The name's Leopard... Snow Leopard... and how I wish it was 10.7 instead of 10.6 so I could extend these hokey James Bond allusions further. That said, it is closer than the truth than you may think. Apple has given Snow Leopard a license to kill... but this doesn't have anything to do with espionage or even spyware (pardon the pun). Instead, it has everything to do with Apple's desire to make the shutdown process faster.

One of the systemwide refinements tells us that "Snow Leopard is up to 80 percent faster when shutting down." If you've ever waited impatiently for your Mac notebook to shut down while your flight was boarding or at the end of the day when you are anxious to get home, Apple is looking to reduce that frustration.

Towards that end, Snow Leopard allows developers to mark their applications as "clean" or "dirty" -- not that kind of dirty!

Here's an example of what "clean" vs "dirty" means in this context: imagine you have been working in Pages, but all of your documents are saved (or maybe you've closed all the documents but Pages is still running). Pages can mark itself "clean" which is similar to saying "I'm ready when you are!"

Now imagine that you are working in Pages, and you've saved your file, but after you saved it you made some additional changes. Perhaps you have several documents open and unsaved, or you've got a Preferences dialog open. If you look at the 3 circles in the top-left corner of the window, you'll see that the one of the far left has a hole in the middle which goes away when you save the file. If any of those situations are true, Pages is considered "dirty," the programmatic equivalent of "Just a moment please!"

When the user tells the operating system to shutdown (not just sleep), the operating system will look to see which applications are "ready to go" and applications are still looking for their metaphorical keys. The ones that are ready? They get killed, and killed hard.

It's like the difference between telling an app to "Quit" versus "Force Quit." If you ask it to Quit, it is going to check to see if it needs to do anything before it does. If you tell it to Force Quit, it's just going to go away.

If you are familiar with the Terminal, you may have used 'kill' to stop some process from running. Usually if you want to 'kill' an application nicely, you send 'kill -TERM' ("software termination signal") which says "OK, clean up your things and let's go!" However if you find that something refuses to stop, you might use 'kill -9' which is referred to as SIGKILL, described as "non-catchable" and "non-ignorable." This is like picking up your child and carrying him or her away because it is time to go now with no questions asked. Applications which mark themselves as "clean" are telling the operating system: "You can use 'kill -9'/Force Quit on me without worrying about losing anything."

How much longer does "Quit" take compared to "Force Quit"? Maybe only a second or two, maybe a fraction of a second. But if you have a lot of applications running and the majority of them can skip that time, it helps the overall speed of the shutdown. Think of it like this: imagine you had a bunch of family members over and you were trying to get everyone out of the house to go to a restaurant: young kids, a couple of older aunts and uncles, and maybe grampa. You've probably asked something like this: "Does everyone have everything they need? Kids, did you go to the bathroom? Uncle Joe, did you get your coat and hat? Grampa, do you have your sweater in case it's too cold?" Even if everyone says "yes" it took longer than if you said "Let's go" and everyone replied "We're all ready!"

Is this a "sexy" feature of our newest cat-themed operating system? Not at all, but it is one of those "little details" that makes life a little easier as a Mac user: a little faster, a little more attention to detail, and exactly the sort of thing Apple promised to pay attention to with Snow Leopard.

(Big tip o' the hat to John Siracusa's epic Snow Leopard review at Ars Technica for bringing my attention to this feature. I look forward to John's operating system reviews almost as much as I look forward to the operating systems themselves.)

photo via flickr creative commons: danzen

The U.S. Copyright Royalty Board decided today to keep rates the same for digital music stores, kneecapping Apple's threat to shut down the iTunes Store rather than operate at a loss.

The three-member board kept the royalty rate at 9.1 cents, and mandated a 24-cent rate for ringtones. The board has never before established mechanical rates for digital files.

"We're pleased with the CRB's decision to keep royalty rates stable," said an unnamed Apple spokesman.

The popularity of Eddy Cue's statement that Apple would shutter the iTunes Store apparently had an effect on the board. "Sure it was posturing," said a music industry source, according to CNET. "I don't think Apple would have gone out of business but a statement like that from the biggest music retailer is going to carry some weight."

[Via CNET.]

If a ruling expected tomorrow by the Copyright Royalty Board raises royalties for online music sales from 9 to 15 cents per track, Apple would rather shut the iTunes store down than operate it at a loss.

Them's fightin' words.

Eddy Cue, Apple's iTunes VP, wrote in a statement to the Times of London, "If [iTunes] was forced to absorb any increase in the ... royalty rate, the result would be to significantly increase the likelihood of the store operating at a financial loss -- which is no alternative at all. Apple has repeatedly made it clear that it is in this business to make money, and most likely would not continue to operate [iTunes] if it were no longer possible to do so profitably."

Of course, this is the "nuclear" option. Apple is most likely trying to gain aggressive leverage before the CRB decision is made. Apple is essentially asking music publishers, "do you want all the revenue you've earned through iTunes, or another measly 6 cents per track?" Shrewd, but is it shrewd enough?

Some analysts speculate that Apple is more likely to pass the additional cost on to the consumer, rather than demolish a key slice of their business. What that will do to sales in the U.S. is hard to say.

