Tips and tricks of Snow Leopard

Snow Leopard has disparagingly been called a 'maintenance upgrade' but that's not exactly true. While Snow Leopard is, essentially, Leopard, it has been dramatically rewritten to be faster in some operations on all Macs, and faster still when future Macs can take advantage of architecture enhancements.

So if you've upgraded, you will have noticed straight away that you now have more disc space. This is partly because of Apple's adoption of the hard drive space maths used for decades by most hard drive manufacturers (ie, that 1000 megabytes is a gigabyte, and not 1024 megabytes), but also because OS 10.6x is smaller.

This is partly through 'leaner' code being written for essential operations and partly because 10.6 only installs the printer drivers you're deemed to need, rather than every printer driver available.

But now you might be sitting there wondering what all the fuss is about. If that's you, here are a few new tips and tricks:

Preview
Preview is Apple's speedy PDF viewer. Or that's how it started out, anyway. Later versions got the ability to crop, and to open and save various images in different formats and to re-save in different formats.

To crop, BTW, just make a selection and choose Crop from the Tools menu.

You could even, in the last couple of years, use iPhoto's editing tools, although this wasn't exactly obvious. iPhoto's editing tools are in the Tools menu but you have to choose Adjust Colour ... to get the options including saturation and sharpen, and even a histogram.

The new version has added annotation, so even without Adobe Acrobat you can annotate a PDF someone sends you (mark it up) and send it back.

A great feature of Preview was to open PDFs and, with the Sidebar turned on, repaginate documents instantly just by dragging the sidebar page icons around.

Snow Leopard's Preview has added another spot: now you can drag thumbnails out of the sidebar to become self-standing PDFs. You just Shift-Select or Command-Select several pages and drag them out to create an instant PDF file which contains just those pages. (You may need to press the Sidebar button at top right to turn this feature on - this displays the page thumbnails.)

iCal
OS 10.6's iCal has thankfully put the info window back. Open the Inspector (Show Inspector in the Edit menu) to see all the alarm times for instant access to any other changes you wish to make.

Spaces
If your Spaces get out of control - presuming you use this feature - you could press the C key in OS 10.5 and it would bring them back into whack. This doesn't work in 10.6 - you now have to hold down the Command key down and press the Down Arrow key to can collect all the windows together.

Option key detail
Holding down the Option key when you press the Bluetooth or AirPort drop-down right-side menus offers you much more detail (signal strength etc). Holding down the Option key when you drop the Sync menu tells you when you synced what, when.

Clippings
When you select some text on a web page, for example, and wait a few seconds, you can then drag that selection out onto the desktop to create and instant 'text clipping'.
Now, though, Quick Look lets you view clipping files and if you double click on Clippings, you can select and copy portions of that text.

Dock behaviour
The new Dock in Snow Leopard adds Exposé effects, sure, but you might be annoyed that the controls you had over running apps has gone.

It has and it hasn't - for example, I used to like to be able to Pause or skip to the next track in iTunes by clicking and holding on the iTunes icon in the Dock and choosing the option I wanted, even when iTunes itself was playing, but hidden (not displayed).
To achieve the same in Snow Leopard, just hold the Control key down before you click; then you get all those controls back.

iTunes' 'nested conditionals'
iTunes has this great Smart Playlists' feature that lets you set a criteria - say, Genre is Blues - and instantly create a 25-song list from your Blues tracks. Now when you choose File>New Smart Playlist (or Option-click on the plus icon below the left sidebar in iTunes), you see the new smart playlist window.

iTunes 9 has added a new element to the smart playlist creation interface. You'll notice a new ellipsis (...) button at the right edge of the rule line. When you click on it, you get a new set of rules, just like the first one but indented, where you can choose to match Any or All rules in that section of the window, and you can add the rules you want to use in your smart playlist.

Nested conditional playlists give you some clever possibilities, like making a list of the podcasts you haven't listened to yet or of all the live recordings you have by particular artists. Check out Kirk McElhearn's more detailed Macworld article on nested conditionals.

Hidden folders in Open/Save dialogue
In the Open or Save dialogue in Snow Leopard, you can now press Shift-Command-Period to display hidden files and folders.

To hide the hidden files again, just press Shift-Command-Period (full-stop) again. The setting is temporary, though. Hidden files will always be hidden when the Open or Save dialogue first appears onscreen. (Somewhat obviously, this also only works if you've clicked the triangular button at top right to expand the dialogues to show the folder browser.)

This feature is of most benefit to developers - if you don't know the import of the suddenly-displayed files, don't play with them!

- Mark Webster mac.nz

AP Photo / Itsuo Inouye