Mac OS X Snow Leopard

Mac OS X is renowned for its simplicity, its reliability, and its ease of use. So when it came to designing Snow leopard, Apple engineers had a single goal: to make a great thing even better. They searched for areas to refine, further simplify, and speed uo from little things like ejecting external drives to big things like installing the OS. In many cases, they elevated great to amazing.

Apple the maker company of this software promises that this new product, the Snow leopard will wake from its sleep, will join wi-fi networks, and shutdown faster than plain old leopard. While it’s difficult to accurately test wakeups and network connections, I timed startup and shutdown on my MacBook Pro in both Leopard and Snow Leopard. Turns out Snow Leopard is indeed faster even on old hardware. It has refined from installation to shut down that makes your mac faster more reliable and easier to use.

Experienced Mac On its New Face:

The all-new, exactly-the-same Finder

The Finder has been completely rewritten to take advantage of the new technologies in Snow Leopard, including 64-bit support and Grand Central Dispatch. It’s more responsive from top to bottom, with snappier performance throughout the Finder. And it includes new features such as customizable Spotlight search options and an enhanced icon view that lets you thumb through a multipage document or watch a QuickTime movie.

New look, new features for Exposé and Stacks.

Exposé is refined and more convenient. It’s now integrated in the Dock, so you can just click and hold an application icon in the Dock and all the windows for that application will unshuffle so you can quickly change to another one. Exposé also has a whole new look. Windows are displayed in an organized grid, making it even easier to find what you’re looking for. And stacks — Dock items that give you fast access to a folder of files — are now scrollable, so you can easily view all items. You can also navigate through folders in a stack to see all the files inside it.

Quicker Time Machine backup.

Introduced in Mac OS X Leopard, the revolutionary Time Machine made backing up your hard drive easy for the first time. Time Capsule took backup even further with its wireless hard drive that works seamlessly with Time Machine. Now Snow Leopard makes Time Machine up to 50 percent faster and reduces the time it takes to complete your initial backup to Time Capsule.

Faster to wake up, shut down, and join a wireless network.

With Snow Leopard, your Mac wakes from sleep up to twice as quickly when you have screen locking enabled. Shutting down is up to 75 percent faster, saving precious moments when you’re trying to head home or to the airport. And joining wireless networks is up to 55 percent faster.

Smaller footprint.

Snow Leopard takes up less than half the disk space of the previous version, freeing about 6GB for you — enough for about 1,500 more songs or a few thousand more photos.

Faster, more reliable installation.

Upgrading your Mac has never been easier. For Snow Leopard, the entire process has been simplified, streamlined, and is up to 45 percent faster, yet more comprehensive and reliable.2 For example, Snow Leopard checks your applications to make sure they’re compatible and sets aside any programs known to be incompatible. In case a power outage interrupts your installation, it can start again without losing any data.

Another leap forward for QuickTime.

QuickTime X is the next-generation media technology that powers the audio and video experience in Mac OS X Snow Leopard. It includes a completely new QuickTime Player application with a clean, uncluttered interface, a new trimming interface, and easy uploads to YouTube and MobileMe. And it delivers more efficient media playback, HTTP-based live streaming, and greater color accuracy.

Innovative Chinese character input.

Until Snow Leopard, if you wanted to enter Chinese characters on a computer, you had to type in the phonetic spelling of Chinese words and the computer would convert them into proper Chinese characters. Snow Leopard offers a breakthrough new way to enter characters: You draw them right on the Multi-Touch trackpad in your Mac notebook. They’ll appear on the screen in a new input window, which recommends characters based on what you drew and lets you choose the right one. The input window even offers suggestions for subsequent characters based on what you chose.

More reliable, higher-resolution iChat.

Having a video chat using iChat is more reliable and more accessible than ever in Snow Leopard.4 It includes technology to address many common router incompatibilities that can interfere with connections. And if iChat can’t make a direct connection, it will use the AIM relay server to create a successful chat session.

Now more people can have high-resolution, 640-by-480-pixel video chats, because the technical requirements are less demanding: You need only one-third the upstream bandwidth previously required — 300 Kbps instead of 900 Kbps. And finally, iChat Theater now offers 640-by-480 resolution, four times greater than before.

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