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New Snow Leopard Features Continue to Emerge

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Apr 12, 2001
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In the days since Apple previewed the forthcoming Mac OS X 10.6 Snow Leopard at its Worldwide Developers Conference keynote and distributed a new build to conference attendees, users have been scouring the new operating system and its associated documentation and promotional materials looking for new features. Mac|Life reports on ten features that have received relatively little publicity. While a few them have been mentioned here previously and many are listed on Apple's Enhancements and Refinements page, Mac|Life's report provides a nice summary and we offer a few of the highlights for discussion.

- Expanded Multi-Touch Capabilities for Older Notebooks: Snow Leopard will bring 3- and 4-finger multi-touch gestures to multi-touch notebooks that currently do not support all available finger gestures. Examples of the gestures that will make their way to the older notebooks include swipe for Exposé and swipe for switching applications.

- iChat Video Chat Improvements: iChat Theater content can be displayed at up to a resolution of 640 x 480 pixels in Snow Leopard, four times that of OS X Leopard. iChat in Snow Leopard also requires only 300 Kbps upstream bandwidth for video chats, one-third that of the bandwidth required in Leopard.

- "Auto Web Spots": Part of Apple's improvements to Accessibility, auto web spots aid in locating specific information sections on complicated Web pages. Users can navigate from spot to spot with a simple keystroke or flick of the finger.


151125-auto_web_spots.jpg



Article Link: New Snow Leopard Features Continue to Emerge
 
Article Link
https://www.macrumors.com/2009/06/12/new-snow-leopard-features-continue-to-emerge/
Yay

So happy about the support for multi-touch gestures. It's a remarkable generous thing for Apple to do, wouldn't you agree?
 
The "Auto Web-spots" feature looks really interesting and useful! Now I can be even more lazier and move my fingers less =)
 
Gettin' better and better every day!

Do any of you know if SL will be more optimized for SSDs than the current version of Leopard?
 
The notebooks with multi finger gestures are the ones that already have some other gesture support correct? IE a late 2006 Macbook wont be getting swipes and stuff.
 
diamond.g said:
The notebooks with multi finger gestures are the ones that already have some other gesture support correct? IE a late 2006 Macbook wont be getting swipes and stuff.
Click to expand...

Too bad. I always was a bit suspicious about multitouch not working for MacBooks that already two finger scroll... it just seems like that's a software thing. Oh well. I guess I'll have to upgrade when my warranty runs out in November... wonder if MBPs will get a real update then? :confused:
 
If you remove the additional languages and printer drivers, Snow Leopard takes 4.0Gb space. You can easily fit that on to a cheap USB stick or SD card for a portable backup system.

Also, there is a new "CoreWLAN" framework in /System/Library/Frameworks, indicating a more structured WLAN system which may make it easier for hackintosh developers to write WLAN drivers for their unsupported cards. So far, these developers have been unable to write drivers for the system due to the system's lack of documentation.
 
tbobmccoy said:
Too bad. I always was a bit suspicious about multitouch not working for MacBooks that already two finger scroll... it just seems like that's a software thing. Oh well. I guess I'll have to upgrade when my warranty runs out in November... wonder if MBPs will get a real update then? :confused:
Click to expand...

I was really asking as a question... As my main laptop is a late 2006 Macbook. I still need the finance committee to authorize a 13" MBP purchase...
 
Is the article wrong? It says bring 3-4 finger gestures to MacBooks that can only do 2 Finger gestures (aka every MacBook before Feb 2008).

So does that mean my MacBook Pro (from June 2007) will get more than the 2 finger gestures (scroll, right click)????

NEVERMIND: when to Apple' website, and it says bringing more gestures to all Multi-touch notebooks (aka MacBook Pros from Feb 2008) :(

The ARTICLE needs to be CORRECTED!!!!!!
 
How could it require one-third the bandwidth for video iChat? Have they really improved their compression that much? That's quite a change!
 
any idea if snow leopard will improve merging and sync for multiple mac households.

for instance, have my wife and my ical calendars be able to merge via our home network, or otherwise sync calenders, contacts, photos, etc.

in fact, i'd like to sync my itunes library between my macbook pro and the mac pro in my studio space.

there are third party apps to help with al of this, otoh, i was hoping that snow leopard would just have some of this built in. i can't be the only one with more than one mac, and smarter merge and sync functions would be most welcome.

any idea if that will be coming from snow leopard?

otherwise, the better ichat and gestures and such are quite welcome.
 
Doctor Q said:
How could it require one-third the bandwidth for video iChat? Have they really improved their compression that much? That's quite a change!
Click to expand...

It appears that they are probably using a slightly more complex h.264 profile. Allowing for more bandwidth/space savings at the expense of more CPU/GPU usage.
 
I can't wait to shell out $29 for this... Of course, if it had a fresh new UI, I probably couldn't wait to shell out $129. I'm a sucker for shiny new things.
 
tbobmccoy said:
Too bad. I always was a bit suspicious about multitouch not working for MacBooks that already two finger scroll... it just seems like that's a software thing.
Click to expand...
Apple follows accounting rules that says new features can't be added to old products without charging for them (with the exception of the iPhone and AppleTV, which Apple decided to account for differently than their other products).

They sold some Macs a few years ago with 802.11n not enabled. A few months later, Apple enabled it, but you had to buy the update for like $3 (because adding 802.11n counted as adding a new feature). People went nuts.

So now they just wait until the next paid software update comes out to do stuff like this.

Fun, huh? :eek:

Doctor Q said:
How could it require one-third the bandwidth for video iChat? Have they really improved their compression that much? That's quite a change!
Click to expand...
Maybe they had the Skype folks rewrite it for them. Skyped always worked flawlessly for me when iChat was acting up (because of bandwidth).
 
Chaszmyr said:
I can't wait to shell out $29 for this... Of course, if it had a fresh new UI, I probably couldn't wait to shell out $129. I'm a sucker for shiny new things.
Click to expand...
Why is the UI worth $100 and features, performance, speed, stability and security worth only $29 :rolleyes:
 
babyjenniferLB said:
Why is the UI worth $100 and features, performance, speed, stability and security worth only $29 :rolleyes:
Click to expand...

Don't get me wrong, if Apple put a $129 price tag on Snow Leopard without a new UI, I have no doubt I would pay that too... I was just really hoping for a new UI!
 
Chaszmyr said:
Don't get me wrong, if Apple put a $129 price tag on Snow Leopard without a new UI, I have no doubt I would pay that too... I was just really hoping for a new UI!
Click to expand...
Apple tends to slowly change the UI over time instead of rolling out major changes right away. So you'll see a new UI slowly but surely before you even notice it has happened
 
I am excited about the iChat upgrades. I travel frequently and their isn't always the best internet connection. 300kbs is a huge advancement vs. 900kbs!

The multi-touch changes will be great for my brothers MBP! We had to hack it to get it to do it up till now.
 
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