Snow Leopard

original.pngOn August 26 Apple released the latest version of it's MacIntosh operating system, OS X 10.6, code-named Snow Leopard. Some have called it a service pack while other say it is a foundation for something bigger. Whether a service pack or future proof update, the sales figures have Wall Street buzzing causing Apple's share price to soar. Good for my IRA and good for my Mac. But what does Snow Leopard offer and what is in it for you? Read on.

No PowerPC allowed

The bad news is that Apple, in the interest of moving the platform into the future, has dropped support for the PowerPC. Snow Leopard will not install on a G4 or G5 Mac. Time for an upgrade?

Under the hood

The refinements in Snow Leopard can be broken down into two general areas with a small number of user interface (UI) improvements.

  • Technology
  • Exchange

Exchange 2007

Like most of corporate America, my employer uses Microsoft Exchange to provide enterprise email and calendar services. On Windows, I use the Outlook client to read email and manage my time. Outlook is part of Microsoft Office for Windows. The MacIntosh Business Unit of Microsoft does not provide Outlook for the Mac but instead provides Entourage; something that most agree is a poor substitute. In any case, to connect my Mac to the corporate email and calendar service, I had to purchase Microsoft Office for Mac.

Snow Leopard changes that requirement.  The Snow Leopard versions of Mail.app, iCal and AddressBook provide built-in support for Exchange Server 2007. Even though I was using the corporate VPN, setup was relatively easy using the Autodiscovery wizard that each application provides. Autodiscovery will use the information provided with your email address to find all the information needed to setup Exchange support. I completed the setup in Mail.app and iCal and AddressBook were setups automatically. Not everything worked for me though. For some reason, iCal won't sync with my Exchange calendar. Other than Exchange 2007 support nothing else appears to be (visually) difference about these apps except I can now manage my personal and business calendar from one app and view them all at once in a single window.

32bit/64bit

64bit_icon_20090824.jpgSome of the changes in Snow Leopard will only be exciting to computer scientist and software developers but will still yield tangible benefits to most users. Nearly all system applications — including the Finder, Mail, Safari, iCal, and iChat — are now built with 64-bit code to take full advantage of the multicore CPUs in the Intel processor. This configuration will boost overall performance because the Mac can now take advantage of more memory (16 terabytes) and process data twice as fast. However, not all Intel Macs are created equal. To run Snow Leopard in 64 bit mode, you'll need an Intel Core 2 Duo processor and a 64 bit EFI. If you bought your Mac in late 2008 or sometime in 2009, you could take advantage of 64-bit computing with Snow Leopard. Right now most applications are still written for a 32-bit computing world, so this isn't such a big deal.

32 or 64 bit, there is still some processing improvement to be had in Snow Leopard even for those older Intel Macs. The Intel Core Duo and Core 2 Duo processors are two processors on a single chip. Apple has developed a new Application Programming Interface (API) called Grand Central Dispatch (GCD). "Grand Central Dispatch takes full advantage by making all of Mac OS X multicore aware and optimizing it for allocating tasks across multiple cores and processors." To take full advantage of these processors software applications will need to be reprogrammed. Once software developers start programming their applications to use GCD, they will be able to boost that applications' performance on a dual-core Mac mini, an 8-core Mac Pro, or anything in between.

Apple has also developed OpenCL, a new API I to take advantage of the fast graphics CPU (GPU) in Intel Macs thus potentially making the MacIntosh user interface (UI) faster. "OpenCL in Snow Leopard is a technology that makes it possible for developers to tap the vast gigaflops of computing power currently in the graphics processor and use it for any application." We may finally see the Mac become a computing platform that gamers will like.

090614_quicktimex.pngYou can see evidence of the new APIs, (GCD and OpenCL), at work in the new version of QuickTime; QuickTime X. QuickTime X is quite visually different it's predecessor. If less is more, then QuickTime X embodies that. I open a .mov file from my library, and I am presented with a spartan black box in the middle of my screen. Playback is smooth even on my 3-year-old MacBook (2GHz Intel Core Duo, 2GB RAM). One of the features I love, that was absent in the previous version, is that I can now record video straight from QuickTime. "QuickTime Player can now capture audio or video using the built-in camera and microphone in your Mac." I can now create high definition video-cast and how-to videos with QuickTime and post them directly to MobileMe or YouTube. Thanks to QuickTime I can now launch my movie career.

Is that all?

