Sep 26 2009
Snow Leopard – Five Nice New Finds
It’s almost a month since the release of Snow Leopard, Apple’s latest release of it’s Mac OS X operating system. Allowing for shipping, I didn’t get my copy until a few days later. Not wanting to tempt fate, I waited for the weekend when I had a chance to do a full image backup as well as my normal Time Machine hourly backups.
The actual upgrade went off fine. I upgraded over the top of my current install and didn’t see any “deal breaker” problems resulting.
There’s already a significant tonnage of stuff about Snow Leopard so I’m not going to go into general reviews or benchmarks. I’d expect my experience to be much the same as already reported anyway. Instead, I wanted to touch on five small, new, features that I really like.
First up, for this “switcher“, I missed being able to see the date with a quick glance. I hadn’t really realised now often I look at the date during the course of a normal day, but, apparently, it’s pretty regularly because the absence of this very small feature niggled. Sure, I could have had this back using iStat Menus but I wasn’t really happy with that aspect of the program and, instead, just dealt with it and got used to looking at the WinXP computer next door to my Mac.
Thanks to Snow Leopard I can now have the date visible right up there next to the clock. I’m glad to have it nice and visible again.
In normal use, I always seem to end up with a large number of applications running. I also like having the programs I commonly use in my dock. Before Snow Leopard, each program minimised also added an icon to the dock. This could result my dock getting really out of control – since I like my dock on the right side of the screen it also meant I was ending up with some really tiny icons in the dock.
Enter a wonderful extra configuration option for the dock (minimise windows into application icon). This has really helped me with a more consistent dock. It also helps the “muscle memory” for moving the mouse to the same place every time to access the same application.
For me, Expose is one of the stand-out features of Mac OS X. It offers a really quick and strongly visual way to find a program/window you’ve got open. As a way to switch between tasks or cross-reference information I’ve found it very functional. One of my niggles has been that Expose would only show windows that were visible on screen. If you minimise it to the dock then it doesn’t show up in Expose. This made worse if you happen to have more than one instance of an application (e.g. Firefox) open at once.
Snow Leopard’s changes to Expose were a welcome addition. A dividing line in the lower half of the screen separates open windows (at the top, and larger) from minimised windows (at the bottom, and smaller). Excellent changes Apple, thank you.
Yes, I know it’s a small thing, but visually appealing matters. For me, I like transparency on things. It doesn’t really enhance the functionality of the computer or anything, I just like seeing my screen look good.
Finding a switch for making the menu bar translucent was a nice addition. It’s only an on/off option and there’s no control there for changing the level of transparency but it’s a nice addition none-the-less.
So, there’s four nice little additions that I’ve found to enhance my enjoyment in using my MacBook. None of them are really world-changing or earth shattering but they’re things I like.
I’d really like to find a nice screen saver but the few reasonable ones I had in Leopard seem to have failed to come through with the upgrade to Snow Leopard. I guess I’ll have to take some time out to do some more searching and see what I can find.
What’s that? I said five and there’s only four? Oh, OK. The last one isn’t really Snow Leopard itself. Instead, it’s the nice update that meant I could keep some convenience stuff in my menu bar – in particular disk activity.
Yep, just a week or two after the release of Snow Leopard, the folks at iSlayer and their lovely little iStat Menus application.
There’s been some changes for the new version that I had some mixed feelings about at first but it’s grown on me and I’m happy to have my disk activity indicator back again.
Are there niggles with Snow Leopard? I’ve had a few. For me, the least convenient one so far is that a move to increased 64-bit capability has resulted in some preferences apps now need you to restart preferences when you load them. One especially, SynergyKM, mattered for me. I use Synergy to share the keyboard and mouse from my XP desktop onto my MacBook and whenever it glitches I have to load the preferences app to de-glitch it.
Overall? I’m happy.
