Filed under: Analysis / Opinion, OS, Software, Snow Leopard
Snow Leopard: what's to love (or at least appreciate)
As you're probably well aware, Snow Leopard broke a lot of applications, some utilities, even some older hardware. For non-developers, Snow Leopard may seem to have more negatives than positives right now. That will change -- things will smooth out as everyone catches up -- but I thought I'd point out the things that have really made me happy in Snow Leopard. As I promised in my post on what Snow Leopard broke for me, this will be a cheery post. I'm not ignoring the multitude of comments on that post, which amount to a short novel on Snow Leopard breakage, I'm just trying to lighten the mood.
No more pesky font conflicts
I'm pretty good about managing fonts. I had some niggling conflicts with Helvetica Neue, though, that I just couldn't get to disappear. The first time Snow Leopard booted, it didn't just nag me about the conflict, it offered a new button to move the offending file to the Trash. Bam. No more font conflicts and no more searching for the culprits.
System Services
Services in Leopard are highly-evolved, and in my opinion, downright amazing. Sure, all of my existing custom services broke, and many services bundled with applications aren't functioning, but again, this will smooth out with time. The simple fact of the matter is that the Services menu now functions the way it probably always should have. You no longer have to go up to the Application menu, select Services and then navigate to the service you want in a confusing list. If you had a lot of services in Leopard, you know what I'm talking about. I could never remember the exact name of a service, and there was a 70% chance it wouldn't be in a subfolder named after the application. That's no good, and Service Scrubber could rarely hack through my jungle of services in order to shorten the list. Instead of all that, we now have Services which show up in a contextual menu (right click/control-click), and are contextually intelligent, showing only applicable services. Further, you can create your own services using Automator, and make them do anything you want. It's never been this easy, even with tools like ThisService.
Rockin' Dashboard
I like Dashboard. I liked it in Leopard, and I used it a lot. I have a screen-and-a-half-full of widgets to prove it. In Leopard, though, even Dashboard Kickstart couldn't help Dashboard keep up with me most of the time. It took minutes for Dashboard to load my precious collection. In Snow Leopard, minutes have become seconds. Within 2 seconds of hitting F12, I'm tracking packages, generating Lorem Ipsum, GeistesBlitzing and more. Dashboard is suddenly much more useful.
Dock Exposé
Exposé in general is much more useful for me now. I never actually used it much in Leopard ... I always found Witch more appropriate to my needs. Now, with the more visually-accessible grid format (I know some don't like it, but I do) and other small tweaks, I'm finding myself popping it up more and more. Especially from the Dock, where pressing and holding an icon runs Exposé just for that app, and from the Task Switcher, as I detailed earlier.
Souped-up text editing
At first, I thought Text Edit had been amped up all by itself. I've come to realize that the new features, such as auto-correct and data detectors, can be enabled across just about any Cocoa text field. Theoretically, I should be able to create iCal events from dates in Safari, though I haven't looked into making that happen yet. The auto-correct feature is working for me everywhere, though (at least in Cocoa apps), and I couldn't be more tickled about it. Sure, it seems like we should have been turning "teh" into "the" a long time ago, but I'm certainly not going to complain that it's happening now.
Image Capture, Preview and my Epson scanner
My Epson Perfection 4490 Photo is as pleased as I am with the upgrade. It's been happily popping scans directly into Preview and other handy places. I'm going to look for a full replacement for Adobe Acrobat over the weekend, as I'd love to cut the bloat and speed the process. In short, though, there are a significant number of new printer and scanner drivers included in Snow Leopard, and things that "kinda" worked before are now flawlessly integrated for me.
Single column of PDF text? Your selection is ready
Improved algorithms in text selection mean that, in Preview, you can finally select just a single column of text without the selection spilling over into adjacent columns. I grab a lot of websites in PDF format for future reference, and selecting code and snippets from them has always been a pain, even in advanced editors like Acrobat and Skim. It's somewhat innocuous, but makes my life much simpler. It Just Works.
Eject? Operation cannot be completed ...
Sometimes a disk gets stuck, a dead process attaching to a file and not letting go, yielding the above error. Snow Leopard is kind enough to provide a "Force Eject" option when this happens, rather than making you resort to WhatsOpen or the like. It's similar to the aforementioned font conflict fix, just a nice touch and a pleasant surprise.
Sure, I could go on, but that's a pretty good sample of what has me personally impressed. I'm one of the fortunate ones whose workflow was fairly uninterrupted by the upgrade, so I have more time to revel in these niceties than others. Here's hoping that those of you with more significant Snow Leopard problems find resolution quickly!
