Top Ten Reasons to Upgrade to Snow Leopard TODAY
I’ve seen more than a few interweb critics panning Apple’s Snow Leopard as merely a service pack update, but since installing Snow Leopard yesterday morning, I’ve decided they couldn’t be more wrong. Sure, the only REAL change is the 64-bit stuff that likely won’t matter until sometime around when OS 10.7 comes out, but I’ve noticed more than a few “must-have” goodies that each on their own would more than justify the upgrade cost. Here’s 10 reasons why you should upgrade to Snow Leopard today.
1: State of the Art: The version number (10.6) is now 20% higher than version 10.5.
2: Performance: The “Jelly” visualizer in iTunes feels like it might run slightly faster
3: Another word for “awesome”. Snow Leopard includes an all-new thesaurus – the Oxford American Writer’s Thesaurus second edition. That’s right.
4: Time-saver: CyberDuck no longer launches, thus saving you tons of wasted ftp-ing time.
5: All-new look: There are now a couple new Snow Leopard-themed wallpapers
6: Rack ‘em and Stack ‘em: “Stacks”, the Dock view nobody ever used, has been updated (although you still won’t use it)
7: Faster shut down: Because…. um who has an extra 8 seconds to spare in this crazy world of ours?!
8: Big Time Graphics: Finder icons can now be as large as 512 by 512 pixels, four times as big as Leopard was able to dish out!
9: Automatic time zone setup: Apple says “If you’re traveling around the world, the last thing you want to worry about is whether your computer is set to the correct time zone. ” I think they meant to say was “the last thing you’ve probably ever worried about is whether your computer is set to the correct time zone”. But hey, it’s there.
10: It only costs $30: And if you have more than 1 Mac, you can rationalize the cost by bringing it down to $15, $10 (or even lower!) with multiple installs. (Oh, don’t act so high and mighty – we all know you never buy the family pack).
Snow Leopard to hit next Friday (August 28th) - support training has begun
According to reliable West Coast sources, support training for Snow Leopard has begun, signaling an imminent release of the next major release of OS X. Sources claim a date of Friday, August 28th is extremely likely. Below are screenshots from the current Apple Support Snow Leopard training course for those of you are who are so into Apple minutia that you’d care about such things (guilty!).
Snow Leopard’s wallpaper looks many times faster than Leopard’s
Hey, who says Snow Leopard doesn’t offer anything cool worth upgrading for? Check out this new wallpaper!
Above: That’s easily $7.43 of the $29 upgrade price right there! Click to download Snow Leopard’s wallpaper.
Yes, now even if you have an “ancient” PowerPC G5 system you can at least pretend you’re cool with the Snow Leopard Desktop Wallpaper! Click here to download.
Above: Snow Leopard’s wallpaper (left) is obviously much faster than Leopard’s (right)
Thanks to faithful Macenstein reader The Unix Geek for the link!
I have tiny balls! (Thanks to Magnifique!)
Fans of custom OS themes rejoice! Magnifique is here!
OK, so maybe shrinking those jolly, candy-like buttons wasn’t my FIRST gripe with the Leopard interface, but it’s nice to have a choice, isn’t it?
Magnifique is a free app that lets you view and install a range of themes in their library, or make your own. Have you always wanted black windows (preferably with hard to read text?) Well, now you can!
As you can see, it also changes theme colors across applications as well as the Finder. And reverting back to the default theme is a breeze. So, assuming this isn’t Spyware, it’s pretty sweet. You can download it here.
[via Lifehacker]
Snow Leopard pics leaked
German site Sevenmac has posted a slew of alleged leaked pics of Snow Leopard, if you care.
For some reason I can never get excited about pics like this that basically show the “Get info” screen of various apps with a slightly updated version number from what I am currently running, especially for a largely “performance update” vs. a “feature update”, as Snow Leopard is said to be, but I figured I’d let you know where to find them if you are into that sort of thing. And speak German.
Thanks to faithful Macesntein reader Jimmy for the tip!
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