If I had to characterize what’s wrong with Snow Leopard’s visual additions with just two words, it’d be these: everything fades. Apple has sprinkled Core Animation fairy dust over seemingly every application in Snow Leopard. If any part of the user interface appears, disappears, or changes in any significant way, it’s accompanied by an animation and one or more fades.
In moderation, such effects are fine. But in several instances, Snow Leopard crosses the line. Or rather, it crosses my line, which, it should be noted, is located far inside the territories of Candy Land. Others with a much lower tolerance for animations who are already galled by the frippery in Leopard and earlier releases will find little to love in Snow Leopard’s visual changes.
The one that really drove me over the edge is the fussy little dance of the filename area that occurs in the Finder (surprise!) when renaming a file on the desktop. There’s just something about so many cross-fades, color changes, and text offsets occurring so rapidly and concentrated into such a small area that makes me want to scream. And whether or not I’m actually waiting for these animations to finish before I can continue to use my computer, it certainly feels that way sometimes.
Still, I must unenthusiastically predict that most normal people (i.e., the ones who will not read this entire article) will either find these added visual touches delightful, or (much more likely) not notice them at all.
” Mac OS X 10.6 Snow Leopard: the Ars Technica review - Ars Technica