New OS round-up: Windows 7 and Snow Leopard

Microsoft and Apple have been busy prepping their follow-up releases to Windows Vista and Mac OS X Leopard.  Here’s a bit of info on both along with links to some good reviews-

Apple-

At Ars Technica, John Siracusa puts Max OS X 10.6, “Snow Leopard” through a very extensive 23-page review.  One of the most exciting new features is not a desktop widget or user interface improvement (the Mac OS is already an example of great UI design), but a under-the-hood change called “Grand Central Dispatch”.  Ars Technica goes into deep geek territory, even with programming code examples, to explain why this is.  I’ll try to bring it back down to earth here…

That blazing fast, dual-core (or quad-core) CPU in your computer has a problem- boredom. The challenges of making use of multiple cores are 1) most programs spend much of their time idle, and 2) most programs are not easily broken down into steps that can run simultaneously. Most programs are serial in nature.

The computer industry has moved to multi-core CPUs because the gigahertz race has topped out.  CPUs were hitting a wall; too much power consumed, too much heat output. So instead of building them faster, they changed the emphasis to efficient performance at lower wattage levels and began put many of them on a single chip. The problem then arises of how to make best use of them. You can see this problem any time you get the hourglass in Windows or the spinning beach ball on a Mac.  It means the system is fixated on completing a task and unable to continue useful work on another core of the CPU. It’s a software problem, not a hardware one.

Apple’s solution with Grand Central Dispatch (or GCD) is not a magic bullet that breaks down every task into multiple parallel pieces, but a programming library that makes it as easy as possible for programmers to do it themselves.  Anywhere in their programs they see a chance to split up a task into multiple simultaneous parts, they can insert a few lines of code (literally, just a few) to make use of GCD. It handles all the messy details that have normally made such programming arcane and difficult. It worries about just how many CPU cores your Mac has, and the how & when of scheduling these tasks.  A programmer using GCD can be sure that whether their code is running on a dual-core MacBook or a fully equipped, 8-core Mac Pro, it will run as efficiently as possible.

It will take time for programmers to re-write and update their code to make the most of this.  In Snow Leopard, Apple has already updated the system itself to make use of GCD, and it shows in the speed and responsiveness of this latest upgrade.

The benefit to users is simply this- increased overall performance on the hardware you already own, as programs are updated.  And as newer models come out, with 4 and eventually 8 CPU cores becoming the norm, Snow Leopard (and the versions that follow) will be able to put all that power to use like never before.

Microsoft-

Gizmodo has a series of reviews and articles examining Windows 7, very soon to be available in a general public release.  In the first article (Windows 7 Review: You can quit complaining now) they cover many of the user interface tweaks that focus on usability and productivity, welcome changes that have Windows 7 doing what any good OS should: provide a stable platform for the programs you need, provide tools to help you organize your work, and otherwise stay the hell out of your way.  This is accomplished through new features such as Jump Lists, Aero Peek, the updated Taskbar and new view styles in Explorer.  I’ve covered these briefly here, and the Gizmodo review has some handy screenshots.  They take an even more in-depth look here.  In their words, Microsoft simply took “what was good about Vista, and fixed what people bitched about”.  Nothing earth-shattering, just a solid, competent new Windows, which is usually all we want from Microsoft anyway.

Speaking of competent releases, I have to mention the built-in hardware and driver support.  Not only is it better than Vista, it’s so good it’s spooky.  The only hardware not fully recognized in my own test cases are the biometric fingerprint readers on two different models of Dell laptops.  Windows 7 properly recognized a couple of high-end graphics cards and a HP multi-function PhotoSmart printer/scanner/fax.  Not as good as HP’s own software under XP (hopefully we’ll see Windows 7 versions soon), but good enough that everything works.  It’s the easiest installation of a Windows OS I’ve ever seen.

As far as the internals go, Microsoft has actually been ahead of Apple in making use of dual-and-quad-core CPUs and supporting 64-bit processors.  A fully 64-bit Windows XP and Windows Server were released in 2005, while Snow Leopard is just now getting there. Microsoft has been re-engineering the guts of Windows with each release since Windows 2000 to be increasingly capable of using multi-core systems.  Windows 7 is no exception, with some improvements made to the underlying user interface code that is designed to keep the system responsive, even in cases where a inerrant program would freeze the desktop in XP or Vista.

While Microsoft doesn’t have a single, brilliant programming library like Apple’s new Grand Central Dispatch for application programmers to use, there are a number of tools built-in to the latest versions of Visual Studio (Microsoft’s programming toolkit) that help make “multi-threading” your code easier.

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What both these systems have in common is a goal of incremental fine-tuning and improvement, not a flurry of new features.  Apple made this clear over the past several months, pointing out that Snow Leopard was a slimming down, tweaking and fine-tuning of Leopard.  It even takes up 6GB less disk space. And while the changes in Windows 7 were more numerous, the argument could certainly be made (and has) that these changes were fixes. All over the internet, the common refrain “7 is was Vista should have been” has been repeated over and over since the first Beta release was available. It’s good to see both Microsoft and Apple doing what regular computer users and ultra-geeks alike have been saying for years- “Quit screwing around with everything and changing it- just clean up the bugs, fine-tune it, make it faster. Make what we have now work better. And if you must change something, be sure it’s a sensible improvement, one we can actually use.”

So it’s good news, whether you are a Mac or Windows fan (or both)- we get two truly solid operating system releases that are both very capable of getting the most out of the increasingly fast computer hardware that’s been available the past few years.  On the Mac, this won’t be as significant an increase because Leopard was already quite capable, fast, and a model of good design.  But Windows users, especially those holdouts (like me) still running the trusty-but-aging XP on recent and fast hardware will quickly realize what they’ve been missing.  This is one Mac-vs-PC battle where both sides win.