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
Just when Snow Leopard is nearing completion for release, and “Regular” Leopard seemed to be completely documented, I stumbled upon this trick for Macbooks….In a Finder window, go to Columns view. If you have any videos, clicking on one, then placing the mouse pointer over on the Preview column, will make a small Play button appear…You can now use 2-fingers on the trackpad to Scroll-Preview through the video without even hitting the Play button…(You must have “show preview column” enabled in the View Options of the Finder).
You can use preview in leopard not only in finder windows but on any document, folder, or file on the desktop. simply highlight the desired file and then press the space bar to view that file in preview mode.
When previewing images, hold alt and click on the picture to zoom in. then you can move the image around with the scroll ball or the cursor. to Zoom Out hold alt+shift and click.
I just took a picture with my built-in iSight. I then opened the file in Preview to do a quick, simple crop. This is when I noticed new options for the select functionality. I ended up doing the whole cropping in Preview – not bothering to launching Photoshop.
Using the Select – Extract shape you can very easily generate and edit a selection mask similar to photoshops colour select. Only the Preview implementation of it is much more intuitive and thus faster to work with.
I’m not sure if this is new in Leopard but I just discovered it. You can significantly shrink the size of PDF files using Preview.
To do this open the PDF in Preview. Select “Save As…” from the File menu. In the dialog that appears you will see a pop-up menu labelled “Quartz Filter”. Choose “Reduce File Size” and when you save the PDF it will be much smaller than the original.
There is some image quality loss so be sure to keep a copy of the original in case you aren’t happy with the results.
PDF documents can be a pain at times for people that need to work with other documents. If you are in need of a PDF to excel converter, you can find some of the best pdf converter software online. Whether you just need a pdf server or a converter for converting pdf’s to word documents you can find software online.
Not much of a trick, but I just wanted to call attention to all the functionality that the new Preview packs. It’s all there, in the help menu, in “What’s New in Preview”. Now with Preview there’s a great deal more PDF manipulation.
Let’s say you have a PDF document. With the sidebar open, you can now rearrange, delete pages, you can even drag pictures or other PDF documents from the desktop into the sidebar, move them around, and Preview will make them part of the original document. It’s great when creating or editing things on the fly. This definitely adds to the post about Preview’s Instant Alpha capabilities to clean up pictures.
This is really cool, I found it on a youtube video. You can place text on your images right in Leopard using Textedit and Preview. Here’s how:
Open Textedit, type a suitable label or string of text. Set the font as you desire (cmd+t), go to “File -> Print” and choose “Open PDF in Preview”.
Now using the “Select Tool” select the text (draw a box around it) and press (cmd+k) to crop. Save the cropped PDF as a PNG image (File -> Save As)
Now with the saved PNG image, hold the mouse button on the select tool until the drop down menu appears, and choose “Instant Alpha”. The image will now let you select the background portions to remove. Click on each white area until they are all grey and then press “Enter”. Now, “File -> Save As” a PNG again, this time you will notice the “Alpha” tickbox is checked. Overwrite the existing PNG file.
Now, with the saved image, press “cmd+a” to select all, then “cmd+c” to copy the item. Go across to your target image and press “cmd+v” to paste the text in. You can drag the text anywhere you like on the image!
Enjoy! * I took this picture whilst on holiday in Margaret River, Western Australia
