Snow Leopard, a bargain at twice the price! 2009/08/28

I’ve been using Snow Leopard as my primary OS since WWDC’09 and regularly informing my fellow Omni Groupies that many of the individual features are worth $30 by themselves. They don’t disagree with this sentiment, but I think they might have an issue with the volume of my proclamations.

Today is Snow Leopard release day, and I can finally shout publicly about the amazing work in Snow Leopard! Each of these are going to make development easier and will result in more powerful Mac OS X apps for our users.

First, there are some huge new technologies for developers that will enable entirely new types of applications:

Blocks. This has been out of the bag for a while now, but it will be years until the full effect of this enhancement is in force. Never has ^ been a more loved character.
Grand Central Dispatch. Hand in hand with blocks, this is a new way to make efficient use of multicore systems. This will lead to easier development of applications that use all the power in your Mac.
OpenCL. If taking advantage of up to 16 cores in your Mac wasn’t enough, how about running the same code on your GPU. Or several GPUs and all your CPUs?
Clang/LLVM. Amazingly good compiler infrastructure, including a new front-end, static code analyzer, better code generation, and faster builds. If you haven’t run the clang static analyzer on your code, you have bugs. I don’t know how many, but it isn’t zero.

There are also a ton of improvements to existing features. Each of these is worth the piddly $30 Apple is asking for this update:

Xcode is improved in so many ways, I can’t even think about going back to 10.5.
NSImage/CGImage impedance mismatch cleanup and CALayer support for NSImage content.
Per-thread garbage collection!
ObjC associated storage. This can be used for good|evil, but when you need it, you really, really need it.
Smart quotes, URL-ification, and more Text Checking support that will let us delete load of code.
NSPasteboard/Services has a much cleaner API and vastly improved user experience. Also, there was a song…
A whole ton of new CALayer subclasses that handle fiddly jobs for us.
CALayer.geometryFlipped. Now you can do flipped content reasonably in CoreAnimation!
-[CALayer needsDisplayForKey:]. Now we can easily add our own properties that animate the content of layers
GPU-dependent CALayer size restrictions lifted. This still seems too good to be true.
Sudden Termination: Apps that opt into this will quit immediately when they have nothing to save on logout/shutdown.
NSFileManager rewrite. One of the cruftiest classes gets some much needed love, and some great new features like incremental writing.
NSURL “bookmark” support — easy aliases for everyone!
Concurrent document opening. If an app takes advantage of this, it can avoid hanging when opening a large document.

These are just a few of the things we’ve already benefited from or that we’ve been looking forward to for years. Beyond this, a search of the system headers for 10_6 is a seemingly never-ending litany of features developers have wanted for years and reading the release notes is a trip into the future.

Congratulations and a hearty “Thank you!” to everyone at Apple and all the developers submitting bug reports over the years!