Your Favorite Snow Leopard UI Changes
Now that many of us have upgraded to Snow Leopard, I would like to start a forum where you can share your favorite UI changes. Use Command + Shift + 3, Command + Shift + 4, a third party screenshot capture tool, or links to your favorite photo sharing site. I’ll start it off with my favorites.
Expose
Below is a screenshot of a new Expose feature in Snow Leopard. I opened six Safari windows and simply clicked on the Safari dock icon for a second. The dock icon lights up while the rest of the dock darkens. Very fast. Very slick.
Airport
Next is the new Airport menu. We finally have signal strength next to the network name. Before, a third-party tool was required for this.
Services
Honestly, I have never used the Services feature in the Finder. It’s cluttered and confusing. Now, it’s smart enough to know what I want to do and provide the correct options. A more thorough write up of the new Services feature is coming to TheAppleBlog shortly.
Leave a comment with links to screenshots of your favorite UI changes in Snow Leopard!
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I am so used to ignoring the Services menu that I don’t think I will ever use it even now that it might be useful.
Once I figured out where the ChineseTextConverterService.app was located and deleted it, the mostly useless Services menu didn’t bother me as much.
BTW David, like helmsb, I can still read all your wireless network names.
Exactly Services looked like crap in 10.1 and it still looked like crap 9 years later in 10.5.8.
It’s going to take a long time before I get in the habit of visiting it.
I hope the Gaussian blur on the airport networks was NOT intended to hide the network names
hah, I was thinking the same thing.
That was kind of a bizarre shot at privacy. :)
I think it actually drew more attention to the network names than if there hadn’t been any blur at all.
I like exposé alot. Now, I haven’t been able to do option shift 3 or 4 yet I don’t believe, but it may be my keyboard.
Try hitting space when hovering over a window during exposé.
It’s not option shift 3 or, but command shift 3 or 4 :)
Tried to unzip a file on the finder… Fail! Stuffit worked though
I just stumbled on a new feature that no one is talking about!
and, actually I think it’s awesome.
If you look at your dock preferences, you have the ability to select “minimize windows into application icon”
Maybe it’s not that useful if you need that visual of a window in your dock, but I think it deserves a little more attention.
though it’s more of a cosmetic issue than anything else, i’ve not heard anyone mention that toolbar gradients (including especially the x/-/+ buttons) are all significantly paler now in snow leopard, lighter than even that in itunes 8, which was itself already noticeably lighter than the leopard gui. (i confirmed this comparing 10.6 and screenshots of 10.5.8 using the digitalcolor meter.)
overall, despite calibrations being adjusted now to 2.2gamma/65k, everything onscreen, from app icons in the dock to colors of window panes and toolbars, appear just a tad washed out. and i can’t seem to make any adjustments to restore the contrast or color saturation to before the upgrade.
I also am experiencing the “washed out look” using Snow Leopard. I’ve always calibrated my monitors to 2.2 gamma / 65k. I’ve noticed that iTunes 9 when installed in Leopard 10.5 also exhibits the washed out GUI, so it seems to me that the GUI have changed? In Snow Leopard the active window toolbar and borders are much lighter, on first glance I can’t tell which window is active compared to non-active windows. I’ve tried re-calibrating using Monaco Optix Pro… nothing I’ve done seems to fix the problem. I cloned back to Leopard 10.5 until there is either a fix or a workaround.
I have the same issue and I’ve noticed one thing, Quicktime X has vibrant colors compared to the rest of the OS, just compare Quicktime’s Close/Minimize buttons to the rest of the OS. Or maybe it’s just me then…
@debug : Really? I’ve experienced just the opposite. Since the upgrade, everything seems to be more vibrant. It’s actually rather nice, since I’ve long considered Mac OS X to have a washed out appearance. I much prefer the vibrant feeling desktop.
It boggles my mind that no one is talking about the new interface for scanning.
If you have a scanning printer open the printer monitor app and see a new button on the far right for scanning. There you can control your scanner and bypass the junky software that came with the scanner. The same interface is in Preview “import from scanner” and Image Capture. It’s brilliant and much nicer to use than the crap that HP bundled. Seems like this is an API that any app can use.
I was really impressed when using a scanner with document feeding. You get a nice multipage PDF, previewed in coverflow – it’s pretty sweet.
The other area that I think is huge is the development of Preview. I’m not a graphic artist but I often need to make comments on a UI or document. I used to use something like Fireworks for this but I could now do it all in Preview using annotation. It’s actually a quite amazing document handling app if you think about it. You can combine PDF, scans, screen grabs and package them all into a document with drag and drop. I use it a lot and its great that Apple keeps expanding the usefulness of this app.