10 Snow Leopard Features Not Mentioned at WWDC
Posted 06/10/2009 at 9:04pm
| by Florence Ion
WWDC’s
Philnote had us squealing with delight over the flurry of new product
updates and announcements, but we still felt like we were left a little
high and dry when it came to news regarding the new Mac OS X operating system,
Snow Leopard. Though the iPhone 3G S did steal the spotlight at the
show, we were hoping for a few more details regarding our favorite
operating system. While we do know that Snow Leopard will be taking
advantage of the hardware that comes bundled with our Macs, including
the graphics accelerator OpenCL and 64-bit compatibility, we’re
wondering what else we’ll get when we eventually upgrade this Fall.
1.
Multi-touch Gestures: Even the older MacBooks upgrading to Snow Leopard
will now have three- and four-finger touchpad abilities, which will
make one-hand computer usage totally possible.
2. Shut Down and
Wake Up now Twice as fast: Apple says that Snow Leopard will be up to
75-percent faster than its predecessor when shutting down and waking up
the operating system from sleep mode, with screen locking enabled.
Hopefully, this is the end of the groggy computer!
3. Higher Resolution iChat Video Chats: iChat can now display iChat Theater
content at a higher resolution--up to 640 by 480 pixels, four times the
maximum resolution in Mac OS X Leopard. So, you can chat with your
friends and family while you're on a business trip and feel like you
never left.
4. Better Services Integration: Services that are
only used sometimes, or never, can now be disabled and enabled as you
please, without cluttering up your screen. And, you'll only see the
services that are compatible with whatever program you're using.
5.
Flight Data Detector: Now when you read email messages and text
documents, Snow Leopard can automatically identify flight numbers
mentioned and take you directly to the Dashboard Flight Track widget to
keep you on board with the latest updates.
6. Split-Pane Terminal: Split your Terminal window into different Terminal sessions. Keep track of mulitple activites in one wndow.
7. AirPort Menu Signal Strength: Not sure which wireless networks have the strongest
wireless signal? AirPort will now include signal strength for all
available wireless networks so you can choose the right one, instead of
rifling through each connection, only to discover that most of them
have less than two bars.
8. iChat will only require one-third
the bandwidth: Leopard requires 900-Kbps upstream bandwidth, while
Snow Leopard only requires 300-Kbps and still manages to deliver near
DVD-quality video. This also means it'll be easier to download an album
from iTunes while simultaneously video chatting with a friend.
9.
Automatic spelling correction: TextEdit will now fix common spelling
errors as you type, including commonly misspelled words such as “teh”
and common misspellings in longer words.
10. Jump around
webpages with web spots: A feature we love on the iPhone. The web spot
technology in Safari lets you jump directly to the important parts of a
webpage. It also provides a way to go directly to the web spot without
having to check out other areas of the page.