If the CRB raises royalties, what do you think will happen? Will you continue to buy music online? Sound off in comments.

[Via IGM.]

Apple seems to be *so* happy to finally fess up that this MacBook RSS (Random Shutdown Syndrome) isn't just all in our heads. xlr8yourmac tracked down a new Apple Knowledgebase article that is another amusing one-liner from Apple's support crew: "If your MacBook is shutting down intermittently, please contact AppleCare for service." A little bird told us they finally know what's going on and have a fix for the issue, but don't quote us on that.

If you are an unfortunate MacBook RSS victim and you do give AppleCare a call, feel free to comment here with your experience and how Apple is treating this issue. We honestly don't know much more about it aside from this theory, so we're in the dark as much as you are.

[via InsanelyMac News]

Blogger Martin Backschat has more or less translated a German article that takes a stab at trying to figure out what is going on with this random MacBook shutdown issue. One only needs to check out MacBook Random Shutdown.com or comb the archives of digg and Apple discussion forums to grasp how many are plagued by this dark game of workflow Russian roulette, but we have yet to hear even a peep from Apple as to what the problem is, and how they're going to fix it.

Martin says the theory centers on a cable that runs between the heat sensor and the CPU's heat sink being too short. The heat sink expands when operating the MacBook, which causes it to contact the heat sensor's cable and melt its insulation - hence, a short circuit and a shutdown. Once the MacBook is no longer running, the heat sink cools down and contracts during the process, breaking the short circuit and allowing the machine to boot again (this expansion and contraction can happen pretty quickly, so it would make sense if your machine can boot almost immediately after shutdown).

It's a twisted game these components play with each other for sure, and we're all hoping for some kind of a statement or - ideally - a solution from Apple soon. The more widespread and publicized this issue becomes, the farther away these Macs will get from their 'it just works' reputation. Something tells us 'it just works - until it decides not to and randomly shut down, blowing away all your work' wouldn't roll off Justin Long's tongue nearly as well.

[via digg]

Some MacBook owners around the web are reporting a 'random shutdown' issue, where the machine will - as you might guess - seemingly shutdown at random; either during work or patiently idling for your next command. If you haven't experienced this issue yourself yet but are still concerned about it, The Apple Files has devised an unofficial test to see if you might be a victim.

The test involves entering a few simple commands into the Terminal and testing a few things over roughly half an hour of your time. Just to be thorough, the author recommends running this test two or three times to be sure, but it's really up to how paranoid you're feeling. Again, this is an unofficial test, and we haven't seen any official reports or announcements from Apple on this issue, its cause or how widespread it might be, but it's simply nice to have options, hey?

[via digg]

We here at TUAW are suckers for productive shortcuts, and since yesterday's System Preferences tip was such a hit, I thought I'd post a few shortcuts to speed up the Sleep, Restart and Shut Down commands. There's actually quite a few ways to accomplish these tasks, so I'll try to mention all the methods I've heard of.

The first: hold the option key while selecting Restart or Shut Down from the Apple Menu to bypass the 'Are You Sure?' dialog, and cut right to the chase. You even get visual feedback in the Apple Menu; click the menu, then press the option key to see the trailing dots disappear from those two commands (as far as I know, this is a typical UI feedback element used throughout the OS; any commands - at least in Cocoa apps - that have keyboard modifiers will change their appearance in the menu if you press the modifier before choosing the option).

The second method is my personal favorite: 100% keyboard shortcuts. Here's a list:

• Sleep = opt + cmd + eject
• Restart = ctrl + cmd + eject
• Shut Down = ctrl + opt + cmd + eject

The third method, involving the power key, can still be counted as a keyboard shortcut, but since I almost never touch the power key (I Sleep my Macs about 99% of the time via my aforementioned favorite method), I don't really consider it part of my typical keystroke regimen. For you power key lovers out there, you can press your Mac's power key, and at the resulting 'Are you sure?' dialog that contains four buttons (Restart, Sleep, Cancel and Shut Down), you can press the first letters of a couple of these actions. Specifically, 'r' for Restart, 's' for Sleep and Enter for Shut Down. 'C' for Cancel doesn't seem to work, but Esc should get you out of the dialog if you need to keep computing.

Here's hoping you don't have a Homer Simpson-like brain, where each new shortcut you learn knocks out an old one. Feel free to chime in with your thoughts on these shortcuts, and enjoy one more trick for working with your Mac just a little bit faster.

Yet more apps that have made my "why doesn't OS X do this natively?" list are Mac Shutdown X and Mac Restart X. The concept of Mac Shutdown X is simple: shut down a Mac automatically based on various kinds of events, such as a download finishing or a file disappearing. While the list of usable events is slim at the moment, the developers state on their product site that they're very open to suggestions. Mac Shutdown X can shut down on a schedule, just like OS X's Energy Preference Pane, but you can also use a calendar and clock to specify a specific date and time in the future for shutting down. Conversely, Mac Restart X does exactly what you might think: it allows you to set a schedule or specify a date (but not events - yet) for automatically restarting your Mac.

While I'm sure some people could find these separate apps handy in various ways, the fact that they sell for $10 each makes me think they should simply be combined into one utility for one price. Regardless, it's a good niche to have filled by a simple little to-the-point app.

[via MacNN]