20 new features in OS X 10.6 Snow Leopard

[Hedi]

Many of Snow Leopard's changes are under the hood - new architecture that provides a foundation for the Mac going forward.

But while there's no Spotlight, Time Machine or Quick Look equivalent this time round, Snow Leopard still packs in new user-oriented features, big and small. Here are our favourites.

1. Exchange support
The biggie for corporate types, and word on the street is Snow Leopard's Exchange support works beautifully. It certainly makes Microsoft's Office 2010 announcement ("We'll be doing Exchange things, too!") look a bit sad.

2. Better stacks
Dock stacks viewed as grids now have a scroll bar if there are many items. You can also move up and down the folder hierarchy within the stack.

3. Dock Exposé
Click-hold a Dock app icon and its open windows show in Exposé. Even minimised windows are shown, displayed smaller and under a subtle horizontal line.



4. Minimised window options
To take advantage of Dock Exposé and not clutter the Dock with minimised windows, you can set 'Minimize windows into application icon' in the Dock System Preferences pane.

5. Malware protection
It's early days, but Snow Leopard contains basic malware protection to stop you killing your Mac to death.

6. Revamped eject manager
In Leopard, disks often couldn't be ejected, because a file was in use by an application. Snow Leopard indicates which app is causing the problem.

7. Improved Keyboard Shortcuts management
Keyboard shortcuts now live in a revised Keyboard System Preferences pane, listed by category for ease of editing.

8. Revised Services
The Services menu is now context-sensitive, showing only relevant options on a per-app basis. Services can also be toggled via the Services section of the Keyboard Shortcuts preferences.



9. Smart text select
Preview now selects text intelligently in multi-column documents, rather than selecting across the entire page width.

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[Hachem Belaifa]

This new system as you have presented is indeed very innovative. But speaking of 32-bit and 64 bit and the possibility that some applications may be incompatible...!