10 Snow Leopard Features Not Mentioned at WWDC

WWDC’s Philnote had us squealing with delight over the flurry of new product updates and announcements, but we still felt like we were left a little high and dry when it came to news regarding the new Mac OS X operating system, Snow Leopard. Though the iPhone 3G S did steal the spotlight at the show, we were hoping for a few more details regarding our favorite operating system. While we do know that Snow Leopard will be taking advantage of the hardware that comes bundled with our Macs, including the graphics accelerator OpenCL and 64-bit compatibility, we’re wondering what else we’ll get when we eventually upgrade this Fall.


10 Snow Leopard Features Not Mentioned at WWDC




1. Multi-touch Gestures
Even the older MacBooks upgrading to Snow Leopard will now have three- and four-finger touchpad abilities, which will make one-hand computer usage totally possible.

2. Shut Down and Wake Up now Twice as fast
Apple says that Snow Leopard will be up to 75-percent faster than its predecessor when shutting down and waking up the operating system from sleep mode, with screen locking enabled. Hopefully, this is the end of the groggy computer!

3. Higher Resolution iChat Video Chats
iChat can now display iChat Theater content at a higher resolution--up to 640 by 480 pixels, four times the maximum resolution in Mac OS X Leopard. So, you can chat with your friends and family while you're on a business trip and feel like you never left.

4. Better Services Integration
Services that are only used sometimes, or never, can now be disabled and enabled as you please, without cluttering up your screen. And, you'll only see the services that are compatible with whatever program you're using.

5. Flight Data Detector
Now when you read email messages and text documents, Snow Leopard can automatically identify flight numbers mentioned and take you directly to the Dashboard Flight Track widget to keep you on board with the latest updates.

6. Split-Pane Terminal
Split your Terminal window into different Terminal sessions. Keep track of mulitple activites in one wndow.

7. AirPort Menu Signal Strength
Not sure which wireless networks have the strongest wireless signal? AirPort will now include signal strength for all available wireless networks so you can choose the right one, instead of rifling through each connection, only to discover that most of them have less than two bars.

8. iChat will only require one-third the bandwidth
Leopard requires 900-Kbps upstream bandwidth, while Snow Leopard only requires 300-Kbps and still manages to deliver near DVD-quality video. This also means it'll be easier to download an album from iTunes while simultaneously video chatting with a friend.

9. Automatic spelling correction
TextEdit will now fix common spelling errors as you type, including commonly misspelled words such as “teh” and common misspellings in longer words.

10. Jump around webpages with web spots
A feature we love on the iPhone. The web spot technology in Safari lets you jump directly to the important parts of a webpage. It also provides a way to go directly to the web spot without having to check out other areas of the page.

From maclife.com, 28 August, 2009