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

New annotations toolbar in Preview
Annotations are front and center in the new Preview. In fact, there's a whole toolbar dedicated to it. Instead of having to select each tool from the menu, just click on it and then use it. The new annotations in Preview are text and arrows, especially useful if you want to jot notes in a PDF's margin without printing it out.

Proof pictures for printing within Preview
For people that want to print directly from Preview, instead of editing their pictures in a dedicated photo manager, Preview now offers several proofing options, and you can view a soft-proof with several different color profiles. This will make your prints more accurate, and eliminate the need to open Photoshop every time you need to print a picture.

Opening JPEGs faster
At times, opening large images (we’re talking 100MB) takes FOREVER. With Snow Leopard, opening JPEG images is faster, and opening other file types also have speed improvements. Furthermore, keeping them open takes up less RAM, so your computer won’t slow to a crawl.

Better PDF text selection
One of the most touted features in Snow Leopard was that Apple used “advanced algorithms” for better PDF text selection. If you work with a lot of PDFs, this is absolutely critical -- no more garbage line breaks, selecting across different columns, or garbled text selection.

Import photos directly into Preview
Again, Preview has taken a lot of features that existed in other OS X applications, and consolidated them in an easy-to-use package. You can import photos directly into Preview, and edit them directly, akin to Image Capture.

Wake up and shut down faster
If you're the impatient type, you'll be happy to learn that Snow Leopard wakes two times faster than Leopard, and shuts down 1.8 times quicker. Perfect for the spy trying to get those secret plans onto their MacBook and out of the embassy's secret office before being caught.

Open a PDF contact sheet
If you are working with a multi-page PDF, this function in Preview will help you reorganize the pages, add new pages, and so on. Instead of doing this from the sidebar, you can zoom into pages in your contact sheet, and work with them directly.

Data detectors in TextEdit
Similar to the data detectors in Mail, if you find an address, flight number, phone number, or anything else that can be detected, you can select it, right-click it, and perform the relevant actions, like showing it on the map, creating a new contact, and things like that.

Easily transform text to all lowercase, all uppercase, or capitalize the first letter of words
TextEdit now supports text transformations. You can easily make everything uppercase, everything lowercase, or capitalize the first letter of every word selected, also known as headline case.

Autocorrect in TextEdit
Using the text substitution feature, TextEdit now supports some limited autocorrect, akin to the iPhone. Say good-bye to spelling errors.