11 new features of Snow Leopard

Snow Leopard is a minor upgrade to Mac OS X, with a price of $ 29, this upgrade only focuses on improving speed and reliability, but it still has a lot of advantages. many large and small adjustments, changes and improvements make the system better and still controversial. In this article we will introduce some of the biggest changes happening to Snow Leopard so far.

Exchange

The latest feature in Snow Leopard is support for Exchange , Microsoft email servers, contacts and schedules. iPhone supported Exchange last year and now it's Mac. This makes it much easier to integrate Mac into standardized businesses on Exchange.

The way Exchange support works in Snow Leopard is quite simple: when you add an Exchange account in Email, you will receive an emial in Mail, you can view Exchange contacts in Address Book, schedules and Exchange tasks will appeared in iCal. iCal has even done some pretty subtle tasks such as scheduling meetings, based on the free / busy status of the invited person; You can accept or reject invitations to meet from Mail. If you synchronize your iPhone with the same Exchange server, then all calendar events will be synchronized automatically.

Malware checker

Although Apple doesn't widely announce this feature, Snow Leopard does have a certain level of protection for malware. The system that Leopard used to warn you before opening programs or downloaded images from the Internet is now able to check the extent to which it is known.

It's a list of malware threats for Mac OS X that Apple has collected. This list will be updated automatically through Software Update, so it will provide an external layer of protection against indiscriminate infection on the computer. However, when infected, Snow Leopard does not have a system to remove that malware.

Exposé

Snow Leopard provides some new improvements with Exposé , the window management function introduced first in Mac OS X Panther. In previous Mac OS X versions, when using Exposé to display the window in the current application or all the windows on the screen, ordering these windows may be a bit confusing. However, with Snow Leopard, these windows are aligned on a grid, so most people will be easier to flip through their screens and find the desired window. Press Command-1 to rearrange the windows in rhyme or Command-2 to group the windows according to the application.

Exposé is also now integrated into the Dock. If you click on any application icon in the Dock and continue to hold the mouse for about half a second, Snow Leopard will work with Exposé and instantly display all of its applications. (Minimalized windows will also appear).

This feature also works with draggable items - if you drag a picture, such as the Pages icon in Dock and keep it here for a while, then Exposé will display all Pages of Pages. open. Drag an image onto one of the windows and hold it there for a bit, this window remains the dominant position, so you can drop the image right where you want. When you understand and use it, this function can speed up your work, especially on systems with smaller displays (such as the MacBooks).

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Dock

Snow Leopard introduces some minor improvements to the Dock. One of them is related to minimizing windows. Some users use the yellow button in the left corner of most windows to temporarily ban these windows into the Dock; others never use that feature, because it fills the Dock with small window icons. With Snow Leopard, Apple has combined window optimization with Exposé to create a new way of hiding windows.

To change the way the windows are scaled, go to the Dock panel in System Preferences and check the Minimize Windows Into Application Icon checkbox. Then, whenever you click on the gold button, your window will land on Dock and not appear as its application icon. To bring the window back, you can select it from the Window menu of the application (a diamond will appear next to its name, indicating that it has been minimized); right-click on the application in Dock and select the window from the list (continued, the minimized window will appear with a diamond next to their name); or click and hold the application icon in Dock, activate Exposé and display all your minimalist windows at the bottom of the screen. Just click on the window to be minimalist to take it out of the Dock. In fact, Exposé always displays the minimized windows when enabled. So you can retrieve the minimalized windows by typing F9 or F10 and selecting the window to search.

Dock has been changed in many different ways: now you can scroll all Stacks when in grid view, meaning you can see all the things inside a folder. And when selecting a Stack or right-clicking on it in the Dock section, you will see the content menu has been changed. It is now gray with a light handwriting, replacing white and previous black writing.

Finder

Finder, the central point for file and folder management in Mac OS X, has been completely rewritten in Snow Leopard. However, it is difficult to know this if you just look through it. This new version, written in the Cocoa framework for 64-bit applications, should be more or less the same with the older version. Apple says that the new Finder reacts much faster than the old model by rewriting the entire code, supporting 64-bit mode, increasing logic by using new Grand Central Dispatch technologies.

