Screen shots of Mac OS X 10.6 Snow Leopard surface

Apple Insider is carrying a story on some of the first significant screen shots of Snow Leopard.

With Mac OS X 10.6 Snow Leopard entering the final stretch of development, overzealous Apple advocates are turning to discussion boards and file sharing websites to show off image and video captures taken from the next generation OS, most recently highlighting features such as simplified security preferences, enhanced searching, QuickTime X's screen recording function and a new version of Image Capture.

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Full article here.

The Quicktime X screen recording feature should be nice because it is much easier to explain things visually. Then again, I can see the number of YouTube uploads of pointless videos explode.

That last video was kind of useless, showing me many features that are already in Leopard. Spaces? Quick Look? The only thing that I think is new (correct me if I am wrong) is the slider at the bottom of Finder to resize the icons, which we were thoroughly shown . Where were all the new SL specific features?

Thanks for the link though. Looks to be another solid release.

Last I checked, in Leopard you couldn't enlarge the icons and play a video file or look through a document without using Quick Look or opening the file itself. The fact that the icons themselves become the video/document was really neat.

If you use the cover flow view, you can view video clips and "flip" through documents (at least PDFs). You can't do it in icon view though. For me, this is just a natural extension of the features available in the cover flow view. For those of us who use list view, this will be irrelevant.

True, but it's still a feature, so you can't say that the video only showed a slider as a feature ;P

Remember, there aren't going to be too many new features in Snow Leopard. It's not a Tiger or Leopard type of release with hundreds of new features. Snow Leopard is a different breed of animal, so don't be disappointed if we only get a handful of new tangible features. The bulk of Snow Leopard's allure is under the hood, but then I suspect you already knew that

Kash said:

True, but it's still a feature, so you can't say that the video only showed a slider as a feature ;P

Remember, there aren't going to be too many new features in Snow Leopard. It's not a Tiger or Leopard type of release with hundreds of new features. Snow Leopard is a different breed of animal, so don't be disappointed if we only get a handful of new tangible features. The bulk of Snow Leopard's allure is under the hood, but then I suspect you already knew that

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Perhaps I would have been better to say that the only feature that might be of use to me is the slider (which I reckon won't get much use from me because of my need to use list view).

As you alluded to, I am aware that most of the work is under the hood which excites me more than features that are user visible. While I do want some visible improvements, I know that most of the work is under the hood and this is the primary reason that I'm really looking forward to SL. While I know this is only one of many new features, a trimmed down default install is going to be great. There is no need that a default install of an OS needs to be as big as Leopard's.

As for QT X, the transparent black title bar is bothering me. I like uniformity and consistency in a toolkit and this is another off shoot when, IMO, there needs to be consolidation in aesthetics.

I actually like the transparent black title bar. When I first saw the pictures I thought it was going to be a major system-wide change and got really excited.

vansmith said:

As for QT X, the transparent black title bar is bothering me. I like uniformity and consistency in a toolkit and this is another off shoot when, IMO, there needs to be consolidation in aesthetics.

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I wish they'd just let the user pick the theme. This is one of those things that makes OS X feel unfinished to me.

But if everyone picked their own themes then it'd be much harder for 3rd party devs to make their apps look nice on the screen. With only a few themes they can develop the UI of their apps to blend nicely with the looks of OS X.

And that's why I like OS X, sure I'm not the greatest fan of Leopard's theme, having it noly and all other apps blend in really nicely is one of the reasons I like OS X.

Hum I think the sad part is I've never once open or used QuickTime since I've used a Mac. Not even accidentally. >_<"

The video recording feature is neat though. I might have a reason to actually use it now. ^-^"

The Chinese track pad writing is cool too. I wonder if it will work with Japanese input?

the8thark said:

But if everyone picked their own themes then it'd be much harder for 3rd party devs to make their apps look nice on the screen. With only a few themes they can develop the UI of their apps to blend nicely with the looks of OS X.

And that's why I like OS X, sure I'm not the greatest fan of Leopard's theme, having it noly and all other apps blend in really nicely is one of the reasons I like OS X.

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I'm with you there - but even a few themes, kind of like Windows XP would be a welcome improvement.

Multiple themes could work if the changes were minor enough that the changes wouldn't make the application look drastically different (such as simply changing colours and transparency). If you start to change font size or any sizes for that matter, you could very likely run into trouble much like I think you alluded to the8thark.

vansmith said:

If you start to change font size or any sizes for that matter, you could very likely run into trouble much like I think you alluded to the8thark.

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Ah, OK - I'm with you there. I guess what I meant by themes is more just the color and texture of windows.

cwa107 said:

Ah, OK - I'm with you there. I guess what I meant by themes is more just the color and texture of windows.

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That should be fine. What I would like to see is an easier way to change the icon theme. It shouldn't be as unnecessarily tricky as it is now (not that it is hard now but it should be easier).

Unless the recording features are fairly robust, I think I'll probably stick with my Screenium installation.

Yes vansmith you were right with what I said. And I agree with all of the above. Only a few themes but have the option to have many different icon sets for the finder etc. I thin that would be a nice touch. There are a few 3rd party Apps that do this already, and heck you can even create your own icons in something like photoshop and copy/paste into each icon's get info window to change. But I think icon sets would make the process a lot easier.

Something I'd like to see is being able to easily change the trash and finder icons. Personally I can not do it without a 3rd party app or terminal. (I use the terminal way). But having that feature of SL I think would be pointless but rather cool.

And I agree with Shikarnov too. But my app of choice is Snapz Pro X for video and for audio only I use Audio Hijac Pro. And it would be nice to have these features in QTX as well as QTX Pro.

This may not have been said but I'd just like it if program windows on a Mac allowed you to actually maximize a window like on Windows instead of just reshaping the window when you click the green '+' button. The user can reshape a window how they want but this takes up so much time for each individual window on a Mac. This option should be pretty simple into Mac OS X so why haven't they done it yet?

livinitup1 said:

This may not have been said but I'd just like it if program windows on a Mac allowed you to actually maximize a window like on Windows instead of just reshaping the window when you click the green '+' button. The user can reshape a window how they want but this takes up so much time for each individual window on a Mac. This option should be pretty simple into Mac OS X so why haven't they done it yet?

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Sure it's easy, but this is a Mac, not Windows. They have not done it because it doesn't fit into Apples way of engineering an OS. Doesn't make it right (well, if you go by Apples specification it does) and it doesn't make it wrong. It just is.

I have snow leopard running on my mac, nothing to exciting about it, basically leopard with a few tweeks. U can download the developers seed if u wana try the first build.

Looks like Im'a have to get that the second I can afford it!