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Apple Byte: Snow Leopard in the wild

2009-07-06
what's happening on brian Tong and a welcome to the Apple by you know how we do it it's all the good and bad inside the world of Apple and I'm pretty sure you're a little tired of hearing about iphone news all the time I am too so let's shift things over to the big cat Snow Leopard now I got my hands on the latest build and I have to say that on first impressions this is definitely a snappier OS even if it's an early build so I'm going to bring in our special correspondent to show off some of the new features and a few things Apple hasn't alright thanks Brian hey you guys snow leopard will be available sometime in September 2009 and the price to upgrade just 29 bucks so we have a sneak peek and let's just jump into this now the first off the finder is a lot more powerful with the ability to directly preview files if you can see here I can resize my file icons on the fly i also have a PDF file and i can move page by page without even opening it and for movies i can play them directly from their thumbnail as well and even well I'm resizing the thumbnail now this is a 2 gigahertz core to do that I'm working on so it just really shows you what snow leopard can do even on an entry-level macbook now if you're familiar with expose they've now added a feature called doc expose so what I do is if I hold my bun on top of an app from the doc all the specific windows for that app will immediately snap to expose from there I can now move around and press the spacebar to preview individual items as well now a lot of times we have so much going on and a really cool feature is the ability to find content and then use doc expose to throw it into an application so here i have an email and i want to put a picture in it so I know it's hanging out my desktop I'm gonna go and find it then I'm gonna drag and hold it on to the mail app you'll see doc expose in action and I'll find that email window that I want I'm gonna hold the picture over it and then it brings it to the front and now my picture is in my email oh snaps just like that now stacks has also been improved where you can now navigate through a stack on your dock and drill down into folders and the files inside of those folders previously once you open any folder and stacks would throw it up into the finder and the stacks interface would go away quicktime is also seen a major facelift going borderless it's really clean and the controls fade out as you're watching a video the big deal here is the ability to trim your clip directly in quick time and then instantly upload it to youtube or mobile me and if you want to send the video to iTunes you have a choice to optimize it for the iPhone Apple TV or computer if the file has a high enough resolution to support it you can also jump directly to videos with chapter markers and this isn't really a new feature but the new select graphical interface to do it is after you set your video to full screen there's also a button that fills out your video to the edges of the screen and another little thing that I found in the preferences is that you have more control over specific settings in the energy saver preferences now there's obviously a lot more stuff I haven't even found but overall this is a really snappy OS from what I can tell so that's a first look at some of the goodies on Mac OS 10 snow leopard back to you in the studio alright thanks Brian a great job on that stuff and really dude you need to stop dressing like me okay let's get some of the news here reports from Reuters say that 10 of the top mobile phone manufacturers including Apple have signed on to adopt the micro USB connector standard for charging smartphones in the European Union you're all familiar with apple's proprietary dock connector which is anything but universal and they built an entire cottage industry for it now Apple will probably just add a mini USB next their dock connector because with all the accessories support that thing isn't going anywhere anytime soon the rollout is planned to begin next year and it's only a matter of time until other countries jump on board now I said I was sick of it but I have to throw a little iphone news in here apple has released the iphone 3.1 software beta to developers recently and yep you're probably asking did a 30 just come out but apple's not sleeping on this stuff new features included allow people to use the 3gs exclusive voice control feature with bluetooth headsets now and the ability to save an edited version of a video clip as its own copy instead of overriding the original file plus some other graph well tweaks and since we're on the iphone 3gs you know what roll the graphic is speaks for itself there are reports on the internet that some owners of white iphone 3gs is are finding that the backs of their phones have been changing pink or brown near the edges after frequent use now I have a black 3gs but I found and plenty of other users have found that the phone can run very very hot compared to previous models when it's being used heavily Apple Insider reports that it's likely due to a flawed battery cell but come on now Apple let's get this power management issue under control or at least start advertising a new color option like the iphone 3gs neapolitan bottom line the iphone does run significantly hotter at times when apple doesn't comment and instead closes the discussion thread on its form about the issue come on now we have to throw the bat after at chu alright guys that's going to do it for this week's show send me your email to the apple byte at cnet com and i'll get to as many as i can i'm brian Tong thanks for watching and come back next week for another bite of the Apple
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