Hands on: Snow Leopard review

Updated: read our full Snow Leopard review.

Steve Jobs first announced Mac OS X 10.6 (Snow Leopard) was in development at Apple's Worldwide Developers Conference (WWDC) in 2008.

It was a chance for Apple to take stock of where it was with OS X. There would be no major innovations, but plenty of refinements: it would install quicker, take up less disk space, and the user experience would be improved through Apple's attention to detail.

Refinement rather than revolution, then, is the watchword for Snow Leopard. We've got our mitts on a copy of the software, which is on sale today. Watch out for our full review, but in the meantime we'll tell you about a few of the features which caught our eye when we had a play.

• Full Snow Leopard screenshot gallery

So many of the improvements in Snow Leopard are under the skin, but because they affect the parts of the operating system we use most, we'll experience real, long-term benefits when we use them. Take Finder, for instance.

• Head to head: Snow Leopard vs Windows 7

We use the Finder every time we use our Mac, so doesn't it make sense to rewrite its underlying code to optimise it for the latest technologies, such as 64-bit processing? Well, that's exactly what Apple has done with Snow Leopard.

In a direct comparison with Leopard, Snow Leopard's Finder does seem a little more eager to respond; it's only a matter of milliseconds to be sure, but an improvement nonetheless.

Improvements have also been made when it comes to ejecting external drives and optical discs. For instance, if you inadvertently leave a file from one of your disks open, you no longer see the cryptic error message that says: "The disk... is in use by another application". In Snow Leopard, Finder actually tells you what application it is, and advises you to quit it.

QuickTime uses the GPU

Like Finder, QuickTime in Snow Leopard has been optimised to take full advantage of 64-bit.

In addition, it now uses the capabilities of the Nvidia GeForce 9400M integrated graphics processor (found in such Macs as the MacBook, MacBook Pro and Mac mini) to decode videos compressed using the H.264 standard.

This in turn frees up the main processor in your Mac for other tasks. As of Snow Leopard, QuickTime Player also reaches version X. Not only does it launch quicker than before (Apple claims up to 2.8 times faster), but it looks different – very different.

Gone is the brushed aluminium skin, and in comes a slick, minimalist interface with media controls (play, pause, fast forward, and so on) that fade out of view when you don't need them. And that's not all: need to make a training video for your colleagues on a hot new application? No problem: choose File > New Screen Recording and do it!

You can even perform basic video editing using the Trim feature (in the Edit menu), and upload your video directly to iTunes, your MobileMe Gallery or YouTube.

Elsewhere, we've said before that Preview is the hidden gem of Mac OS X. Starting out as a humble image viewer, its feature set now goes way beyond showing previews of printed pages. For instance, have you ever tried to copy and paste text from a PDF into a word processor and found that the PDF's formatting gave you more work than if you'd just retyped the whole thing?

Well, no more: Apple has added a little bit of artificial intelligence to recognise that, say, the text in your PDF is arranged in columns. It enables you to select what you need.

What if you want to annotate your PDF before you send it to your colleagues? No problem: click Annotate in Preview's toolbar, and a comprehensive set of annotation tools appears along the bottom of the application window, enabling you to add callout arrows, text boxes and highlights to make your point.

Open multiple PDFs and you can view them all in a single window (like a contact sheet in Photoshop), allowing for a quick comparison. And it doesn't stop there: you can now scan images directly into Preview, adding yet another tool to what's already a Swiss Army Knife of an app.

Evolution not revolution

For another example of the 'refinement rather than revolution' policy adopted by Apple for Snow Leopard, look no further than Address Book. The Sharing and LDAP options in Preferences are now combined into a single Accounts pane, which now allows you to set up syncing with Google as well as Yahoo and MobileMe.

For Google Contacts users, this is a welcome recognition by Apple that there are online contact managers other then MobileMe; though, of course, this option has previously been available to iPhone users. We set up syncing with MobileMe and (separately) with Google, and found the syncing experience pretty seamless.

All you need to do is enter your email address and password, and everything is done for you. There was a bit of a glitch when we tried syncing with Google, which left our contacts without an email address listed in Address Book as No Name, but other than that we were impressed.

The big news when it comes to syncing, however, is Snow Leopard's built-in support for Microsoft's Exchange Server 2007.

Snow Leopard also improves the way you take screenshots. Whether you're emailing a technical support helpdesk or helping out a Mac newbie it's great to be able to take a few shots of your Mac's screen by simply hitting Cmd + Shift + 3. But how often have you looked forlornly for that one grab that makes your point succinctly, only to find it mingling with others labelled Picture...?

No more: Snow Leopard labels your grabs with the date and time they were taken, making it much simpler to find the one you want. While we're on the subject of refinements, we'd have liked to have seen an option here to change the default target folder for screenshots. Saving multiple grabs to the Desktop makes for a lot of clutter, unless you move each one in turn as you take them.

Luckily, there are applications such as the free TinkerTool that lets you make this change. The equivalent Terminal command also still works in Snow Leopard. And don't forget, you needn't stop at still images: with QuickTime X you can record all the activities taking place on your screen and edit them into a training video.