Apple’s Snow Leopard update to Mac OS X has been embraced accordingly within Apple’s community. Snow Leopard is the latest release in series of Mac OS X. The first release of Mac OS X was named Jaguar (10.2) on 24 August 2002. It was then superseded by Panther (10.3) in October 2003, and so on. Apple’s Mac OS X has come a long way from those days, in fact, this OS has frantically been evolving ever since. However, not in the least in its visual appearance. Though technically, its advancement places it at the forefront for operating systems.

With this release Apple boasts of increased system stability allowing your Mac OS X to almost never crash and over 6GB of promised storage savings. Among other upgrades there are dozens of interface tweaks, thus we’ve outlined 5 User Inteface Inconsistencies when compared to the previous MAC OS X Leopard.

Dock Experience

With previous OS X docks you were able to drag a file to an icon in order for the two to interact. Now you’re able to drag files from one application to another using the Dock. Also, if you Control-Click on any item within the dock you’ll see that its contextual menus are white text on a translucent black background rather than the standard black-text-on-white-background seen in previous Mac OS X.

Expose

Now clicking and holding a file triggers Expose. Apple’s window management tool that oh so wisely manages any particular application you choose. Exposure nestled within Snow Leopards dock allows you to easily pop out an applications windows and then select the right one in a single step. This improved features also lets you view all of the windows for one application in Expose’s zoomed-out view. This arranges the applications in a grid instead of a single, boring line. When you minimize a window you’re able to view it at the bottom of the screen under a minimal line dividing it from other maximized windows that come from the same application.

One small downside to new improvements Expose has undergone is the fact that you still can’t use Expose to quickly find the browser tab you want within a window. This becomes more of a problem if you’re a heavy on browser usage.

Stacks

Stacks first made its appearance in Leopard. With that OS X this quick file viewer was way too unstable to utilize. A lot of times errors would arrise such as trying to move a file and in the middle of this task the entire app would either freeze or close shut! With this release stacks was improved by allowing scrolling in the Grid view, and by also inserting a smart list view that lets you see various files at any one time.

Bottom line is, with this release it is much more usable and compensates by offering the ability to drill down into folders just like a Finder window. The Bad: For as long as we can remember dragging a file onto a stack icon doesn’t open the stack, but instead opens a Finder window. Command-clicking a stack icon does not open the folder, however it pops open the enclosing folder. This result in operation has been around since the release of Tiger.

Minimization of Windows

Although Snow Leopard continues in the tradition of minimizing windows the same way Mac OS X has for the last ten years, there’s a new alternative. A “Minimize Windows Into Application” Icon checkbox in System Preferences Dock pane still allows your window to be minimized, however instead of that window disappearing into a mess of applications it will minimize it into the icon of the application it belongs to. This allows you to easily bring your window back up to where you need it.

As you might of guessed it, this goes hand in hand with Expose. As soon as you interact with Expose all of the minimized windows line up together in grid form at the bottom of the screen.

File Previews

One of the most noticible user interface tweaks is the way files are displayed and behave in the Finder. A newly optimized zoom slider was added to the lower right side of the Finder windows allowing you to zoom in on whichever icons you’d like. Now you’re also able to preview multipage documents and even play QuickTime movies without having to leave the Finder window.

Common file types from Microsoft such as Excel, PowerPoint, and Adobe PDF files can now be previewed without having to own those applications on your desktop. Preview in Snow Leopard now uses accurate text selection in multicolumn PDF files. This results in Preview recognizing that there are multiple columns in your document allowing you to virutally select whatever text you’d like within the layout.

Google promised that Chrome would be fast to launch and fast to load web pages, but people predicted it would fail with the arrival of its extensions. Well, the extensions are here (at least for some of us) and surprisingly they do not affect the browser’s performance. And not only that, but playing with Google Chrome Extensions is like child’s play, whether you’ve added a new extension, or deleted one, you won’t need to restart your browser. Extensions are so easy to manage and use that once you have access to them, I’m sure you’ll be looking forward to testing everything in this Cromeextensions Directory.

This is what I basically did. I tried most of the extensions, then realized I’m not ready yet to ditch my beloved Firefox, and I’m guessing that you won’t be either. On the other hand, there are some plugins that are worthy of a mention and from that list I’ve culled some cool ones to get you started. If you already have extensions enabled (lucky you), you are welcome to try the ones in this list. If Chrome is not allowing extensions for you just yet, try to upgrade to the developer’s version (don’t worry, all of your Chrome settings will be saved).

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