Top 5 Fixes in Snow Leopard

There are lots and lots of “refinements” coming in Snow Leopard. Many are nice additions or tweaks, but some fall under the category of “about time”. Not the headline features such as Grand Central Dispatch or Open CL, but the little fixes to those things that may have bugged you about OS X but were more annoyances than major grievances. Anyway, here are my top 5 fixes in Snow Leopard that I am most looking forward to.

1. Faster Shut Down and Startup.
   I’ll be honest, the startup time of OS X never really bothered me that much. I don’t really reboot that often anyway, prefering to put my systems to sleep or just leave them on. However, shutting down is somethingt hat can be a complete pain in the preverbial. Sometimes it can take ages, and more often than not, shut down will abort because some Application times out. Hopefully though, Snow Leopard will fix this. According to Apple’s information page, shutting down Snow Leopard will be 75% faster. Sounds good to me.

2. More Reliable Disk Eject
   This is another one of those gotchas in OS X that can be a complete pain when it happens. In my old job I would constantly be getting calls from people with disks they couldn’t eject and often it wasn’t immediately obvious as to why. While you can often force eject a stubborn disk using the terminal, having this happen seamlessly will be a god send, especially for those who have to administer a group of macs for, how shall I put this delicately, less than tech savvy users.

3. More reliable iChat connectivity
   Compared to Skype, iChat is terrible for connection issues. I have constantly run into problems with various router set ups that block video or audio chat in iChat but work fine for Skype. If the new iChat is even half as good as Skype for getting through various router problems then I’m, sold.

4. Greater color accuracy in Quicktime
   If you’ve ever produced video content on the mac, either professionally or even as a hobby, you’re bound to have run into the wonderful quicktime gamma bug. Basically you have a lovely piece of video or graphics, you encode it to some nice h.264 video and when you play it back the brightness levels and to a lesser extent, color are all over the place. I often send quicktimes to clients for approval of graphics work, and will often get comments about the brightness being off. Of course, it’s not easy explaining to the lay person that the final version won’t look like that on TV. Not only that but playback can be inconsistent across software and devices. A quicktime embedded in an email might be fine but play that back in Quicktime player and the brightness is way off. You get the idea. Hopefully having Colorsync on video all the time will fix this issue once and for all, and having reliable color across video will be a godsend for content creators.

5. Context Sensitive Services
   The services menu in OS X is probably one of the most powerful under-used features of the operating system, mainly because it’s not intuitive to get to and it’s a big jumbled mess of sub-menus. In Snow Leopard it will only show you the relavent services, but even better they will be available through a pop up menu when you right click. This should make the services menu much more useable and open up it’s power to a much wider range of users.

These are just my personal picks, yours of course may be different. Either way, here’s looking forward to Snow Leopard in September.

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