While Snow Leopard doesn’t bring any revolutionary “visible” features, there are dozens of little improvements to the interface. Here are four of my favorites so far.
- The AirPort menu now lists not only the available networks, but the signal strength of each. With this at-a-glance view, it’s clear which network is best to hop on. It also shows whether or not a network is secured with the use of a small lock icon next to the signal strength, which is carried over from earlier version of OS X. The signal strength indicator is a nice touch, especially for city dwellers.
- If a disk is in use by an application (say iTunes is playing music from your Time Capsule), Mac OS X will tell you which application is using the device if you try to eject it. Previously, it would report simply that the disk is in use, but now by reporting exactly which application is using it it is more efficient to safely eject.
- On the theme of ejecting, optical disks seem to eject about ten times faster now. The delay between pressing the eject button and the media actually coming out of the slot has been nearly eliminated.
- While iChat is largely unchanged, us iChat users can video conference with Windows AIM users with webcams. Some of my friends aren’t perfect and still prefer Windows, so this is a welcome addition.
What’ve you found so far in Snow Leopard?