Mac OS X 10.6 ships August 28
Warning – this is a long post
Friday is the day… Pre-orders are scheduled. Amazon tells me that I should see my copy on Sept. 1 or so, and I’ll be reporting my experiences here in the next couple of weeks.
Most of the changes are under the hood… speed improvements, security improvements and such. The interface will be familiar to 10.5 users… but there are a few really good new features.
Important New Features
The Snow Leopard (SL?) interface will be familiar to Leopard users, but there are some new features that can make life very sweet for some users… here’s a list of my favorites:
- 1. Automatic location detection
It’s always been up to you as a traveler to change the time zone to match your location. Going into Date & Time has been something you need to remember to do. Not any more.
Now your time zone settings are automatic (you need to set this as a default, then forget it) providing that you can connect with Wi-Fi. iCal can be set to adjust calendar times to the current time zone, too. If you set an appointment to call John at 3pm in California, when you arrive in New York iCal will remind you at 7pm, as it should.
2. Wi-Fi Status
Click on the Airport menubar item, and the strength and security status for all visible networks is displayed.
2. Exposé and Dock Improvements
Exposé makes accessing open documents a snap, as it is not integrated with the dock. Click and hold an app icon in the dock will give you preview windows for all docs open in that app. Select an document or close one, right from the doc. I love it! Exposé has been wasted on me until now, but I can see it will be much more useful with 10.6.
The Dock has a new look, and much slicker menus. The new Options menu contains common options and makes for a much less cluttered menu.
3. ActiveSync and Exchange 2007 support
It makes sense that after iPhone’s new native support for Exchange that the Mac OS will do so as well. Now email, contact and calendar apps from Apple will interface with Microsoft Exchange 2007 server. Now Mac users can have the same abilities as Entourage users, with the Apple apps they prefer. Address Book, iCal and Mail will now play nice. Users won’t be disadvantaged with regards to their Entourage collegues.
4. Preview Improvements
Preview will be able to open multiple PDFs, just like Adobe Acrobat Reader. It can display contents as contact sheets, and can show page thumbnails in a sidebar, more like Adobe Reader. Preview has always been my choice for launching PDFs… it is much faster than Reader. Now there are fewer reasons to use anything else.
5. Replace Text Systemwide, automatically
Word has been able to do automatic substitution as you type for years. Snow Leopard provide a way to make substitutions with the Keyboard preference pane, which will apply to ALL apps, providing that the developers update their apps.
6. Movie and screencast recording
QuickTime Pro now is part of the package, not a paid app. Record movies and screencasts without additional cost. This is great for me, as a Mac consultant… I can record training sessions easily for the benefit of my clients. Hey, maybe I’ll even post them here!
7. AppleScript
The Script Editor app is now called AppleScript Editor. It’s in the Utilities folder, not the Applications folder, so if you’re an AppleScript user, you may think you’re losing your mind looking for the old app in the old location.
AppleScript Utility is gone, but the AppleScript Editor preferences handle it’s functionality.
8. Trackpad Gestures
I have a 2.33Ghz MacBook Pro that’s been been my workhorse diagnostic and repair tool now for 3 years. I can only use 1 and 2 finger trackpad gestures, not the 3 and 4 finger options the newer MacBooks can use. Now all gesture-capable Macs will be able to use all gestures. This won’t work on older Macs, unfortunately. Gestures are not supported prior to 2006 models.
9. Multilingual Macs
Imput Sources is the name of the pref pane that replaces the International pane. It provides controls for working in multiple languages, and allows both right and left reading languages, but the Japanese Kana palette control is gone, appearing automatically when the Kana input is chosen. The Character Palette is now the Character Viewer. These can be available through the menu bar
Most of my clients are business users, and they will really benefit. Mac market share is close to 8%, and Mac usage is much higher. Nearly 25% of businesses have 30 or more Macs in-house, and Entourage is the primary email/contact/calendar app. Now Mac users can play nice with Entourage. This will be big for business users in companies using Exchange 2007. No need for a client license for the Macs, so this will save even more money for businesses who have mixed technology.
Other changes/improvements
ActiveSync is so common, allowing Entourage 2004 and 2008 to sync with the Exchange server, that it is remarkable only in its absence. Apple Mail can connect to an Entourage 2003 server via IMAP, but it’s mail only. Connected to a 2007 server will change all this. No more syncing thru Sync Services (sometimes prone to errors), and integration with iCal and Address Book will make life much easier for Mac users in business.
AppleTalk is gone. Finished. Dead. RIP. Good riddance. It cannot be used by Macs running 10.6, so you will gain a lot of bandwidth on your network. For those running printers, etc. that require AppleTalk, it may be time to look for a replacement.
Finder Changes
Now you can set a magnification slider in the Finder, in icon view. Icons are live previews, and you can play movies, page thru documents, etc.
Using the contextual menu, you can access folder actions in Snow Leopard more easily, to create, and edit them. They will appear in the main menu, under one option, rather than under the “More” submenu.
You can also set default search scope for Spotlight in Finder Prefs, so that a Spotlight search will default to the entire Mac, the current folder, or a previously used scope.
Right-click (or Control-Click) on an item in the trash will allow you to use the new “Put Back” option, returning the item to it’s original location.
Users can add to the Finder’s Sidebar more easily now, using a menu option or a keyboard shortcut. You can still drag items to the sidebar, too. You can change the order of categories, and remove categories if you don’t use them. If you add an item from an unused category, Snow Leopard is smart enough to add the category back.
Security changes include the ability to set a delay between screen saver onset and the password requirement for accessing the Mac. You can set a period of time when the Mac is still accessible with a touch of the keyboard, without password. I’m not sure how I feel about this one. It seems to defeat the purpose of password protecting the Mac.
Firewall settings are easier to use, and more secure. No more confusion about port IDs… just select the applications or services you want allowed or blocked. Signed software can be set to be permitted by default.
Sharing prefs now offer a Share Scanner option, similar to Share Printer. I love this one!
Keyboard and Mouse prefs are now 2 separate preference panes. Keyboard prefs will offer more control of shortcuts, and setup of Bluetooth keyboards and mice, in addition to the ability to customize system-wide services (applets), deleting unwanted ones and adding new ones.
Users can use gestures to enter Chinese characters on the MacBook’s trackpad and opened up the multi-touch trackpad to outside developers. Hopefully we’ll see non-Apple apps that can make use of gestures.
64-bit capabilities
Almost all the apps included with Snow Leopard are 64-bit savvy. What does this mean? Firstly, it provides access to more than 4 GB of RAM. Then there are some speed boosts, utilizing the Intel chips’ built-in routines optimized for 64-bit mode.
Intel Core 2 Duo or Intel Xeon machines are 64-bit capable, others are not. Snow Leopard will still run 64-bit apps at 64-Bit, but older Macs will not be able to boot with the 64-bit kernel. The main disadvantage of this will be the inability to access more than 32 GB of RAM. I can’t do that in my Mac Pro, and no other Macs can do it yet, so no big deal. In the future, there may more of a disadvantage.
Grand Central is the technology Apple is implementing to make it easier to program parallelization and concurrency into applications. No, I don’t know what that means either, but Apple says that apps will be able to make much better use of the multiple CPU cores in current and future Macs. One of these days we’ll have machines with 16 or 32 cores, and programming to use the separate cores is very complex. Grand Central is designed to simplify this process.
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