Edible Apple

Don’t let Snow Leopard’s $29 price-tag fool you.  Despite all of the under the hood enhancements the new OS will bring, there won’t be a short supply of new features for users to enjoy.  While the feature list certainly won’t be as extensive as it was for OSX 10.5 Leopard, it’s definitely not anything to scoff at.  While Bertrand Serlet went over a few of the enhancements we can expect to see in Snow Leopard this past week, MacLife has compiled a list of 10 Snow Leopard features that weren’t mentioned during the WWDC keynote.

A few of them include:

Multi-touch Gestures: Even the older MacBooks upgrading to Snow Leopard will now have three- and four-finger touchpad abilities, which will make one-hand computer usage totally possible.

Shut Down and Wake Up now Twice as fast: Apple says that Snow Leopard will be up to 75-percent faster than its predecessor when shutting down and waking up the operating system from sleep mode, with screen locking enabled. Hopefully, this is the end of the groggy computer!

Higher Resolution iChat Video Chats: iChat can now display iChat Theater content at a higher resolution–up to 640 by 480 pixels, four times the maximum resolution in Mac OS X Leopard. So, you can chat with your friends and family while you’re on a business trip and feel like you never left.

AirPort Menu Signal Strength: Not sure which wireless networks have the strongest wireless signal? AirPort will now include signal strength for all available wireless networks so you can choose the right one, instead of rifling through each connection, only to discover that most of them have less than two bars.

iChat will only require one-third the bandwidth: Leopard requires 900-Kbps upstream bandwidth, while Snow Leopard only requires 300-Kbps and still manages to deliver near DVD-quality video. This also means it’ll be easier to download an album from iTunes while simultaneously video chatting with a friend.

You can check out the full list over here.