Apple intended Snow Leopard (OS X 10.6) to be a version of the Mac OS that concentrated on stability, as well as the future, not the past. Snow Leopard was supposed to focus on Intel multi-core processors and abandon previous technologies.
Lucky for us, the engineers at Apple couldn’t completely suppress their desire to toss in a few new features, some of which have gotten more press than others. Here are some of the lesser-known features of Snow Leopard, features that should help improve your daily workflow, at least in terms of using the Mac OS.
1. Screen Shots in Preview
Preview, the PDF reader application that Apple includes with OS X, has gotten some nice upgrades with Snow Leopard. One upgrade you may find helpful is the new ability to take screen shots from within Preview.
2. Exposing Expose’s Hidden Features
Snow Leopard adds new functionality to Expose, Apple’s windows management system. Besides letting you view all open windows as thumbnails on the desktop, Expose now also works from the Dock, displaying only the windows associated with a particular Dock icon. For example, if you click and hold the Microsoft Word icon in the Dock, Expose will display all open Word documents.
3. How to Enable the Hidden Single-Application Mode in Snow Leopard
When Apple first released OS X as a beta product, it displayed applications one at a time. Even though multiple applications could be running at the same time, only one would be visible on the desktop. This was called single-application mode. Single-application mode kept desktop space uncluttered, but it made working with multiple applications a pain in the windows. For that reason, Apple later chose multi-application mode to be the default behavior for the Finder and its desktop.
The single-application mode is still available in Snow Leopard. You just need to do a little tweaking to enable it.
4. Recent Items: Find Out Where Recent Items Are Located
The Apple menu’s ‘Recent Items’ sub-menu lets you quickly access applications, documents, and servers you have recently used. This is a handy feature that saves a few steps when locating and launching applications or documents.
In previous versions of Mac OS X, the ‘Recent Items’ list didn’t actually help you locate files or applications, it just let you access them quickly, without revealing where they were physically located in your Mac’s file system. In Snow Leopard (OS X 10.6), the ‘Recent Items’ sub-menu has a new trick up its sleeve. If you know the secret, the ‘Recent Items’ sub-menu will show you where items are actually located.
5. Spotlight Search: Setting the Finder’s Search Box Preferences
Spotlight, the system-wide search service in Mac OS X, is one of the easiest and quickest search systems available for the Mac. You can access Spotlight by clicking the ‘Spotlight’ icon (the magnifying glass) in the Apple menu bar, or by using the search box available in the top right corner of every Finder window.
The problem with using the Finder window search box is that its default behavior is to search your entire Mac. I prefer to use Finder search boxes to search the folder that is currently open in a Finder window. Thanks to Snow Leopard, I can now do this.
6. Snow Leopard: System-Wide Text Substitution
Snow Leopard has some new features that haven’t received their fair share of press. One such feature is system-wide text substitution, which lets you create text shortcuts for phrases you use frequently. Once you type a text shortcut, it will automatically expand to its associated phrase. This works in any application, not just a word processor.
Text substitution is also a handy tool for words you frequently mistype. For instance, I tend to type ‘teh’ when I mean to type ‘the.’ My word processor is smart enough to correct that typing error for me, but other applications are perfectly happy to let me look silly, with ‘teh’ written all over the place.
7. Quick Look for Disk Space
Need to know how much free disk space you have, and need to know it quickly? Before Snow Leopard, finding out how much free disk space was available required opening a volume in the Finder, using Get Info, or firing up Disk Utility.
Now there’s a faster way: Just use the Quick Look feature. Quick Look was designed to let you instantly preview the contents of your documents, but it can also be used in some surprising ways.
8. Select Audio In and Out From the Menu Bar
Your Mac has multiple audio inputs and outputs. If you’re using more than one, you may find it inconvenient to launch System Preferences just to select a new input or output. Use the volume item in your Mac’s menu bar instead. Here’s how.
9. View All Docked Finder Windows
In case you didn’t already know this, option-clicking the minimize button in a Finder window will collapse all open Finder windows to the Dock.
This has been the case with OS X as far back as I can remember. I can’t confirm it, but it may have been a shortcut as far back as the public preview of OS X 10.0.
With the introduction of Snow Leopard and its Cocoa-based Finder, you can maximize all Finder windows with the same shortcut.
