100 Snow Leopard Tips, Tricks, and Features
Posted 08/31/2009 at 11:02am
| by Arvind Srinivasan and Roberto Baldwin

Accept event invitations from within mail
A hidden gem in iCal is the ability to auto-add events from Mail. Say your friend emails you, inviting you to a party on a given date. If you enable the feature, iCal will pull the relevant information from the message, including location and date, and create a new event.

Black bezel for the Dock's contextual menus
A small UI change Apple made with Snow Leopard was changing the contextual menus for Dock items (accessed by right-clicking something in the Dock) to black glassy menus. It looks much better -- we just wish the same courtesy was extended to other contextual menus as well.

Icons can be up to 512x512
The new Finder has a zoom slider in the bottom right of each window, allowing you to zoom the icons inside up to 512x512 pixels, without having to go into Cover Flow.

Live previews in icons
The enlarged icons allow for an actual preview of the files, so that’s exactly what Apple enabled. You can live-preview the documents represented by the icons, like movies, music, PDFs, and even certain presentations. While we may still use Quick Look instinctively, this is an easy option to preview file contents even faster.

Grand Central Dispatch
Another major feature that doesn’t affect the average user at all, Grand Central Dispatch is a framework that allows for simple multi-core threading in applications built in Xcode. What this means is that more OS X apps are going to be able to harness the extra power of dual-core CPUs, meaning that you can waste time playing games even faster than before.

App-relevant Services
Even if you are a Leopard user, you probably don’t use Services, which are AppleScripts that can trigger different events across applications. Even if you have accidentally clicked the menu item at some point, you would have likely seen a lot of grayed out options, and wondered exactly why they chose to include useless things. Snow Leopard corrects this by only putting things in the Services menu that you can actually use. Furthermore, Automator workflows that you create will be added to the Services menu, making it something that you might actually want to click on in the future.

Revamped Image Capture
Image Capture is sort of the little brother to Preview, iPhoto, and the multitude of other photo-organizing apps that you have on your Mac, but it is a great bare-bones way to get pictures off a scanner, camera, or even iPhone. Snow Leopard features a completely redone Image Capture that features more information, an iTunes-esque interface, and faster importing.

Sticky Notes keyboard shortcut
One of the things Microsoft brags about is Windows 7's sticky notes, which hang around obnoxiously with your tasks. Apple has had these since Tiger, but in Snow Leopard, they have one cool feature that Windows doesn’t. You can assign a keyboard shortcut (System Preferences > Keyboard) that automatically creates a sticky note with whatever text is currently selected. This is great for clipping notes, text fields, and so on, from anywhere around your Mac.

Text labels in Exposé
Speaking of another completely redone feature, the new Exposé features text labels under every window that is currently displayed, especially useful if you can’t actually tell what the window is by its contents.

Multi-process Safari (sandboxing)
Snow Leopard claims that its version of Safari 4 supports sandboxing of individual tabs, similar to what Google Chrome does. What this means is that if a plug-in crashes on a tab, it won’t crash the browser on the whole, and the rest of your browsing experience will be intact.