New Snow Leopard Features Continue to Emerge

In the days since Apple previewed the forthcoming Mac OS X 10.6 Snow Leopard at its Worldwide Developers Conference keynote and distributed a new build to conference attendees, users have been scouring the new operating system and its associated documentation and promotional materials looking for new features. Mac|Life reports on ten features that have received relatively little publicity. While a few them have been mentioned here previously and many are listed on Apple's Enhancements and Refinements page, Mac|Life's report provides a nice summary and we offer a few of the highlights for discussion.

- Expanded Multi-Touch Capabilities for Older Notebooks: Snow Leopard will bring 3- and 4-finger multi-touch gestures to multi-touch notebooks that currently do not support all available finger gestures. Examples of the gestures that will make their way to the older notebooks include swipe for Expos and swipe for switching applications.

- iChat Video Chat Improvements: iChat Theater content can be displayed at up to a resolution of 640 x 480 pixels in Snow Leopard, four times that of OS X Leopard. iChat in Snow Leopard also requires only 300 Kbps upstream bandwidth for video chats, one-third that of the bandwidth required in Leopard.

- "Auto Web Spots": Part of Apple's improvements to Accessibility, auto web spots aid in locating specific information sections on complicated Web pages. Users can navigate from spot to spot with a simple keystroke or flick of the finger.