Refined, not reinvented.
Mac OS X is renowned for its simplicity, its reliability, and its ease of use. So when it came to designing Snow Leopard, Apple engineers had a single goal: to make a great thing even better. They searched for areas to refine, further simplify, and speed up — from little things like ejecting external drives to big things like installing the OS. In many cases, they elevated great to amazing. Here are just a few examples of how your Mac experience was fine-tuned.

Return to your desktop.
Theres one more feature in Exposé. Press one key to push all the windows aside, giving you instant access to your desktop. Once you grab what you need, another keypress brings all the windows back. Want to open a document? Check to see if the CD or DVD youre burning in the background is ready? Or quickly locate and drag a file into an email as an enclosure? Exposé makes it easy.

See everything.
Quick Look works with nearly every file on your system, including images, text files, PDF documents, movies, Keynote presentations, Mail attachments, and Microsoft Word, Excel, and PowerPoint files. To see a file in Quick Look, you simply tap the Space bar or click the Quick Look icon in the Finder window. You can view the file in full screen, and you can open the application that created it with a double-click. Best of all, Quick Look works even if you dont have the application that created it — perfect when a colleague sends you a document that you couldnt otherwise open.

A Quick look back in time.
You can use Quick Look to your advantage when youre searching for files to restore in Time Machine. Once you locate the file youre looking for, use Quick Look to verify its contents before restoring it to the desktop.

View attachments, no detachment.
Quick Look also works in the Mail and iChat applications in Mac OS X. Say you receive a message with a bunch of attachments. Instead of downloading and opening each one, you can use Quick Look to see them with a click. Its great for viewing PDFs, Microsoft Office documents, and other files. You can even view attached photos as a slideshow and add them to your iPhoto library with ease.

Stop looking, start finding.
Spotlight is the lightning-fast search technology built into Mac OS X that makes it easy to find what youre looking for, even if you dont know where to look. Conveniently available in the Mac OS X menu bar, the Spotlight search field gives you instant results as you start typing, encompassing not only files, folders, and documents but also messages in Mail, contacts in Address Book, iCal calendars, items in System Preferences, applications, and even dictionary definitions. Spotlight searches arent confined to your computer — you can also search other computers on the network.

Searching with smarts.
When you search with Spotlight, youre actually accessing a comprehensive, constantly updated index that sees all the metadata inside supported files — the “what, when, and who” of every piece of information saved on your Mac — including the kind of content, the author, edit history, format, size, and many more details. Most document types, including Microsoft Word documents, Adobe Photoshop images, and email, already contain rich metadata. And because Spotlight indexes content as well, your search results include what appears inside a file or document, not just its title. When you click the document, you are immediately taken to that spot in the document with the search terms highlighted.

Smartly organized.
Thanks to the speed and flexibility of Spotlight, youll discover countless new ways to organize your files. You can save the results of a search as a Smart Folder that automatically updates as you add, change, or remove documents on your Mac. Smart Folders contain files grouped together based on search criteria instead of physical location, so the same file can appear in multiple Smart Folders without moving from its original saved location on your system. No need to duplicate, shift, or update files: Spotlight Smart Folders keep everything organized for you.

Surf fast.
Safari 4 in Snow Leopard outraces all other browsers. On even the most demanding Web 2.0 applications, Safari delivers blazingly fast performance using the new Nitro Engine. For example, thanks to 64-bit technology in Snow Leopard, JavaScript performance in Safari 4 is up to 50 percent faster than the 32-bit version of Safari. In addition, Safari offers top-flight HTML performance — the best on any platform — loading pages up to 3 times faster than Internet Explorer 8 and almost 3 times faster than Firefox 3.5. What does all that mean for you? Less time loading pages and more time enjoying them.

See your Top Sites.
The new Top Sites feature lets you enjoy a stunning, at-a-glance preview of your favorite websites without lifting a finger. Safari 4 tracks the sites you browse and ranks your favorites, presenting up to 24 thumbnails on a single page and making them accessible with just a click. You can customize the display by pinning a favorite site to a specific location in the grid. And a star in the upper right of each thumbnail indicates whether a site has new content since the last time you visited.

Mail: All your email accounts in one place.
Designed from the ground up specifically for email, Mail offers an elegant user interface that makes it easy to manage all your email from a single, ad-free inbox, even when youre not connected to the Internet. It works with most email standards — including POP3 and IMAP — and most popular email services, such as Gmail, Yahoo! Mail,¹ and AOL Mail. If you have more than one email account, no problem. Just add all your accounts to Mail and youll be able to access everything from one central place.

