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A pawful of quick Snow Leopard tips

by Steven Sande Aug 31st 2009 at 12:30PM

As all of us are starting to get familiar with Mac OS X 10.6 Snow Leopard, we're starting to find little features that aren't immediately visible and are pretty cool!

My first surprise came when one application asked me to make sure that my date and time settings were correct. I dutifully popped into System Preferences, clicked on the Date & Time preferences pane, clicked on the Time Zone tab, and noticed a couple of things that were different:
First, the time zone I'm in (Mountain) was highlighted and as I moved my cursor left and right, a "ghost" appeared for whatever time zone I was currently over (see arrow above). That in itself wasn't anything great, but the check box at the top -- Set time zone automatically using current location (see oval above) -- was intriguing so I clicked on it. The map went to shades of gray, and then Snow Leopard used the SkyHook Wireless's Wi-Fi positioning service to figure out where I was.
This will be wonderful when I'm traveling for business or pleasure, as I no longer have to remember to set my local time zone when I arrive at a new location. Of course, it's not going to be very useful if you're in an area with little or no Wi-Fi...

The second cool feature was one that was pointed out by resident boy genius Brett Terpstra. It's the text substitution feature that's tucked away in System Preference -- Language & Text. What you can do is set up system-wide text substitutions for various shortcuts. For example, I set one up that uses the letters "sl" as a shortcut for "Mac OS X 10.6 Snow Leopard." In any of the apps that use these text substitutions, I just need to type "sl" and I get the whole enchilada.
This doesn't work in a lot of applications, unfortunately, but it's fun to use where it does work. In Mail.app, iChat, TextEdit, and a handful of other apps, I was able to turn on text substitution from the Edit menu. These apps then used the shortcuts I had set up in the Language & Text sysprefs panel to speed up typing.

My personal favorite tip involves stacks in the Dock. Stacks are the folders that usually end up in the lower right corner of the dock. I usually set up my Macs with three stacks in the Dock -- downloads, documents, and applications. Now I can use my application stack as a type of quick launcher. A click on the stack brings up the grid icon view of the apps, and I just type the first couple of letters of the application name, then press return to launch it.

QuickTime X also has a few nice new features. In playback, the FF / Rew buttons "stick", and if you want to go backwards or forwards through your video even faster, you click on those buttons again to accelerate the motion. I really like the screen recording feature found under the File menu as well, since it's a very fast way to create spur-of-the-moment screencasts for friends or clients.

This next one might have been something you could do in earlier versions of Mac OS X, but it's new to me. A reader pointed out that if you option-click on the sync icon in the menu bar, you now get a complete sync history as well as some sync diagnostics and a way to reset sync history without having to fire up iSync:
The final tip has nothing to do with actually running Snow Leopard...or does it? TUAW reader Jared A. reminded us that the music played at the end of the Snow Leopard installation (which also appeared in Leopard) is the song "Exodus Honey" by Honeycut. It's available in the iTunes Store.

Do you have any fun tips involving Snow Leopard? Let us know by leaving a comment below.

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As all of us are starting to get familiar with Mac OS X 10.6 Snow Leopard, we're starting to find little features that aren't immediately...
 

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Jason Hines

I believe this is new to SL, you can use multiple jabber based accounts in ichat.

September 03 2009 at 5:33 PM Report abuse rate up rate down Reply
lostrecordsuk

In dock expose you can switch through apps with 4 finger swipe/cmd+tab or using the dock icons :D its fun although i wish the text sub worked in safari i wanted to make some for my email address etc

peace

brian

September 02 2009 at 4:16 AM Report abuse rate up rate down Reply
Jim

option click on the volume menu item and you'll get some different choices from when you just click on it... give it a try

September 01 2009 at 7:42 PM Report abuse rate up rate down Reply
Allister

Wow! Try this.

Open iTunes and a Finder window in two different spaces. In the Finder window, locate an audio or video file and drag it to the iTunes icon in the dock - but don't let go.