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Reader Comments (Page 1 of 2)
philafication said 3:44PM on 9-04-2009
What changed in Snow Leopard's Exposé? I know it feels different but what exactly is it? I don't like the blue frame that wraps around it. The color feels weird.
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Brett Terpstra said 3:50PM on 9-04-2009
The windows resize as necessary to create a more grid-like view. Some people dislike it because it makes it difficult to differentiate based on window size, but I'm finding it much easier to work with.
A reader named Frank tipped us off to the fact that you can alter the blue wrapper with a little digging and some graphics work. If you go into System->Library->CoreServices->Dock.app and right click to select Show Package Contents, then go into Contents->Resources and look for expose-window-selection-big.png and expose-window-selection-small.png, you can replace those files with your own images. It's a little bit of a dig, but it's worth it if those blue outlines are driving you nuts.
Chester said 6:38PM on 9-04-2009
The arrangement of windows has changed, and now it includes minimized windows too. A welcome addition IMO. Also, the ability to click and hold on an application icon in the dock to see that applications windows in Exposé is nice... I use it to drag files into specific windows of an application.
philafication said 4:01PM on 9-04-2009
Oh thank you very much,... that's great. I'll look into it and see if I can find something suitable.
julian said 5:58PM on 9-04-2009
I have to agree. I completely hate the blue surrounding. i wish it was the same color of the highlighting ... either way its too fluorecent.
thanks for the tip!
dan said 3:50PM on 9-04-2009
The main change is the spacing and sizing of windows - previously they were scattered around the screen at random, now they are all evenly sized and spaced. Works better. :-)
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D.J. said 4:07PM on 9-04-2009
Eh... I ran into a couple font conflicts and am still having one that I can't get rid of (for some reason, all text on the user authentication screen that pops up when you need to verify who you are is odd characters - nowhere else though).
That said, when resolving the other issue I had, I noticed that the Font Book is indeed a lot better put together this go round. Not flawless yet, but steps have been made.
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Brett Terpstra said 5:37PM on 9-04-2009
I wonder if—because it's the login window and loads before the rest of the system—it's not offering the same options?
D.J. said 5:40PM on 9-04-2009
It's not that window. It's the authentication window that pops up whenever you install a new program, check something in the keychain, etc.
Brett Terpstra said 5:42PM on 9-04-2009
Does it give you the font conflict error, or does it just garble the text?
D.J. said 5:43PM on 9-04-2009
Just garbles. No errors otherwise.
Brett Terpstra said 5:47PM on 9-04-2009
Sounds more like a corrupted font than a font conflict. I'd check the validity of your font files and clear your font cache...
D.J. said 5:50PM on 9-04-2009
Thanks, man. I'll give it a shot. I really appreciate you helping think through it. :)
philafication said 5:08PM on 9-04-2009
Yeah, that blue did drive me nuts. I now use a more subtle one instead.
I just wanted to share how I did it. It's really easy, just download the files on the page and follow the instructions to change the frame's color of Snow Leopard's Exposé.
http://philafication.com/2009/expose-colors/
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Joe said 5:55PM on 9-04-2009
Hey, Phil ... maybe you should credit TUAW for this on your blog? Just a thought.
philafication said 8:17AM on 9-05-2009
I'm sorry. I already did. It was too late yesterday.
EagerDragon said 5:23PM on 9-04-2009
I have to disagree that SL has broken applications and utilities. Developers had access to SL for many months. If they decided not to upgrade their software to be compatible prior to SL release, to me it shows lack of respect for their customers.
They could have released a new version the day SL was ready or even months prior.
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Dom said 1:05PM on 9-05-2009
Snow Leopard has just broken too much for me and I'm going back to Leopard for the forseable future.
I understand that this is down to app developers as well as Apple, but the *only* benefit I was getting from SL was the new services menu, and that's currently buggy and unusable for me. Putting certain actions into a workflow just crashes Automator every time.
I find it a little sad that having been loved Apple products for five years, I get lumbered with what I can only describe as a piece-of-trash OS. I know many will disagree, but for my needs, it's simply unusable.
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muffinloaf said 1:40PM on 9-05-2009
My personal favorite little SL features:
-Animated arrange icons (it's about time!)
-Minimize to Dock Icon and how it looks and works in the updated Expose
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Angelina Harding said 3:31PM on 9-08-2009
I am a fairly new Mac convert and have a minimac, which was great. I accessed the internet by means of an Orange dongle (because of some access to broadband in the are) This used to work well until I upgraded to Snow Leopard - now it does not function on my mac but still works with Vista. I am really disappointed as I have a visual impairment and I thought Snow Leopard would help me. I do not know whether this is a universal problem or just peculiar to my configuration. I would be glad of anyone else's experiences. Ena Harding
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