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

Pinch to zoom icons on Desktop
If you want to make the icons on your Desktop bigger, merely pinch to zoom on a multi-touch trackpad. This works better in reverse, because if your Desktop is cluttered, it helps to make all of the icons tiny until you can clean it up.

3- and 4-finger gestures for older multi-touch trackpads
Extending the olive branch to users of older-generation MacBooks and MacBook Pros that did not have four-finger and three-finger trackpad gestures, Snow Leopard brings this feature to those MacBooks, provided you have a supported model.

More granular firewall settings
In order to prevent hackery of the malicious variety, Snow Leopard includes more firewall settings than its predecessor. You can choose to block incoming connections from certain apps, always allow connections from other apps, and set an allow/do not allow list. This is a huge upgrade from the mere “off/on” found on the previous firewall.

Specify how long after screen saver you want to lock computer
Have you ever walked away from your laptop to get a soda, and then walked back to see your computer lock in front of your eyes. Instead of scrambling to prevent going into screen saver, merely set the computer to ask for the password after a certain period of time after the screen saver activates.

New desktop wallpapers
Though not quite the caliber of the LSD-influenced wallpapers that are in Windows 7, Apple has introduced a few new default desktops in Snow Leopard as well, namely, more nature and art images.

Show date in menubar
One notable omission in the default OS X clock is the date, as you have to click the time to see it. In Snow Leopard, you can choose whether or not to see the date in the menubar, and choose how it is displayed, whether fully written out, or abbreviated by number.

Faster Time Machine backups
Even better than telling you how much time is left in your backup, Time Machine speeds up significantly in Snow Leopard. In our tests it was about twice as fast as Leopard, namely reducing the time in the Preparing Backup stage.

AppleScript has access to Cocoa frameworks
At WWDC, Apple announced something called Cocoa Bridge, which allows you to access any Objective-C frameworks from within AppleScript, with an AppleScript syntax. This will make AppleScripts much more functional, as well as make it easier to develop applications that don’t necessarily require a GUI.

Treat trackpad as a virtual screen, guided by VoiceOver
Apple has introduced a plethora of new functions to help Universal Access. If you have trouble seeing, you can navigate the computer using the trackpad as a virtual screen, with the help of VoiceOver, which will tell you exactly where to go.

iCal syncs with Google Calendar and Yahoo Calendar
iCal now syncs with Google Calendar and Yahoo Calendar out of the box. iPhone users may be used to this, because you could enable it within iTunes, but now, you can do it directly from iCal.