Snow Leopard: The little changes that weren't advertised. (Updated 8-29-09)
A list of my findings:
- Preview.app: CMD-Delete sends the current image to the Finder TRASH.
- Clicking the pill button in Finder windows has an animation now.
- After dragging a selection box in the Finder, it fades out when you let go.
- All animations are much smoother now
- No horizontal tearing in Spaces anymore
- No horizontal tearing in Safari scrolling
- Lots of little subtle Finder animations
- Preferences icon shows list of Preference Panes when right clicked.
- When expanding a folder down in List View in the Finder, the icon changes to an opened icon.
- Spotlight: Window settings stick and you can add and remove columns (such as Date Modified, Last Opened, Kind) by hitting cmd-J
- Waking up a sleeping display no longer flickers when it awakes.
- Right-clicking a Dock menu and right-clicking again closes the menu (as it should.) In Leopard, the menu would keep popping up if you right clicked while it was already open.
- Apple changed the Stacks an animation to a zooming animation instead of the scattering icons animation. It's much smoother and more pleasing to look at.
- Apple FINALLY keeps the shadows on the Finder windows during a minimize. It used to bug me that the shadow would disappear and then the window would minimize. It looks much better now
- Shadows under windows are also retained when using Exposé. Again, looks better and doesn't show that flicker that Leopard had
- Ever since Mac OS X 10.3 (Panther), when an app crashed while it was launching, every window from that point on would stutter when minimizing it. The only way to get it to be smooth again was to quit the Dock. Snow Leopard no longer does that. I'm very surprised by this.
- Scrolling in the Finder is smoother
- Finder preferences now includes an option to choose the default location for Finder searches (such as "Search the Current Folder" or "Search This Mac") I'm glad they finally put this back because when I wanna search the entire drive, I use the Spotlight menu, but when I'm in a folder, I want it to search just that folder.
- You can now hide the Finder sidebar without losing the unified window.
- Right clicking the tile of a window will show you a menu with the path to that folder. In Leopard, you had to cmd-click it to do that.
- The Dock now remembers the ACTUAL Dock size you set it to. In Leopard, you could set it to a certain size, and then when you rebooted or logged back in, it would be a few pixels LARGER (barely noticeable, but I noticed).
- Address Book window no longer shrinks each time you launch it. Seriously. Leopard's Address Book window would get a few pixels smaller every time you launched it until it was as small as it could get. The only way I was able to previously fix this, was to lock Address Book's preference file after I had the window set to the size I wanted.
- When moving or copying files, the files or folders being copied are gray until they are finished. Very nice.
Update:
- Option-clicking the sync menu in the menubar gives you more detailed information
- Option-clicking sound in the menubar lets you change your input device.
You can definitely tell that Apple went through Leopard with a magnifying glass and removed almost ALL of the tiny quirks that plauged Leopard. There's even situations where I didn't even know something was wrong with Leopard, until I noticed that it was fixed in Snow Leopard.
I couldn't be happier right now.
For me, Snow Leopard lived up to it's hype (at least the hype it was given here on MacRumors) and this is the most SOLID version upgrade I've ever seen in the life of Mac OS X. I mean, I'm used to having a glitch here and there, but in Snow Leopard, it's VERY hard to find those little glitches.
Either I got extremely lucky, or I have the right combination of hardware, or Apple have really outdone themselves on this one.
Anyone else have a flawless upgrade?
Edit: By the way, I did an erase-and-install.
A list of my findings:
- Preview.app: CMD-Delete sends the current image to the Finder TRASH.
- Clicking the pill button in Finder windows has an animation now.
- After dragging a selection box in the Finder, it fades out when you let go.
- All animations are much smoother now
- No horizontal tearing in Spaces anymore
- No horizontal tearing in Safari scrolling
- Lots of little subtle Finder animations
- Preferences icon shows list of Preference Panes when right clicked.
- When expanding a folder down in List View in the Finder, the icon changes to an opened icon.
- Spotlight: Window settings stick and you can add and remove columns (such as Date Modified, Last Opened, Kind) by hitting cmd-J
- Waking up a sleeping display no longer flickers when it awakes.
- Right-clicking a Dock menu and right-clicking again closes the menu (as it should.) In Leopard, the menu would keep popping up if you right clicked while it was already open.
- Apple changed the Stacks an animation to a zooming animation instead of the scattering icons animation. It's much smoother and more pleasing to look at.
- Apple FINALLY keeps the shadows on the Finder windows during a minimize. It used to bug me that the shadow would disappear and then the window would minimize. It looks much better now
- Shadows under windows are also retained when using Exposé. Again, looks better and doesn't show that flicker that Leopard had
- Ever since Mac OS X 10.3 (Panther), when an app crashed while it was launching, every window from that point on would stutter when minimizing it. The only way to get it to be smooth again was to quit the Dock. Snow Leopard no longer does that. I'm very surprised by this.
- Scrolling in the Finder is smoother
- Finder preferences now includes an option to choose the default location for Finder searches (such as "Search the Current Folder" or "Search This Mac") I'm glad they finally put this back because when I wanna search the entire drive, I use the Spotlight menu, but when I'm in a folder, I want it to search just that folder.
- You can now hide the Finder sidebar without losing the unified window.
- Right clicking the tile of a window will show you a menu with the path to that folder. In Leopard, you had to cmd-click it to do that.
- The Dock now remembers the ACTUAL Dock size you set it to. In Leopard, you could set it to a certain size, and then when you rebooted or logged back in, it would be a few pixels LARGER (barely noticeable, but I noticed).
- Address Book window no longer shrinks each time you launch it. Seriously. Leopard's Address Book window would get a few pixels smaller every time you launched it until it was as small as it could get. The only way I was able to previously fix this, was to lock Address Book's preference file after I had the window set to the size I wanted.
- When moving or copying files, the files or folders being copied are gray until they are finished. Very nice.
Update:
- Option-clicking the sync menu in the menubar gives you more detailed information
- Option-clicking sound in the menubar lets you change your input device.
You can definitely tell that Apple went through Leopard with a magnifying glass and removed almost ALL of the tiny quirks that plauged Leopard. There's even situations where I didn't even know something was wrong with Leopard, until I noticed that it was fixed in Snow Leopard.
I couldn't be happier right now.
For me, Snow Leopard lived up to it's hype (at least the hype it was given here on MacRumors) and this is the most SOLID version upgrade I've ever seen in the life of Mac OS X. I mean, I'm used to having a glitch here and there, but in Snow Leopard, it's VERY hard to find those little glitches.
Either I got extremely lucky, or I have the right combination of hardware, or Apple have really outdone themselves on this one.
Anyone else have a flawless upgrade?
Edit: By the way, I did an erase-and-install.