September 01 2009 at 5:50 AM Report abuse rate up rate down Reply
Doc Izzy

Here are some I've found:

• Alt-Command when clicking on a stack opens the folder in Finder. [I'm pretty sure this wasn't in Leopard cuz I was constantly trying to find a way to do it. In Leopard the closest I found was Command click on a stack and it opened the containing folder.]

• Preview now has image editing features that were only in iWork, like Alpha Channel for removing backgrounds. Also improved Annotations with a mini annotations tool bar on the bottom.

• When you take a screen shot using the keyboard shortcuts the images placed on the desktop are no longer "Picture1.png," "Picture2.png." Instead they are now named based on the date and time like this: "Screen shot 2009-09-01 at 12.03.11 AM"

• Snow Leopard has the new iDisk icon.

• Time Capsule drives now show up with the same Time Machine icon as plugged in Time Machine drives. Previously it was a generic white drive icon.

• Pinch & open multitouch gesture when in a finder window in icon view changes the size of the icons (works on desktop, too.). The same gesture in cover-flow view changes the size of the cover-flow window.

• Keyboard viewer can be resized (CultofMac blog speculates this could be further evidence of tablet as you can resize it large enough for fingers to fit)

• You can change how soon a password is required after the screen saver starts in the Security preference pane.

• The firewall preference pane is simplified and now allows for "signed software" to be given automatic access.

• Day of week can now be shown with the time in the menu bar via the date & time preference pane.

• Time Machine status is more descriptive about what it's doing and gives percentage complete when calculating changes (formally called "preparing").

• If you have older custom preference panes installed (like DivX or Flip4Mac) when you click on them the preferences window will restart into 32-bit mode - indicating that all standard preference panes run 64-bit.

• (I don't think this was in Leopard) Safari help menu includes "installed plug-ins" which shows you detailed plug-in information. BTW, I read that Safari now runs plug-ins in a separate process so it's more stable. When plug-in crashes Safari will not. And it is supposed to give the option to restart the plug-in.

That's all the goodies I've found so far!!

September 01 2009 at 4:40 AM Report abuse rate up rate down Reply
VK

Don't know if this was in Leopard, but cmd-click on a minimized window in the dock opens it up in the current space, regardless of in which space the window was minimized. Also works in Expose.

September 01 2009 at 12:51 AM Report abuse rate up rate down Reply
PabloZ

The Dock/Stacks/Launcher feature works in Leopard too. I've been using the dock as a launcher for a year now, with several folders (Apps, Grfx, iApps, Net, Utils) badged with custom icons. I hadn't tried the typing a few characters trick until tonight, as I keep less than 20 items in each folder, but it works in 10.5.8.

August 31 2009 at 9:21 PM Report abuse rate up rate down Reply
Hawkman

One I've not seen mentioned anywhere yet has to do with multifunction printers. Snow Leopard now knows my HP C4580 has a scanner in it, which works without launching the HP Scan software!

- There's a Scanner pane for the device in Print & Fax.
- I can choose to "Share this scanner on the local network" (though as this model has wireless built in, that's pointless for me). But, Scanner Sharing like Printer Sharing? That's very sexy.
- I can scan straight from the printer's print queue.
- I can scan from Preview.app. Which, incidentally, includes the option to look for networked scanners. :-)

August 31 2009 at 9:18 PM Report abuse rate up rate down Reply
Magicpony

Two finger swipe to fast forward or rewind in quicktime. This was in Leopard but it seems smoother in SL and now has indicators telling you how fast you're fast forwarding or rewinding.

August 31 2009 at 8:31 PM Report abuse rate up rate down Reply
Bill Eccles

I found a few that I outline in two entries on my blog.

http://www.bill.eccles.net/bills_words/2009/08/more-nice-snow-leopard-refinem.html

First, the AirPort "pings" while searching. Second, the eject button next to a disk causes it to actively seek to eject and grays it out. And third, the server disconnect dialog box has an "Ignore" button in it.

I call it, "Mac OS X Snow Leopard: Now with 20% less pestering!"

August 31 2009 at 8:01 PM Report abuse rate up rate down Reply
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