NEW! Microsoft Exchange Server Support.
With Snow Leopard, Mac OS X is the only operating system with built-in support for the latest version of Microsoft Exchange Server. So you can use your Mac — with all the features and applications you love — at home and at work and have all your messages, meetings, and contacts in one place.

iCal: A powerful desktop calendar.
iCal makes it easy to keep track of your busy schedule. You can create as many separate calendars as you need — one for home, another for school, a third for work, and so on. You can see all your calendars in a single window or choose to see only the calendars you want.

Address Book: One place for all your contacts.
Address Book gives you a flexible and convenient place to store contact information for your family, friends, and colleagues. You can import information from other applications, create distribution lists for clubs and groups, print address labels and envelopes, and more. Because Address Book is built on the industry-standard vCard format for storing contact information, your friends can send you cards that you can add to your own list by dropping them in — no typing required.

Show off slideshows from anywhere.
Why wait for a darkened room and a projector to present vacation photos or Keynote slides? Now you can do it all remotely, right in iChat. Put on a photo slideshow, click through a Keynote presentation, or play a movie — in full screen, accompanied by a video feed of you hosting — while your buddy looks on.

Entertainment made easy.
Forget rifling through stacks of CDs or flipping through channels. iTunes puts your entire music and video collection a mere click away, giving you an all-access pass to thousands of hours of digital entertainment. Browse. Organize. Play. All from your Mac or PC.

Everything, to go.
You have music and video in iTunes. You have photos, contacts, and calendars on your computer. You want to get it all on your iPod or iPhone. iTunes syncing does exactly that. And wireless syncing to Apple TV puts music and video from your iTunes library on the big screen.

The world's #1 online music store - and more.
iTunes is an application that plays all your digital music, podcasts, and videos. It syncs content to your iPod, iPhone, and Apple TV. And its a 24/7 entertainment superstore that lets you browse and buy over 10 million songs, rent or buy blockbuster movies, get HD episodes of your favorite TV shows, download applications for your iPhone or iPod touch, subscribe to free podcasts, and shop for audiobooks.

A beautiful new player.
Completely redesigned in Mac OS X Snow Leopard, QuickTime X debuts a brand-new version of QuickTime Player, the application used by millions to watch a wide range of video formats and files. Using the power of the Core Animation technology in Mac OS X, QuickTime Player offers a clean, uncluttered interface with controls that fade out when theyre not needed. And large thumbnail images make navigating chaptered movies simpler than before. Instead of text-only chapter names, QuickTime Player displays frame-based thumbnail images for each chapter marker, so its easy to navigate your chaptered media.

Trim your media.
The new QuickTime Player lets you trim your media to the ideal length by removing unwanted portions from the beginning or end. Rather than relying on a simple timeline, it displays frame-based thumbnails that help you make the perfect edit.

Buil for high quality and smooth playback.
QuickTime X is optimized for the latest media formats — such as H.264 and AAC — through a new media architecture that delivers stutter-free playback of high-definition content on nearly all Snow Leopard-based Mac systems. QuickTime X maximizes the efficiency of modern media playback by using the graphics processor to scale and display video. It further increases efficiency by supporting GPU-accelerated video decoding of H.264 files. And QuickTime X takes advantage of the proven capabilities of ColorSync to color-manage your media for the best playback experience and for sharing to your iPhone, iPod, or Apple TV.

Your personal photographer.
Photo Booth is a fun application that makes it easy to take photos using the built-in iSight camera in your Mac. Just look into the lens, smile, and click. Before it snaps your photo, Photo Booth flashes your display with bright white to add more light to your face. Take a single snapshot or use the burst mode to take four quick pictures.

The fun begins.
Sure, you can take regular photos, but the real fun starts when you use the cool effects and backdrops in Photo Booth. Snap a photo of yourself at the Eiffel Tower or in outer space. Twist and twirl your smile with the strange Twirl effect. Add an artistic look with the Colored Pencil effect. Experiment with all the effects to transform your look.

Capture video clips.
Photo Booth is not just for pictures. Using your iSight camera, you can shoot video clips and send them to friends and family via email with just a few clicks. Backdrops and effects work for your videos, too.

Set it, the forget it.
Time Machine works with your Mac and an external hard drive. Just connect the drive and assign it to Time Machine and youre a step closer to enjoying peace of mind. Time Machine will automatically back up your entire Mac, including system files, applications, accounts, preferences, music, photos, movies, and documents. But what makes Time Machine different from other backup applications is that it not only keeps a spare copy of every file, it remembers how your system looked on a given day — so you can revisit your Mac as it appeared in the past.

Go back in time.
Say you accidentally deleted a file you meant to save. Simply enter the Time Machine browser and youll see exactly how your computer looked on the dates youre browsing. You can browse for files using Cover Flow, or you can perform a Spotlight search to find what you need across all your backups. Use the timeline to select a specific date, or let Time Machine fly through time to find your most recent changes. Before recovering a file, use Quick Look to verify the contents of the file, then click Restore to bring it back to the present.