The biggest changes in Finder must be done with icons. The icons are now 512x 512 pixels in size, four times the size of Leopard. There is a lower-right slider of any window in the Icon view, allowing you to resize or increase the icons without using the View -> Show View Options command and adjust the settings. Control button here.

Apple is taking advantage of these large icons by previewing them directly inside them. In Leopard, Apple introduced Quick Look (which allows you to view the file content by pressing the spacebar) and Cover Flow (allowing you to preview the document in the Finder window). In the new Finder, you can see faster by hovering over the icon. If it is a multi-file PDF, you will see all the contents of the document, using the previous and next buttons to navigate the page. Hover your mouse over a video file that will display playback controls, which means you can watch the movie in its icon.

Smart Eject

If you use some external hard drive, USB drive, you will probably encounter the frustrating problems of OS X. In Snow Leopard, the removal of the drive has been significantly improved. Snow Leopard's eject manager has improved on the old method in two ways. When you want to eject a disk, the eject manager sends a signal to its subsystems and other programs, asking them to leave the partition if possible. If it fails because a program is using a disk, Snow Leopard will issue a window informing you about which program does not want to allow you to eject the disk. You can then exit the program and eject the disk.

Replacement

Now, Apple has built a set of automatic text replacement in OS X. Other programs have also been changed to support it and all share an alternative list, which you can see in the Text tab of the Language & Text panel in System Preferences. Besides, there are a few common alternatives that are enabled by default. But you can add what you like. To see the active changes, open TextEdit and select Edit -> Substitutions -> Text Replacement . When the Text Replacement box is checked, TextEdit will follow the replacement list throughout the system and from there you can activate smart quotes, links, dash, etc.

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Service

In Snow Leopard, Apple made some adjustments to the OS X service menu. Previously, to access the old style menu, you had to go to Application -> Services . After doing so, you must navigate through a long list of available services - some are included in the operating system by Apple, others are complemented by the third group, some of them not suitable for what was previously available. With Snow Leopard, Services promises to be much more useful: it is quite sensitive to content: when you open it, only services related to what you are doing or the application you are using is new. appear.

QuickTime

The new version of QuickTime architecture in Snow Leopard is called QuickTime X. QuickTime X features a completely redesigned QuickTime Player application. QuickTime Pro users will see that the old QuickTime Player application has been moved to the Utilities folder of Mac. Fortunately for Apple users who have retained the old version because QuickTime Player cannot perform many tasks, QuickTime Player 7 can.

Preview

Snow Leopard's Preview application, currently in version 5, features a number of patches and some quite useful refinements. The first and most obvious of them is the selection of text. The program can now detect accurately and allow you to select columns across and along the page layout, making cut, copy and paste easier than ever. This is a fairly comprehensive improvement over what is available in previous versions. This improved column detection capability is also extended for Safari.

Also Preview has a few enhancements to the image. It can detect images from a digital camera or scanner with a USB connection. The new Import From Scanner menu replaces the Import Image command in the previous version, allowing you to scan, view, and edit images in Preview. The new preview will also detect a connected camera and allow you to import images from it. However, no camera has this capability. For example, PowerShot G2 cannot be detected, but it can identify Canon Digital Rebel XSi.

The Annotate button that is paired with the new Annotations Toolbar appears at the bottom of the document when you click and the button. It will show you the following tools: Arrow, Oval, Rectangle, Text, Note, Link, Highlight, Strikethrough, Underline, Color Menu, Line Width Menu, and Show Font Panel. Text and Arrow are new things in this version.

The Adjust Size command currently uses an advanced algorithm (Lanczos interpolation algorithm) to make the image softer. When making an selection with the rectangle selection tool, you will see the pixel sizes for your selection.

Finally, a new Contact Sheet view will allow you to see all pages as thumbnai. However, to get this view, you need to set up to open all files in a window or open file groups in the same window.

Accessible ability

Apple has gradually accelerated Mac OS X as accessibility features for users with physical disabling capabilities. Tiger made a big jump, Leopard added many improvements. But Snow Leopard has brought accessibility features in Mac OS X to a whole new level.

Along with the new additions are improvements in VoiceOver, support for trackpad actions, support for Braille display, and so on. Indeed, there are many and many, however, in this article we would like to stop here again.