Snow Leopard (Mac OS X 10.6) brought many refinements to the operating system that aren’t immediately apparent to most users. A lot of tinkering around reveals some very cool additions. One of those hidden features is the ability to view invisible files in Open/Save dialog boxes.
View invisible files in Open/Save dialog boxes
Whenever Apple releases a new operating system, the first thing creatives consider before updating is whether or not the new OS will play nicely with their existing investments in hardware and software. For most designers and artists, that means Adobe Creative Suite, font managers, and Web browsers, not to mention their existing Macs. In my latest article at Macworld, I share a brief overview of Snow Leopard, and how it might affect designers using the Adobe Creative Suite 4 applications. To make a long story short, the answer is yes, go ahead and upgrade. While the speed increases are nominal at this point; future upgrades to individual applications will boost speed in the not-so-distant future – as shown by Safari, Mail and iCal. I experienced no issues running Adobe CS4, Extensis Suitcase Fusion 2 or any other applications I use on a daily basis.
While PC users sweat, complain and ponder which over-priced version of Windows 7 they’ll be forced into buying to fix everything wrong with Vista, most Mac users are likely licking their chops at what Snow Leopard will bring, and how little it will cost. I’m pretty excited about the update, but oddly enough, it’s the little things that are getting fine-tuned that interest me the most. I’ve covered them in my article at TheAppleBlog titled Snow Leopard, Finely Tuned. As designers, the one thing that will impact us the most is probably going to be the Gamma default change to 2.2 from 1.8.
UneasySilence reports to have all 35 of the OSX Snow Leopard desktop pictures in full 2560×1600 resolution available for download. Grab ’em while they’re hot!
Chris Foresman over at ArsTechnica comments on the upcoming font changes to OS X Snow Leopard. Among the many under-the-hood changes to OS X are the removal of Strong and Light anti-alias font Display settings. Medium will be the only option. And much to the delight of many designers, Apple is apparently getting rid of their proprietary dfont format. Taking its place will be a number of fonts in the TrueType Collection (.ttc) format. How font management applications like Suitcase Fusion will support this remains to be seen – however the .ttc format has been supported by the Mac OS since 8.5, according to Ars.
It’s time for another rant here at The Graphic Mac. Back in February, I went off on Apple’s utterly stupid lack of menu bar customization. Today, just one day after Apple’s World Wide Developers Conference (WWDC), I have a whole new dump truck to unload on you… (more…)