• 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.

Microsoft is set to launch Word 2010 this year and with this new version comes some much needed updates. Microsoft added a lot in this version to streamline your process allowing you to use Word for all aspects of your document from graphics, to image editing, and of course, words. The walkthrough above gives you a taste of what to expect in Word 2010 but let’s go over the improvements.

• Screenshots:

Word 2010 now allows you to take full application screenshots and gives you the ability to select just the parts of the screen you want. You no longer have to mess with print-screen and paint to add the perfect screenshot to your document.

• Improved Charts and Diagrams:

Microsoft has made huge strides in an attempt to streamline using images in word. By using SmartArt graphics it’s dead simple to create beautiful and informational diagrams to add power to the content of your document. Microsoft also advertises the ability to change bullets to visuals making it even easier to transform a standard document into a well-rounded piece.

• Artistic Effects:

Word 2010 continues with images in mind allowing you to quickly adjust your graphics by adding effects such a photocopy, chalk sketch, blur, paint strokes, and many more. Microsoft has also expanded word art giving you many more options including reflections and glow effects.

• Remove Background of Images:

Have you ever download an image that would be perfect for your document minus the background? Well, with word 2010 its dead simple to remove those pesky defects. All you have to do is select your image, click format, and select ‘background removal’. From there, you can allow word to automatically remove the background but for complex images you will need to use the mark to include/remove buttons to specify what you want to keep.

• Improved Search:

Word 2010 now searches through graphics, footnotes, tables, and comments to find the information you are really looking for.

• Improved Spell Checker:

Sometimes you spell a word correctly but accidentally type the wrong word. (For instance, two, to, too or there, their, they’re.) Now, those mistakes will be corrected by Word’s new context sensitive spell checker. If one was to type ‘Who owns the toy other their.’ Word would detect the mistake and suggest changing the sentence to ‘Who owns the toy over there?’. Pretty useful for all users.

• Language Translations:

¿Hablas español? If so, Word’s new translation features are for you. Including many languages from Spanish to German and English translating text is easier than ever. With language courses becoming more and more popular, and required, being able to translate from your current language to the one you are learning, all from your word processing application, is a nice touch.

• Mobile Document Support:

Being able to collaborate on your document is a growing advantage. Word 2010 now allows multiple users to work together on a document and also includes a word web application. Similar to google docs, this web application allows users to create, edit, and view documents right from the browser. Even if you don’t have a browser available, Word Mobile 2010, for Windows Mobile smartphones, allows you to do the same activates right from your phone.

• Ligatures:


Above are some common ligatures. This effect makes you font look fancy but also keeps the letters separate allowing you to search the text as if the font were regular. Of course, not all fonts support ligatures, but you can enable them in supported fonts by going to font preferences, selecting advanced, and selecting ‘standard only’ in the ligatures box.