Many of Snow Leopard's changes are under the hood - new architecture that provides a foundation for the Mac going forward.
But while there's no Spotlight, Time Machine or Quick Look equivalent this time round, Snow Leopard still packs in new user-oriented features, big and small. Here are our favourites.
1. Exchange support
The biggie for corporate types, and word on the street is Snow Leopard's Exchange support works beautifully. It certainly makes Microsoft's Office 2010 announcement ("We'll be doing Exchange things, too!") look a bit sad.
2. Better stacks
Dock stacks viewed as grids now have a scroll bar if there are many items. You can also move up and down the folder hierarchy within the stack.
3. Dock Exposé
Click-hold a Dock app icon and its open windows show in Exposé. Even minimised windows are shown, displayed smaller and under a subtle horizontal line.
4. Minimised window options
To take advantage of Dock Exposé and not clutter the Dock with minimised windows, you can set 'Minimize windows into application icon' in the Dock System Preferences pane.
5. Malware protection
It's early days, but Snow Leopard contains basic malware protection to stop you killing your Mac to death.
6. Revamped eject manager
In Leopard, disks often couldn't be ejected, because a file was in use by an application. Snow Leopard indicates which app is causing the problem.
7. Improved Keyboard Shortcuts management
Keyboard shortcuts now live in a revised Keyboard System Preferences pane, listed by category for ease of editing.
8. Revised Services
The Services menu is now context-sensitive, showing only relevant options on a per-app basis. Services can also be toggled via the Services section of the Keyboard Shortcuts preferences.
9. Smart text select
Preview now selects text intelligently in multi-column documents, rather than selecting across the entire page width.
10. Text replacement
One for the future, once apps support it, but Mac OS X now has system-wide, user-definable text substitution—see the Text tab of Language & Text in System Preferences.
11. Enhanced view options
In Finder, you can now change the file sort order in Column view. Icons can also be displayed in Icon view at a frankly silly 512 x 512 pixels.
12. Better accessibility
The enhanced VoiceOver utility showcases major improvements to assistive technologies within Mac OS X.
13. Recording and trimming in QuickTime
QuickTime X can record from your Mac's camera or screen, and the results can be trimmed and shared to iTunes or YouTube.
14. Date and time in the menu bar
The Clock tab within the Date & Time System Preferences pane finally offers a 'Show date' option, so the time and date can be shown simultaneously in the menu bar.
15. Time-zone tracking
The Mac's time zone setting can now automatically update as you move around the world.
16. iCal events inspectors
Edit an event and you can tear off the dialog as a separate inspector. Alternatively, set this as the default via the Advanced preferences - Open events in separate windows.
17. Sandboxed Safari plug-ins
When Flash crashes, Safari doesn't. Worth 25 quid on its own to most people, we'd say.
18. Automatic printer driver updates
Plug in a printer and Snow Leopard makes sure it has the right driver—and it periodically checks for updates and downloads them via Software Update.
19. Faster wake and shut down
We're not sure sleeping and waking our Mac is now twice as fast (as per Apple's claim), but it's damn close.
20. Smaller footprint
OK, so we're adding one 'architecture' feature: install Snow Leopard and you end up with more—not less—space on your Mac. We got back over 20 GB, another install yielded 9GB.
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