While there are a large number of other "refinements" in Snow Leopard the ones I talked about here are the most noticeable. Services, Exposé and Stacks has small but useful improvements, Time Machine is faster, and Preview has been enhanced. Is it worth it to upgrade? I think the three items I outline here justify the $29 cost of Snow Leopard. I no longer have to switch to Entourage to read my corporate mail and manage my work calendar. My three-year-old computer seems faster than it did before and I am starting a side career in video. If you don't have an Intel Mac, the question is moot. For all Intel Mac owners running Leopard or Tiger, get yourself a copy and install. If you have more than one Intel Mac (like I do) get the family pack for $49. It's a good deal.

Backblaze: Time Machine for the Cloud


BackBlaze
BackBlaze

Last year my friend had to deliver some distressing news to his wife. The external hard drive on which he had been storing their family photos failed. The problem had started a few weeks earlier when his wife mentioned that the hard drive was making some strange noises. My friend had planned on backing up the disk to DVD but being a busy IT manager he just never got around to it.
At that time I remember thinking smugly to myself, if only he had a Mac with Time Machine he would have been protected. I realized later on that I was wrong. I use Time Machine to backup three of the household Macs to Time Capsule once a day. This protects my data should the local hard drive fail but I lose ALL of my backups if the Time Capsule disk fails. I wanted a backup system that was more robust; one from which I could survive a local disk and local network storage failure. That's where Backblaze comes in.

Backblaze is a cloud based service that backs up everything on your computer except your operating system, applications, and temporary files. The service costs $5/month ($50/year) and provides three methods to recover your data. You can download your files from the Backblaze web site, order them delivered to you on DVD ($99, 4GB max) or for a $189 fee Backblaze will deliver your files on a 500GB Western Digital external USB hard drive. The 500GB seems quite reasonable to me considering that I now have 74GB of data (70GB of photos, 4GB of documents) stored on Backblaze.

After registering for the service I downloaded and installed the Mac version of the Backblaze client. The Mac client is Intel only. Backblaze also offers a client for Windows XP, Vista and Windows 7.

One of the first things I did was setup the frequency of backups. By default, Backblaze simply backs up all the time so you don't have to remember. But if you wish, you can schedule Backblaze to backup at a convenient time (like the middle of the night) or only when you click "Backup Now". I chose the "Continuously" option. I take a lot of photos during the summer and I find myself emptying the SD card from my Nikon at least once a week.

Backblaze will backup any USB or Firewire drive I have attached to my computer as long as I leave the external hard drive attached to my computer all the time. It was simple to add my 500 GB G-Drive Q Firewire HD to the backup queue. Good thing too, since this is where I keep my digital photos.

To prevent users from abusing the service network (NAS) drives, Time Machine drives , remotely mounted computers or volumes, or shared volumes do not get backed up.

From the setting screen the user can also set options to control how much local network bandwidth is dedicated to backup as alerts for failed incomplete backups.

By default Backblaze backups everything on the main hard drive except for applications and the operating system. It also does not backup files over 4GB. Backblaze claims that most users do not create files larger than 4GB. I can't disagree with that and they do make an except for iPhoto library files.

I don't really need every user folder to be backed-up. My iPhoto library are stored respectively in the Photos and Documents folders on the externally drive. Unfortunately the mechanism that Backblaze uses to mange what gets backed-up and what doesn't is not easy. I had to explicitly exclude all the folders that I did not want backed-up — on both the local and external drive. If you have more than one user on the local machine this can take considerable time.

The Backblaze console provides a fair amount of reporting including how much storage each type of file will use and which files are scheduled for backup.  This was an eye opener for me. I did not realize how large my iPhoto library had grown. A drive failure would surely be a painful experience.

I've been using the Backblaze service and software for just a few weeks and so far I have no had any problems.  Of course, the true test of service is how easy it is to service a hard drive failure.  Knowing that I can rebuild my machine and recover all my files with a single click gives me piece of mind.

Paranoid about data loss?

I think maybe I have a little too much storage space. Between Amazon S3, the two 500GB G-Drive Q external drives and the 500GB Apple Time Capsule, I have over 2TB of storage. I don't think I have that many photo and family videos and my iTunes library isn't that large either.  The Amazon S3 is used to backup photos from our iPhoto library stored on the G-Drive Q Media and documents stored on the G-Drive Q.  The Time Capsule is for backing up the three Macs via Time Machine.picture-11