Thread: 11 Major New Snow Leopard Features

Snow Leopard can be a "small" update to Mac OS X, with an upgrade price with a focus on enhanced speed as well as dependability, but it's still satiated at the seams with tweaks, changes, as well as improvements with hardly any alteration that may well be fairly contentious. Here's a glance at some of the major changes due to appear with Snow Leopard on Friday, August 28.

Exchange

The major latest characteristic in Snow Leopard is maintained for Exchange, Microsoft's popular e-mail, contact, as well as calendar server. The iPhone got support for Exchange last year, as well as now it's the Mac's turn to unite the party. (Inappropriately, Windows doesn't support Exchange out of the box.) As a result, it has turn into that much easier to combine the Mac into businesses that have consistent on Exchange.

The way Exchange support works in Snow Leopard is appealing easy: once you insert an Exchange account in Mail, you'll start getting e-mail messages in Mail, you'll be capable to view Exchange contacts in Address Book, as well as Exchange calendars with tasks will emerge in iCal. iCal will even execute difficult tasks like setting up meetings based on the free/busy status of invitees; you can recognize or refuse meeting invitations right from Mail. If you're syncing your iPhone to the similar Exchange server, all those calendar events will sync up automatically.

As some IT manager will inform you, Exchange can be a profound as well as difficult subject. We've asked an IT professional to converse Exchange in Snow Leopard in aspect, as well as will be posting a separate editorial on the subject soon here.

Malware Check

Apple's not trumpeting the characteristic, but Snow Leopard does in fact contain a positive degree of integrated protection against unsafe software. The similar system that Leopard working to notify you prior to you open programs or mount disk images downloaded from the Internet at present also checks those files for recognized hazard.

Its evidence to the incomplete figure of Mac OS X malware threats that Apple's stock listing of dangerous files include all of two entries. But, that list can be mechanically updated through Software Update, so it certainly offers a first line of security against without knowing infecting your PC with vice software. But, once you're ruined, Snow Leopard doesn't have a system for removing that malware. As a consequence, we anticipate that there will still be a strong market for third-party virus-checking as well as -elimination software.

If you want additional information, Dan Moren has written an in-depth look at Snow Leopard's unknown malware protection.

Exposé

Snow Leopard offers a hardly any development to Exposé, the window-management functionality initially launched in Mac OS X Panther. In earlier versions of Mac OS X, when you make use of Exposé to display every window in your present application or all the windows on your display, the arrangement of the windows can be a bit random. With Snow Leopard, windows are allied on a network, so most people will discover it a little easier to rapidly scan through their screen as well as find the window they want. Press Command-1 to reorganize the windows alphabetically or Command-2 to group windows by application.

Exposé has also now been included into the Dock. If you click on any application image in the Dock as well as carry on to hold your mouse key down for half a second, Snow Leopard will connect Exposé as well as instantly display all of that application's windows. (Windows that you've minimized will come into view, too, though they're slighter as well as sit beneath a faint line that separates them from the visible windows).

This characteristic also works with dragged items--if you drag a picture onto, say, the Pages picture in the Dock as well as drift there for a second, Exposé will display all the open Pages windows. Drag the image above one of the windows as well as drift for a new moment, and that window will arrive to the fore, allowing you to drop the picture right where you want it. Once you get the hang of it, this latest functionality can actually speed up work, particularly on systems with lesser displays (such as MacBooks).

Dock

Snow Leopard brings a hardly any minor development to the Dock. One of the major concerns minimizing windows. Some people make use of the yellow button in the left corner of most window toolbars to banish windows for the moment to the Dock; others not at all take benefit of that characteristic, as it fills the Dock with small window icons. With Snow Leopard, Apple has combined window minimization with Exposé to make a new-fangled way of hiding windows that might be more well-liked than the old one.

To alter the fortune of minimized Windows, visit the Dock panel in System Preferences as well as check the Minimize Windows into Application Icon box. Then, at any time you click on that yellow button, your window will fly down to the Dock as well as disappear into the icon of its application. To get it back, you can choose it from the application's Window menu (a diamond will appear next to its first name, indicating it's minimized); right-click on the program in the Dock as well as select the window from a list (once more, minimized windows become noticeable with a diamond next to their name); or click as well as hold on the application's sign in the Dock, activating Exposé with displaying all your minimized windows at the base of the display. Just click on a minimized window to bring it out of the Dock. In fact, Exposé always shows minimized windows when triggered. So if you favor to recover minimized windows by typing F9 or F10 also picking it out, you can do that, too.

The Dock has changed in other ways, as well: you can now roll through Stacks when in grid view, meaning you can notice a complete lot more of what's in an exacting folder. And when you choose a stack or right-click on a Dock item, you'll see that the background menu that pops up has changed. For one thing, it's now dark gray with light lettering, slightly than the customary white with black lettering. And the selection to eliminate an item from the Dock, open that application at login, as well as disclose it in the Finder are now all found in latest Options submenu.

Finder

The Finder, the central point for managing files as well as folders in Mac OS X, has been totally rewritten in Snow Leopard. But you'd barely know it from looking. This latest version, which was written using the Cocoa frameworks necessary for any 64-bit application, looks more or less the same to the older version. Apple says that this latest Finder is much more approachable than the older model due to the entire rework, support for 64-bit mode, with amplified threading using the latest Grand Central Dispatch technologies (See Jason Snell's look at Snow Leopard's under-the-hood improvements for more).

