Mac OS X 10.6 Snow Leopard is out. You can find out everything about it, and then some, in John Siracusa's epic 23-page review. John's OCD nitpicking reviews are great, and this one's his best; but read his previous ones in "Looking Back" on page 23, too.

But if you're not up for reading War & Peace, here's what I care about:

1. Cocoa Finder. The Finder is faster, more reliable, and fixes (most of) the bugs in the old Carbon Finder. There are some minor bugs, but for a 1.0 release of an all-new application, it's amazingly stable and similar to the previous Finder, just better.

2. Quicktime X shows video far more attractively (no damned brushed metal everywhere), with lower CPU load & heat.

   Okay, QTX doesn't play all the legacy formats or have all the editing/export features that Quicktime 7 did; that's why QT7 is available as an optional install. But unless you have a specific need for QT7, don't bother.

3. Safari is faster and more stable. I always use ClickToFlash, but Flash should crash your browser far less often.

4. The Services menu is actually useful now. In 10.4, I used ServiceScrubber, but it stopped working on Apple-supplied services at 10.5.

5. On the Objective-C development side, Snow Leopard is mandatory. I've been writing Mac software the last few weeks, and started trying to do 10.5-compatible. A week of beating my head on that wall convinced me that was stupid. 10.6-only development is vastly improved over 10.5: Clang/LLVM, 64-bit, delegate protocols, blocks, new Xcode 3.2. It's as much better than 10.5 development as that was to 10.4 or Java (which were adequate, but never nice).