Likes and dislikes about the new Mac OS X aka Snow Leopard
by George T on Oct 25 2009 at 23:16 
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I’ve finally made up my mind to upgrade to Snow Leopard. It has been a day or so since I did a clean install of the new Mac OS X. Well, the truth is nothing looks different from the previous version (10.5) until the moment you start to interact with this version of Mac OS X. The first thing that you may notice is the missing icon of your hard drive. Snow Leopard clearly urges users to change their cluttering-workspace behaviors towards a fewer-(if none)-icons desktop environment. Other than that, there are numerous other refinements you can find out about here. After a day of usage these are my likes and dislikes about the new Mac OS X aka Snow Leopard.
Likes:
- The secondary tap/click on the Dock icons pops up an nicely transparent menu that looks just perfect.
- Snow Leopard supports three- and four-finger gestures for all mac notebooks with Multi-Touch trackpads.
- In case you did have a Mac notebook with Multi-Touch trackpad you might have heard of MultiClutch. MultiClutch allows you to assign custom keyboard shortcuts in a given app to a given gesture. I personally used MultiClutch mostly for swiping back and forward inside Firefox. Well, Snow Leopard seems to be able to handle these swipes without any other third party application.
- Do you like the Grid View of the Stacks? Now you ‘ll love it! With its native folders support you will be able to open folders in a stack to see all the files inside and quickly return to previous folders.
- I can’t count the times I wanted to look up the date and had to switch to Dashboard or look at the Calendar icon in my hiding-on Dock. The date can now appear alongside the time in the menu bar which is definitely a time saver.
- When I first heard of the new borderless quicktime I knew it would be awesome. At first it may look strange to you but you ‘ll get used to it shortly.
- What a relief. Since I first saw this on the iPhone I wanted it so badly. Address Book now syncs with Google! Hurray!
- “Ok, we are in the Trash now. I need to take this accidentally deleted file back to where it came from. Wait a minute.. Where on earth did it came from?” Has this ever happened to you? No problem. The “Put Back” option inside the Trash gives you the option to retrieve that deleted file and put it back, even if you don’t recall where back is.
- Another cool feature in the new Mac OS X resides inside the Dock preferences. It is a check box that allows you to minimize windows into the application icon rather than to the special section of the Dock. It comes in very handy and you can you can either fire up Exposé or click and hold on any icon in the Dock, to see that both are displaying minimized windows a little bit smaller.
- Are you a Windows user? If yes, don’t worry, no one is perfect. The new Mac OS X enables you to access the files on your Mac OS X partition from Windows. It supports read-only access for security reasons.
- Finally, TextEdit’s automatic spelling correction rocks! If you are a regular TextEdit user you ‘ll love it.
However there are a couple things I don’t like about the new Mac OS X.
Dislikes:
- Firstly, I could not help but notice this awkward, you might say, transition from space to space. I don’t know if you are using Spaces at all (although I think you should) but you will definitely notice this clumsy effect. It lasts for milliseconds but hell yeah it is noticeable. I don’t recall this happening in Leopard. Has anyone else noticed this?
- Last but not least, when Apple introduced Multi-Touch trackpads I noticed that people (including myself) kept pinching (opening and closing) by accident and that caused zooming in and out icons in Finder windows (which was undeniably one of the worst things you could do with your Multi-Touch trackpad). Soon, a software update was released fixing this “bug”. Now, why on earth did this came back with Snow Leopard?
[ photo via adamjackson ]
tags: apple, mac, mac os, mac os 10.6, operating systems, snow leopardshort url: http://bit.ly/1nuunM
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I cant make any comparance with 10.5 but SL seems stable (at last) on my hackintosh PC. :) So, i’ll give it a chance.