The major changes in the Finder have to do with icons. Icons can now be as big as 512 by 512 pixels, four times as big as Leopard's biggest (256 by 256).
There's a slider in the bottom-right place of any window in Icon view, which lets you unusual the size of the icons in that window up or down without appeal to the View -> Show View Options command as well as adjusting the controls there.
Apple is taking benefit of those large icons by putting live previews within them.

In Leopard, Apple launches Quick Look (which lets you sight the contents of a file by pressing the spacebar) along with Cover Flow (which lets you sight document previews in a Finder window). In the new-fangled Finder, you can get an even faster look by just hovering over the symbol in question with your cursor. If it's a multipage PDF, you'll be able to outlook the complete contents of the document, by means of next- as well as previous-page buttons to find the way. Hovering over a film will disclose playback controls with yes; this means you can look at a QuickTime movie in its icon.

Smart Eject

If you make use of external hard drives, thumb drives, or the like, you've most likely run into one OS X's annoyances: occasionally your Mac just loves your exterior volumes so a good deal that it won't let them go. If you've ever tried to eject a volume only to have OS X tell you the volume is in utilize as well as can't be ejected, or if you've ever been tick off by OS X for disconnecting a volume that was still mounted, you know what we're talking about.

In Snow Leopard, dismounting drives is very much enhanced. Snow Leopard's new-fangled eject manager advance on the previous method in two ways. When you first try to eject a disk, the eject manager in fact sends out an indication to its own subsystems with additional programs, asking them to surrender their hold on the volume if that's feasible. If that fails as a program actually is using the drive, Snow Leopard will bring up a window telling you which program don’t want to allow you eject the disk. You can then switch to that program, quit out of it, as well as eject the disk.

Substitutions

Numerous programs autocorrect what you type, changing teh into the, for example. And a host of Mac utilities will do the deception, too. Now Apple has built auto substitution of text into OS X. Programs have to be customized to specially support it; but once they are, they'll all share the similar substitution listing, which you can observe in the Text tab of the Language & Text pane in System Preferences. An only some ordinary substitutions are enabled by default--(c) into the patent sign with the abovementioned teh into the. But you can insert your own as well. To observe substitutions in action, open TextEdit as well as select Edit -> Substitutions -> Text Replacement. When the Text Replacement box is checked, TextEdit will pursue the systemwide substitutions listing. You can also allow smart quotes, links, with dashes, which restore normally typed symbols with their fancier, typographically accurate cousins.

Services

In Snow Leopard, Apple lastly cleans up OS X's Services menu. That menu has been around eternally, but its execution has been astonishingly uncomfortable. To access it, you had to go to the Application -> Services menu. And when you did so, you had to find the way throughout extensive lists of accessible services--some built into the operating system by Apple, others added by third-party vendors, lots of them unrelated to anything it is you were doing. With Snow Leopard, Services assure to turn into way more functional: it's available from a contextual menu; right-click and there it is. And it's supposed to be responsive to context: when you open it, only those services pertinent to what you're doing or the app you're using should show up.

QuickTime

The latest version of Apple's QuickTime multimedia structural design in Snow Leopard is called QuickTime X. It features a much redesigned QuickTime Player application, which a few people will love--and numerous others will hate. Users of QuickTime Pro will find out that the previous QuickTime Player application has been moved to their Mac's Utilities folder. Its kind that Apple kept the old one around, as the latest QuickTime Player can't do numerous tasks QuickTime Player 7 might. We'll be posting an in-depth look at QuickTime X shortly, so stay tuned.

Preview

Snow Leopard's Preview app, currently at version 5, sports some very helpful fixes as well as modification. The first as well as most clear of these is improved text selections. The program now precisely identify as well as lets you choose horizontal as well as vertical columns in page layouts, making for cleaner, more correct cutting, copying, as well as pasting. This is an enormous development over the preceding version, which could not identify columns precisely. (Apple credits artificial intelligence algorithms now built into the core of the operating system.) This enhanced column revealing also extends to Safari.

The latest Preview also features imaging enhancements. It can now identify images from a USB-connected digital camera or scanner. A fresh Import from Scanner menu item restores the Import Image command of the earlier version with lets you scan, view, as well as accurate your images in Preview; it even detects where the images are located on the scanning bed. The innovative Preview will also identify an attached camera as well as let you import images from it. But it does not work with all cameras. It did not identify a Canon PowerShot G2, as, but it did identify a Canon Digital Rebel XSi.

The Annotate button is balancing with an innovative Annotations Toolbar that emerges at the base of your document when you click on the key. It shows you the subsequent tools: Arrow, Oval, Rectangle, Text, Note, Link, Highlight, Strikethrough, Underline, Color Menu, Line Width Menu, as well as Show Font Panel. Text along with Arrow is fresh in this version.

The Adjust Size command now make use of a highly developed algorithm (the Lanczos interpolation algorithm, to be precise) to scale images more easily as well as with less pixelated artifacts. And when making a collection with the rectangular choice tool, you'll observe the pixel dimensions of your choice.

Finally, a new-fangled Contact Sheet view lets you observe all of your pages in thumbnail view at the similar time, a pleasant expediency. To get this sight, however, you need to place your General preferences to Open All Files in One Window or Open Groups of Files in the unchanged Window.