First Impressions of Mac OS X v10.6 Snow Leopard

Yesterday I went to the Apple Store for the launch of Mac OS X v10.6 Snow Leopard. Here's a video with some of my initial thoughts and notes, followed by a few additional details.

You can get Snow Leopard at a discount from Amazon through this link.  As of when I'm posting this, it's only $25 with free shipping!

Following are some of the notes I took at the Apple Store (some of which made the cut to this video).

Apps that I tested and found to still work fine in Snow Leopard:

• Invisibility Toggler (my app)
• 7zX
• Chicken of the VNC
  
• EasyFind

Security notes:

• Safari: the Status Bar is still hidden by default
• Finder: file name extensions are still hidden by default
• CoreTypes now detects two specific types of Mac malware when downloaded from specific applications such as Safari—read more about this at my security blog—but all other malware is not detected, nor is the eicar.org test file

Other random stuff:

• New autocorrection feature: In TextEdit, if you type "eicar" it autocorrects to vicar, even if you put it in quotation marks. Weird. Apparently autocorrect is a new feature, but it's not very smart. Autocorrect should fix typos, not completely change the word. The letter e and the letter v are far away from each other on the keyboard. Autocorrect is interesting, though; it automatically fixes misspelled words like keybord, keybored, keybaord, keyborad, even kybord, etc. It doesn't fix certain common typos like accidentally hitting the m key when trying to hit the comma, such as keyboardm, housem, applem, etc.
• Screenshots are still saved on the desktop, but now the filename makes it clear that the file is a screenshot and gives it a name based on the date and time it was taken, e.g. "Screen shot 2009-08-28 at 9.23.21 AM". It's saved as a .PNG file.
• Wi-Fi signal strength now shows up in the AirPort menu for each access point, not just the one to which you're currently connected
• Trimming movies is super easy in the new QuickTime Player; it works very similarly to the iPhone 3GS
• The final build of 10.6 is Build 10A432
• There's no visible difference between .RTF and .RTFD files in the Finder; two files in the same folder that in reality have different names look like they both have the same name because the file extension is hidden by default
• I don't know yet whether iChat videoconferencing works between 10.5 and 10.6 because I didn't have a 10.5 machine in the store with which to test it. Video chat is not possible between 10.4 and 10.5, but I'm hopeful that 10.5 and 10.6 may be compatible

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