in universal binaries (and more in TextEdit, as the default install is a four-way 32/64 bit intel and PPC universal binary) and unnecessary languages.
textedit uses 3 mb on my computer, that’s the universal binary (264 kb) and support for two languages. but textedit doesn’t do that much on it’s own anyway, but calls the coretext framework. that’s another universal binary of 2,7 mb.
the universal binary of webkit is only 52 kb – because it links to the webkit framework (38,4 mb) and the normal safari binary (3 mb).
I should have remembered that programs get a rich-text editor library in OS X for free, this goes back to NeXTStep I think, and realized that TextEdit would of course use it. Similar things of course for are the case for WebKit, though of course embedding browser engines is something you can do with two most popular browsers as well.
You have to remember that the application bundles contain both the PPC and Intel code as well as the language localizations…
Also textedit is more than just a simple text editor… It’s can view, edit and save files in a variety of formats: .txt. .rtf, .rtfd, .html, .webarchive, .odt, .docx, .doc, .xml and formats that are not .txt can include graphics, text formatting, tables and lists. (culled from the TextEdit Help viewer).