New Features in Snow Leopard

Mac OS 10.6 Snow Leopard is Apple’s upgrade to its highly popular operating system leopard. There are plenty of improvements in this new operating system but most of them are on the back end. Where as leopard looked substantially different than tiger, snow leopard looks very similar to leopard with improvements when you start using specifics features. Now that you have been prepped, let’s go over some, of the many, new features in snow leopard.

• QuickTime X

Apple’s upgrade from QuickTime 7, what happened to 8 and 9, includes many new features making it more powerful than ever. For no extra cost, you can capture video, audio, and even your screen. In the past video capture required quicktime pro and screen capture required third-party software. Apple has saved you all some money by implementing these tools into QuickTime X for no additional charge. Basic editing, in the form of trimming, has also been added and the ability to upload directly to mobile me or youtube is a plus.

• Exposé

One of my favorite features in OS X is exposé. Apple has improved exposé by organizing your winodws in a grid and allowing you to sort your applications by name (CMD+1) or application (CMD+2). Dock exposé has also been added allowing you to click on an app in your dock and view all instances of that applications. On the topic of your dock, you now can minimize applications directly to their icon in the dock instead of their own location.

• Stacks

Stacks has been updated allowing you to scroll through long grids instead of shrinking the icons. You can also drill into folders in the stack instead of being forced to open the finder.

• Finder

The finder has been rewritten in snow leopard making it leaner and quicker. Graphically, the finder looks the same but now supports icons at 512 pixels. I doubt I would actually have my icons that large but it makes it possible to read text from a document, in the finder, without even opening preview or quicklook.

• Services

Now, instead of cluttering the menu, only services that work in each particular app is shown.

• 64Bit

Snow Leopard is both 64bit and 32bit. I’m not sure how this works on a technical level but natively supporting both 32 and 64bit applications is wonderful.

• Exchange Support

Apple has finally opened their platform to serious business users. Snow Leopard now completely supports exchange right out of the box. Nuff’ said.

• Text Substitutions

(c) now becomes ©, (r) becomes ®, 1/2 becomes ½, and the list goes on. In fact, you can create your own substitutions in the language and text pane in system preferences. All cocoa apps are supported and developers can bring support to their carbon apps as well.

• Smaller Footprint

Apple says you can save up to 7GB of space by installing snow leopard. Although snow leopard is leaner than leopard, benefits are skewed because snow leopard and leopard use different number systems. Compare the available bytes and not the GB number you see.

• ZFS Support

Snow Leopard uses the ZFS file system as well as HFS+. Although HFS+ won’t be completely eliminated any time soon, you do get some benefits including data redundancy and auto error correction from ZFS.
Apparently, apple dropped this feature before launch. I was actually looking forward to the benefits but apple was having licensing issues and dropped ZFS from snow leopard. 10.7 anyone?

• Multi-Touch Trackpad

Have you ever wondered why newer laptops included more gestures leaving your machine limited to one or two finger commands? Well, as I often said, this is a software restriction and now all multi-touch trackpads will be able to to gesture with one, two, three, or four fingers.

• iChat

Technical requirements are much less strenuous in snow leopard using around ⅓ of the bandwidth for video chats. Because of this, iChat is now more reliable and supports video chatting at the higher 640×480 resolution.

• Security

Although apple advertises how safe their system is, and how vulnerable windows has become, Apple has taken it upon themselves to give their users more protection. From parental controls to phishing protection, and hard drive encryption snow leopard is the most secure version of OS X to date. In fact, virus and malware protection has been added and enabled right out of the box.