Hi there, yesterday I’ve decided to upgrade Mac OS X Leopard to Mac OS X Snow Leopard, that will come out in September as announced by Apple.
On the next lines I’ll try to tell you the first impressions with this new OS…
Ok let’s start from the beginning, as I said earlier I’ve upgraded my Leopard to Snow Leopard, leaving all content on the hard disk. It took awhile, about 45min to install it.
On the first run of Mac OS X Snow Leopard, I’ve noticed that the system was a little bit slow on its the performance, but I’ve noticed that SpotLight was indexing all my files and folders.
I’ve already startup my System after SpotLight’s indexing task and notice that is faster than Leopard, on loading Finder, startup programs, Dock, Desktop and opening applications.
Let’s talk about Apple applications and its new features:
Finder was all rewritten and get some new features like, a slider on the bottom left in Finder windows that allows to resize folder icons, the possibility to recover files on the Trash to its original folder.
Finder's Slider
Trash's Put Back Feature
The Dock got new appearance and also some new features. On appearance, the contextual menu as ‘joined the dark side’, getting a darker style. The new features of the Dock are, the possibility to scroll and navigate between folders on a Stack and to activate the exposé from the Dock by pressing an icon the active windows of correspondent program are shown.
Dock's Contextual Menu Style
Scrollable Stack
Navigating Utilities Folder on Applications Stack
Calling Exposé from the Dock
On Exposé, I’ve only noticed three differences. When a window on Exposé gets the mouse over, it gets a blue border, I’ve already try to find a way to change the color of that but no success. Other feature is all the windows in Exposé got a label of its title. And the last one, is that even the minimized windows on the Dock appear at the bottom with a small size.
Exposé
As you might know, Apple created a new QuickTime X, it as new features like recording and share to itunes (to ipod touch and iPhone), Mobile Me and Youtube. It as also a new and dark interface.
QuickTime Player recording features
QuickTime's share feature
QuickTime's new interface
Now on iCal, it’s easier to configure Google and Yahoo! Calendar so is also easier to configure the Calendar for Exchange 2007. When you setup the Exchange 2007 Calendar you can also configure Email and Contacts automatically, with no pain at all. Unfortunately I can´t find a way to sync all calendars (Google, Exchange and Local), in order to have the same information.
iCal supported accounts
iCal Exchange Email and Contacts set up
Like you noticed above, Apple introduced the support for Microsoft Exchange, I’m already using Exchange on Mail, iCal and Address Book.
Mail, on Leopard I was using an Exchange/Imap configuration and it worked perfectly, so for now I haven’t noticed differences with the email account configured with Exchange.
On Address Book now I have two new groups, one for the contacts on my Exchange account and the other one is the contacts global list of the Exchange Account, and it works very well!
Address Book Exchange Global List Search
Preview, Apple’s image and PDF viewer and editor, when you are selecting an image now you can see the selection area size. That’s all I’ve noticed on Preview for now.
Preview's selection area size
On Snow Leopard all Apple native applications are now running on 64bit, with the exception of iTunes (in this version ‘Snow Leopard Build 10A421 Seeded to Developers’, the last one available).
Activity Monitor
Unfortunately Apple didn’t make any changes in Front Row like the possibility to watch the movie trailers in HD.
There are more features on this Snow Leopard but for now this is was my first impression of the Mac OS X Snow Leopard, I hope that you have enjoyed!
More information about Snow Leopard: Apple
