Snow Leopard Tips » Improvements

Address Book and iCal synchronization are a welcome addition

admin — Wed, 02 Sep 2009 20:56:55 +0000

Snow Leopard introduces a net set of features in iCal and Address book. Apart from now having full Microsoft Exchange support, you may also synchronize your contacts and calendars with Yahoo and Google.

This new feature makes synchronizing a snap compared to with older versions of Mac OS where third-party software like Spanning Sync or Busy Sync were needed to get the job done.

Synchronizing your Address Book contacts

From the Address Book Preferences window (⌘+,), go to the Accounts tab. Here you will see options to sync with your Yahoo Mail or Gmail contacts. Simply check the type of account you wish to synchronize, enter your login information and the new GoogleContactSyncService takes care of the rest.

Synchronizing iCal events

If you’re a free lancer or a web professional, chances are you use Google Calendar to share planning information with your clients. Synchronizing GCal with iCal puts all your events in one place so you can better organize your time.

From the iCal Preferences window (⌘+,), go to the Accounts tab and click the plus (+) sign. Select the account type and enter your credentials. You may also configure the rate at which your calendar refreshes.

Your online calendars will appear just below the ones on your Mac.

You even have the ability to add new calendars by selecting New Calendar from the File menu and by choosing the account.

The results are in! 10.6 outpreforms 10.5 on all fronts

admin — Wed, 02 Sep 2009 20:35:45 +0000

Many people have asked me: “So what’s new in Snow Leopard?” Unless I want to get into a long rant about OpenCL or how Grand Central Dispatch utilizes multiple processor cores, the typical user will probably give me a blank look when I tell them iCal now syncs with Google Calendar.

Yes there any many subtle improvements and optimizations in the new OS X but it’s beauty remains under the hood. This is where benchmarks come in handy.

Gizmodo has posted an impressive set of benchmarks comparing Snow Leopard to its predecessor. The graphs speak for themselves. In 13 tests, the new version outperformed Leopard in 11! The most impressive being in thread intensive processes like opening multiple high resolution images in Preview.

Source: Gizmodo

Of course, in order to take full advantage of these technologies, we’ll have to wait until software is written to do so. Get working developers!

Snow Leopard Tips now on the iPhone !

admin — Mon, 31 Aug 2009 11:25:36 +0000

SnowLeopardTips.net now works natively on the iPhone! Thanks to the awesome WPtouch plugin for Wordpress, all you iPhone users can browse in comfort at 320 × 480.

Unresponsive apps are more responsive in Snow Leopard

admin — Mon, 31 Aug 2009 09:17:24 +0000

I appears as though even non-responding applications where not overlooked in Mac OS 10.6. In previous OS X versions, when an application stopped responding, you had to right-click the dock icon and sometimes wait several seconds for the contextual menu to appear allowing you to force quit. That action now seems to be a lot snappier, the menu popping up almost instantly when a broken app’s dock icon is clicked.

The same seems to be true for apps in the launching phase. How many times have I pressed ⌘+option+O instead of ⌘+option+0 in Photoshop, launching Adobe Bridge (urrrhhh). I used to have to click and wait for several seconds to close it. Now I don’t even think about it. I just right-click, force quit and I’m back to work.

This is one of the many improvements Apple has put into their new OS that will probably never be talked about but nevertheless is greatly appreciated. Thanks Apple!