Snow Leopard

Seeing as we utilize the quartz layer quite a bit, and over the last number of years, "quicktime" has become our middle name, we have noticed, significant performance improvements on most of our apps simply by upgrading to os x 10.6. In most cases we didn't accurately measure cpu load difference, but it has been a very noticeable power boost. (for free it seems). I am also recompiling the quartz apps under 10.6 to see if we can win back any more power. It is hard to generalize, but the net speed increase (also it's 'smoothness', video just seems to glide past in quicktime X) on the whole seems to have gone up by a good 20%, with no changes made to the hardware.
This has been the most seamless full OS upgrade ever. Normally computers tend to slow down after such an upgrade, this time round it felt like we were working on brand new machines, although most are a few years old now. We are missing a lot in how we can talk to the new quicktime through java-even applescript, which means we needed to make a few work arounds, but I do hope apple will improve scripting support for quicktime X, and I also have a hunch they have moved this accessibility elsewhere, in an attempt to stimulate the use of xcode and bringing all underlying core technologies together in one developer environment.