Finder and Exposé refinements

With no plans to launch a complete overhaul of the Mac OS X user interface in Snow Leopard, Apple was free to tackle minor quirks, and that's what was done here. Besides speed, Finder's changes mostly streamline what was already there: it's now possible to thumb through a multi-page PDF or other document without entering Quick Look if the thumbnail is large enough -- which it can now be thanks to a size slider in Finder windows. Spotlight now has the option of changing search defaults and of better sorting, and items put in the trash can be restored to their original locations. As mentioned earlier, dropped connections to network shares or other resources resume more quickly.

Those who regularly juggle tasks between apps may also appreciate an important change to the Services section in the right-click (contextual) menu or in the main program menu: rather than offer every possible service, it's now sufficiently intelligent to show only the actions Mac OS X thinks can be taken in a given situation. If you select text in a web browser, for example, you'll be given text-related options like making a Stickies note, not image imports. Editors and others who face unusual tasks that come up often, or which have multiple steps, can even create Automator tasks that get pinned to the Services menu.

Stacks have arguably received the biggest help. Leopard owners will recall that they quickly became useless any time they were applied to folders with significant numbers of files. Many files were often excluded from the view as it could only handle a certain amount of data at one time. That's now fixed; whenever Stacks are set to Grid or List view, you can scroll through all files as easily as you would in a Finder window. The simple adjustment now makes Stacks useful for your Applications or Documents folder, not just temporary holding places.

If prospective buyers are expecting a cosmetic reminder that they've bought a new Mac OS X update, though, they'll be sorely disappointed. About the only conspicuous change to Finder itself are translucent black contextual menus for Dock icons. They're pretty and help retain more visual consistency with Dock features like Stacks, but that's roughly as far as they reach.

Much more significant is the change to Exposé. The visual task switcher has always been useful, but in Leopard and earlier it quickly becomes something of a mess when many windows are open. Windows in the past used to scatter in seemingly random directions and could sometimes be so small as to be hard to decipher. Snow Leopard now neatly organizes and labels the windows and lets you zoom into them to verify their contents if they're too small. It's much easier to view just the windows for a particular app, too, as you can now click and hold on the Dock icon instead of having to remember a keyboard or corner mouseover shortcut.



All of these contribute to a perceivably quicker time switching apps. It is one of the few features that feels partly like a reaction, however: Windows Vista and 7 have had visual thumbnails of taskbar items since 2007 and have already had a way to view just a particular app's windows in that context. To call Snow Leopard a copy would be something of a mistake, though: Microsoft still doesn't have a way to see the windows for every running app, and its side-by-side previews are too small. Flip 3D remains a cosmetic selling point rather than truly functional.

by Jon Fingas