Gizmodo's Everything you need to know on Snow Leopard is
here
Server goodness info
here
Apple's
Technical Specifications for Snow Leopard
What Snow Leopard is
Accessibility features
info
Technology
info
OpenCL
64-bit support
Grand Central Dispatch
Pricing & Availability
$129 for Snow Leopard
$29 for those with Leopard already
$49 For those with Leopard already wanting a family pack
$9.95 for those who buy a Mac today with Leopard, and are eligible for the
Mac OS X Snow Leopard Up-to-Date Program
If you purchased a qualifying system or Xserve on or after June 8, 2009 that does not include Mac OS X Snow Leopard, you can upgrade to Mac OS X Snow Leopard for $9.95.* (Covers product plus shipping and handling fee. U.S. customers add appropriate sales tax.) Please check back on June 16, 2009, for additional information.
- iPhone OS 3.0 comes out the day after. iPhone Comes out 2 days after that? Guess they're spreading it out a little more.
Apple's
Refinements page
Apple's
More refinements page
"Refined, not reinvented...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 up...a few examples of how your Mac experience was fine-tuned."
Finder
It's 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.
Exposé
- Now integrated in the Dock - 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.
- Look has changed - windows are displayed in an organized grid
- Activate Exposé for any open application by clicking and holding the application’s icon in the Dock
Stacks
- Dock items are now scrollable
- You can also navigate through folders in a stack to see all the files inside it
Time Machine
- Faster Backups ("Snow Leopard makes Time Machine up to 50% faster and reduces the time it takes to complete your initial backup to Time Capsule")
Speed
- Wake up (up to 100% faster)
- Shut down (up to 75% faster)
- Joining of a wireless network (up to 55% faster)
- Installation of OS X 10.6 (Up to 45% faster)
- "All native OS X apps, like Mail, Quicktime, Finder, and Safari, are fully coded for 64-bit compatibility"
Footprint
- Snow Leopard takes up less than half the disk space of the previous version, freeing about 6GB
QuickTime X
- Allows quick trimming within Quicktime, if you don't want to open up iMovie
- "more efficient media playback"
- Live HTTP-based live streaming
- More info
here
-
GPU-accelerated video decoding
- Visual chapters
- Screen recording
Chinese Character Input Tool
- 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.
i
Chat
- "more reliable and more accessible [video iChat]
- "Includes technology to address many common router incompatibilities that can interfere with connections"
- "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 as only 1/3rd the upstream bandwidth needed compared with previously - 300 Kbps instead of 900 Kbps.
- iChat Theater now offers 640-by-480 resolution, 4x better than before
Contextual Services Menu
- Lets you use features of one application while working in another — for example, make a note in Mail while browsing in Safari.
- Shows just the services appropriate for the application you’re using or content you’re viewing rather than all available services
- Can access services with a right click of your mouse or Control-click of the trackpad
- Can configure the menu to show only the services you want
- Can create your own services using Automator
Printer improvements
- When you plug in a printer, Mac OS X can download the latest driver available over the Internet
- Periodically checks to make sure it has the latest driver. If not, it downloads the newest version through Software Update. Easy.
Core Location Technology
- Automatic time zone setup (Using the Core Location technology, it locates known Wi-Fi hotspots to set the time zone automatically,)
Preview
- Better PDF text selection (- No more (or maybe just less) mixing of text from multiple columns in the wrong order)
- GCD used for search
Mail
-
Microsoft Exchange support "With Snow Leopard the Mac now has out-of-the-box support for Microsoft Exchange Server 2007, something even Windows PCs don’t have"
- "no need for time-consuming installations or complicated configurations. You set it up just by entering your email address and password — the rest happens automatically."
- "Then, instead of using Outlook to access Exchange services such as email, calendar invitations, and Global Address Lists, you’ll use Mail, iCal, and Address Book."
- You then get "Spotlight for systemwide searching, Quick Look for viewing attachments without opening them, data detectors that make it easy to act on information in email, and more."
- More on Exchange
here
- More on mail
here
Safari 4
Disk eject
- Fewer of disk eject errors
- Will tell you which app to blame if you get one, so you can quit it and eject the drive properly
File sharing
- Bonjour in Snow Leopard: With Snow Leopard and a compatible AirPort Extreme or Time Capsule base station, your computer can go to sleep yet continue to share its files with other computers and devices, waking when you need it and sleeping when you don’t. Learn more about energy efficiency and the Mac"
More on energy efficiency
Other tidbits
- Multi-Touch gestures in older Mac models. All Mac notebooks with Multi-Touch trackpads now support three- and four-finger gestures.
- The Exchange meeting arrangement looks great. Let it find when people and a room are free. Set up a meeting quickly through a group in Exchange - wiull be interesting to see the details. (Preview Microsoft OFfice files without needing Office? Nice!)
Just to go over one more thing - it's pretty amazing to think that Apple has decent and identifiable icons for a lot of their projects -
Any one see any new ones?
- “Adjust view options for Spotlight results just as you can with any Finder window. Modify the default view as well as the size, labeling, and alignment of icons.”
- Seems to
