Photo credit: flickr/Tricia Shears

Apple is not known for detailed release notes (in fact, they are quite often brief to the point of being useless). So it is quite welcome that after yesterday's WWDC keynote, Apple posted a long list of "Enhancements and refinements" providing quite a bit of detail on what to expect this September, when Snow Leopard is uncaged.

Forthwith, the features I am personally most looking forward to in Mac OS X 10.6 "Snow Leopard":

Finder

More and better Spotlight search intelligence!

More reliable disk eject.

Core system services such as Spotlight indexing and file system events will intelligently stop their work so you can remove your drive. And improved dialogs tell you which applications are using the drive so you know what to close in order to safely disconnect your drive.

Removable sidebar headers.

If you remove the items under the Devices, Places, or Search For header in the sidebar, the header will disappear, too. To add it back, simply drag an item into the sidebar.

Dock

Activate Exposé from the Dock. It sounds useful, but I will have to see it in action to know how it actually works.

System Wide

Faster shutdown and wake-up.

Automatic updates for printer drivers.

Redesigned Services menu.

The Services menu has been streamlined, displaying only the services relevant to the application or content you're using. You can customize the Services menu, and you can create your own services using Automator.

Bidirectional text. This I have to see!

For languages that are written right to left, such as Hebrew and Arabic, Snow Leopard now elegantly handles mixing in left-to-right text. It also has a split-cursor option that shows the appropriate cursor direction at the boundary between right-to-left and left-to-right text.

 

AirPort menu signal strength.

The AirPort item in the menu bar now includes signal strength for all available wireless networks, so you can see which access point has the best signal before selecting it.

All-new thesaurus.

Snow Leopard includes the Oxford American Writer's Thesaurus second edition.

QuickTime X

QuickTime sure has come a long way since I first saw it in beta in 1991.

Mail and iCal

Reorderable Mail sidebar. So you can choose the order in which accounts appear.

Automatic setup (of Google and Yahoo calendars) in iCal

Omnipresent inspector in iCal.

System Preferences

Multi-Touch gestures in older Mac models. Here's one where I wish I had more information about which models have "Multi-Touch"; my 2006-era MacBook Pro supports two-finger scrolling, but I'm not sure yet that it will automagically gain new powers under Snow Leopard.

 

Installation

Faster, more reliable installer.

Smaller footprint. Additionally, new apps requiring 10.6 should generally shrink, since they will no longer include PowerPC code.

Again, these are just things that I'm especially interested in—there are many, many more major features (especially under the hood) and usability enhancements that I'm not even mentioning here.

In conclusion, I expect Snow Leopard to be both noticeably faster, more stable, and yes, more fun and productive to use. We Mac OS X users have been repeatedly spoiled by software releases that make our computers faster than when we first bought them!

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