{"id":100,"date":"2008-06-19T00:01:15","date_gmt":"2008-06-19T07:01:15","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.wambooli.com\/blog\/?p=100"},"modified":"2008-06-19T22:22:13","modified_gmt":"2008-06-20T05:22:13","slug":"mac-os-x-106-snow-leopard","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.wambooli.com\/blog\/?p=100","title":{"rendered":"Mac OS X 10.6 – Snow Leopard"},"content":{"rendered":"

Apple is doing something revolutionary with the next release of its OS X operating system. Rather than add new features or show off a fancy new interface or “skin,” they’re going to hone the sucker’s speed. I’m blown away!
\n
\nThe next release of OS X is version 10.6, dubbed Snow Leopard<\/em>. What Apple is doing with this operating system is tuning up the software. They’re adding no new features. Instead, the programmers are going to review thousands of lines of code and optimize it. The end result will be a faster, leaner operating system.<\/p>\n

I would love to see such a thing happen on the PC side. In fact, it was once common: many developers would forgo the lust for new product features and instead concentrate on speed and optimization. WordPerfect for DOS as famous for doing this: up until version 5, each new release of WordPerfect was faster than the previous one.<\/p>\n

Making software faster should make sense, but such an effort is an uphill battle; in most companies, sales is in the driver’s seat, not engineering. Salespeople don’t appreciate optimization as much as they crave new splashy features. Optimizing code takes time and, arguably, with faster hardware and more RAM, such efforts seem futile when compared with flashy new features that don’t improve performance but merely add bullet-points to the side of the software box.<\/p>\n

I would like to think that the customer prefers speed over features. Yet it’s been so long since any major software company has offered speed improvements. Only occasionally will a new release of some game go for performance over features. But even that is rare.<\/p>\n

Imagine if Microsoft were driven by the coders and not the sales beast. What would have happened if Windows Vista was merely an optimized, faster version of Windows XP? My guess is the same thing that will happen when Snow Leopard is released: people will upgrade in droves.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Apple is doing something revolutionary with the next release of its OS X operating system. Rather than add new features or show off a fancy new interface or “skin,” they’re going to hone the sucker’s speed. I’m blown away!<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[3],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-100","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-main"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.wambooli.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/100","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.wambooli.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.wambooli.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.wambooli.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.wambooli.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=100"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.wambooli.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/100\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.wambooli.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=100"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.wambooli.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=100"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.wambooli.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=100"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}