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Quick Tip: Greet Snow Leopard with Universal Binaries

Maximum is better than optimum

Aug 18, 2009 14:43 GMT  ·  By
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   Universal Binary logo

As avid Softpedia readers should know by now, Apple is widely believed to have given the order for mass production of Snow Leopard install discs. Last week’s Build 10A432, claimed to be the Golden Master edition of the software, is seemingly arriving even sooner than expected. So, why not greet Snow Leopard with some software that can really make it work fast?

Launched after Apple’s transition to Intel processors, Rosetta is a lightweight dynamic translator for the Mac. Distributed with Mac OS X, it enables applications compiled for the PowerPC family of processors to run on Intel processors. If you skip installing Rosetta in Snow Leopard, some of your PowerPC-only apps will not work anymore. On the other hand, if you do install Rosetta, those apps will work, but they will have a slower performance than their universal binary counterparts, because Rosetta takes its toll on the CPU to do instruction translations.

So, the best logical choice is to update those apps to Universal Binary. Not all of them will have their Universal counterpart, but most will. Years have passed since the transition from PowerPC to Intel, so most developers (and implicitly their software) have gone Universal.

To check which of your apps are PowerPC-only, fire up System Profiler and go to the “Software” category, and then click on the “Applications” sub-category. System Profiler will instantly list all your installed applications, showing you each app’s current version number, as well as its Kind (Intel / PowerPC / Universal).

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System Profiler showing a PowerPC-only app (example) If the application kind is listed as "PowerPC”, you're going to need to update to a Universal version of that app, if you’re going to keep using it under Snow Leopard without the sluggish, old Rosetta. You can use the respective app’s built-in software updater to check for updates, or you can go to http://mac.softpedia.com/ and find the version you’re looking for. Just type its name in the search field (highlighted in the screenshot below) and Softpedia’s search algorithms will do the rest.
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Use Softpedia to search for Universal Binary versions of your PowerPC apps As soon as you find your app, check with the info pane on the right side of the download button.
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Check with the “Binary Format” of each program to see whether it is available in Universal form We have a match! Download the app, double-click the resulted DMG file to mount the image, and drag the new app into the Applications folder. That’s it! Follow these instructions for the rest of your PPC apps, and Snow Leopard will reward you. Any other suggestions are strongly encouraged, so use the comments at will.