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

Mail detects flight numbers
In the new Mail.app, there are more data detectors than ever. If someone emails you a flight number, you can click it, and be presented a contextual menu that includes tracking the flight in your Dashboard. This is incredibly useful, because you don’t have to worry about cutting and pasting properly, and then finding the airline site to track the flight.

Flagged photo screen saver
One of the new screen savers in Snow Leopard is an option to cycle through flagged pictures from iPhoto. If you get tired of seeing a particular face in your photo slideshow screen saver, you can always remove them from the flagged list without deleting their photo.

Better installer
The new Snow Leopard installer is much improved -- it does not try to upgrade incompatible apps, but rather puts them in a separate folder. Clearly, Apple engineers remember the blue screen of death fiasco when people tried to install Leopard on computers that had Application Enhancer installed.

Better documentation browser Xcode
Finding documentation for Objective-C frameworks has never been easier than in Xcode 3.0, equipped with a three pane documentation browser. You can easily search for a particular function, class, or object, and navigate back to your own project in the same window.

Properly sized windows in Exposé
One annoying thing about the old Exposé was that all application windows were the same size when zoomed out. This meant that you often couldn’t see the text on larger windows, and smaller windows were unnecessarily large. Now, the windows are sized relative to their actual size.

Wake servers on demand
Apple wants you to reduce power consumption and bandwidth consumption, as servers can go to sleep in Snow Leopard without losing their data connection. Any time you request data from the server, it will send a wakeup signal, and you can continue using the data uninterrupted.

Arrange Exposé windows using keyboard shortcuts
With all windows visible, you can press Command-1 to arrange them by name, Command-2 to arrange them by application, press the Tab key to view all windows belonging to a given application, and best of all, enlarge a given window by selecting it and pressing the space bar.

Video chat with AIM users in iChat
If your friends have webcams and use the latest AIM client, you can video- and audio-chat with them from iChat. Think of it as a consolation prize, because they are still using Windows.

Take screenshot directly from preview
You can always use Grab, Shift-Command-4, or Shift-Command-3, but if you want, you can take a screenshot (full screen, window, or selection) directly from Preview. This is more versatile than the other two options, because you can edit it directly, save it in a file format of your choice, and save it in a location of your choice.

Color-correction histogram
The new Preview gets a bit more hardcore with the introduction of a color-correction histogram, which allows you to adjust levels and see what they might do to your picture.