Hi, this Bob Madden from FierySource.com and this is a first look at Apple’s new operating system, Snow Leopard. You can upgrade Leopard on your current Mac to Snow Leopard for $29.00 as of Friday August 28 2009. Snow Leopard is one of two operating systems coming out this year, the other one is Microsoft’s Window 7 due out October 22 2009.
Unlike in the past, Apple didn’t totally design a new product and intro it with a big dog and pony show with all the fireworks, instead they took there time rebuilding the already good operating system by modifying things you don’t see under the hood. They really didn’t add any new major features. There are a number of nice little modifications or refinements through out the system but really nothing lust worthy.
Apple says new technologies like 64 bit core applications, Grand Central Dispatch, and Open CL support all will make your system and applications run faster than before. Nevertheless there are a few other nice things about Snow Leopard. It’s speeds up some of the core applications a good bit such as e-mail and the Finder which is the Mac’s desktop. Stacks also got a much needed upgrade as well as Quick Time X.
Installation:
Installing Snow Leopard was simple and took about 40 minutes to do so without any issues what so ever. I believe the install was about 40 percent faster than Leopard and asked us only one question during installation. The default setting installs Snow Leopard without tampering with any of your saved files, music, photos, or documents.
Those who want to perform a “Clean Install” or a “Fresh Install” ( this option deletes everything for minimal issues ) you’ll need to use Disk Utility to first remove all data on the drive, then run the install.
Snow Leopard takes up less space on your hard drive. One of my computers I freed up 10 GB’s of space from it’s predecessor Leopard. Apple claims it will free up 7 GB’s.
Exchange
I think the biggest new feature in Snow Leopard is Exchange, which is a Microsoft product that large companies use to manage their email contacts and calendars of their employee’s. But previously on Windows or Leopard in order to use exchange you had to purchase an add-on product like Microsoft Outlook on Windows or Microsoft Entourage on the Mac.
Now Apples is building exchange capability directly into the operating system which means you don’t have to purchase any add-on software for features like calendar invitations, synchronized notes, Global Address Lists and automatic sync of messages, contacts and appointments are all integrated with Snow Leopard’s standard application set.
iCal's Exchange support includes group scheduling for meetings.

Expose:
In the past Apple operating Systems arrived on the scene with major features, there’s nothing significant in Snow Leopard, although the various changes to the operating system are certainly nice and all the little changes do add up. One such little feature is Dock Expose, just as it sounds this simply links Expose to the Dock. Holding down on an application’s icon triggers Expose for that application’s window, therefore you can drag a file onto another application and be able to select which window you want to drop it into. Nevertheless here’s a short video of it in action:




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