crunchgear has a preview of Snow Leopard, including a little video. It’s based on the Gold Master, 10A432 release.
Some notable features:
QuickTime has been turned completely Pro with screen capture, audio capture, and movie capture built in along with an editing/trimming ribbon right in the app
Shutdown is faster as is wireless connectivity
There is automatic printer driver download as well as automatic timezone setup
It also has Chinese character input, faster installation, and faster Time Machine backup. It also is 6GB smaller than the original Leopard
Stacks has been updated as well with a new icon style and menu color. Previews are much more powerful now and you can cut intelligently from PDFs
It requires an Intel processor – no PowerPC support – 1GB of memory and 5GB of disk space
With the release of the OS X Snow Leopard 10A402 beta yesterday, users have been poring over the new version looking for changes. Among the most obvious changes have been a few visual tweaks, although several other enhancements have also been discovered.
- Contextual Dock Menus in List View: Apple has modified the theme of contextual menus within the Dock when using list view. The menus now utilize what some users are calling a “heads-up display” theme of white text on a charcoal background.
- Finder Window Slider Button: The new-in-Snow Leopard Finder window slider button for adjusting icon sizes has now taken on a grey color as opposed to the standard blue buttons found elsewhere.
- Exposé for Multiple Monitors Fixed: Exposé reportedly now functions correctly when using multiple monitors, with windows remaining on their respective monitors in Exposé rather than all being collected on the primary monitor.
- System Responsiveness and Speed: Many users are reporting greater system responsiveness and significant increases in speed. Startup and shutdown times appear to be significantly improved.
- Third-Party Preference Panes: Third-party System Preferences panes reportedly are now functional.
- Battery Life for Notebooks: A number of users have reported their battery life indicators estimating significantly longer run times than under previous Snow Leopard builds. This has not, however, been confirmed in actual battery life tests yet.
- New QuickTime Version: QuickTime X has been upgraded to Build 10.0 (42). There is no word on any visible changes in the new build.
Today Apple have updated their web site with some Snow Leopard information, including a ‘notify me’ link. Other news is that if you purchased your new Mac after June 8th, you’ll be eligible for a discount on the cost of Snow Leopard ($14.95 AUD I believe).
Better Disk Eject behaviour, including telling you what App has a disk Open
Setting default search location to Current folder
Printer Driver Updates
Split Pane terminal is back!
Apparently some super file sharing energy saving magic:
Quote:
With Snow Leopard and a compatible AirPort Extreme or Time Capsule base station, a computer that acts as a file or media server can go to sleep yet continue to share its files with other computers and devices, saving energy.
Date in the Menu bar. It seems small, but seeing todays date at a glance is very useful
GPU acceleration for QuickTime X Video decoding
Exchange support
Data Detectors now identify fly details
Multi-Touch for older laptops
Grand Central Dispatch + OpenCL
Head on over to the Apple site and have a good read, it’s worth a look.
