Snow Leopard - little things that make difference.

I bet you've heard a lot about the fact that Snow Leopard is rather a big update than a new operation system. But why should we invent a new wheel if people like to drive using the one they've got used to, what they really want is just to make it more efficient. A huge percentage of people who switched from Mac OS 10.4 to 10.5 speaks for itself - people loved Tiger but Leopard showed lots of new useful stuff people found useful. At this point improving Leopard  means  bringing lots of small improvements that as a whole makes a Big Difference. That's what Snow Leopard is about.


Let's review top 5 improvements I've noticed since they turned out to be really helpful, at least for me :-)

1. Language switching. People who are fine with English as a single language on the Mac can simply skip this paragraph, but people who use 2 or more languages on their Mac and quite often have to switch between  will find a new language switching indicator extremely helpful. Where do you watch as you're switching a language using a shortcut? Right - on the right upper corner of your screen but would you prefer to keep watching on a text you're writing? The new switcher will allow you to do just that. It is a small improvement but I just love how it's been implemented and actually help me to stay focus on what I'm typing.
2. Expose built-in Dock. I love Dock and Expose as tools without which I can't imagine using Mac OS. What happens when you combine these tools? Exactly - once again it helps you to stay focus on your work.
3. Grab in Preview. I love Grab application but I found it a bit of a hassle that I can't save a captured image in any other format as TIFF, of course I wouldn't mind to save it in JPEG as it's the major format I and many of you keep our images. And so now Preview allows you to take screen shoot in a similar way as we do it in Grab. Now I predict eventually Grab will fade away as Preview starts to obtain its function.
4. Thumbnail resizing in Finder. I guess this function was pretty obvious to add as before Snow Leopard you could adjust distance between icons and icon size it a folder properties and so adding this function right to a window was a really logical step to take.
5. Separating Safari and its plugins in different processes. Right, now you can not only complain about Flash viewer bad coding for Mac OS but you can actually see how this process eats up your CPU and memory :-) Well, seriously - this separation allows you to close a certain plugin or force it to quite without crashing / closing Safari.