Various Snow Leopard Things

The new release of Mac OS X, 10.6 is called Snow Leopard and is due out in September. If you upgrade from Leopard it's only $29. There's lots written about it even though most of changes are under the covers instead of new features. Still there are lots of little things in it. Here are a few I learned about this week:

Mac Rumors writes New Snow Leopard Features Continue to Emerge: "Snow Leopard will bring 3- and 4-finger multi-touch gestures to multi-touch notebooks that currently do not support all available finger gestures. Examples of the gestures that will make their way to the older notebooks include swipe for Exposé and swipe for switching applications." Also iChat Video requires less bandwidth and iChat Theater supports 4x the resolution.

Ars Technica writes about Font changes coming to Mac OS X Snow Leopard "One Mac developer has discovered a few interesting changes to fonts that are coming to the next version of Mac OS X. Apple is planning to say goodbye to a long-time monospaced friend of Mac developers." The fixed width font Monaco is going away and is being replaced by "Menlo, a monospaced sans serif based on the rather popular DejaVu Sans Mono".

Tidbits writes New MacBook Pros Boot From SD Cards. The new 15" MacBook Pros have had their ExpressCard slot replaced by an SDCard slot. A few people are complaining about it but it will be more useful for me as I've never used the ExpressCard slot. "A recent Apple KnowledgeBase article reveals an extremely useful and previously unmentioned feature of the SD card slot: users can boot the Mac from an SD card with Mac OS X installed on it."

Mac Rumors shows some New Snow Leopard Screenshots. "The AirPort Menu Item now shows signal strengths for all networks within range without having to join the networks, aiding in network selection in locations with many possible choices."

As for the new iPhones (and the new OS 3.0 that ships this week for older devices) iPhone Central writes What's new in iPhone 3.0 The most interesting one, "Find My iPhone allows you to locate your handset should you misplace it. You access the service via MobileMe’s Web interface, at which point you have several options." If it's in range of GPS signals you can find out where it is from a web page, or if not you can make it ring (hoping you're in range of hearing it) or if you think it's really gone you can remotely wipe it's memory clean. The last part is interesting, you can restore it from from backups if you find it but I'm curious as to how secure they'll make it. If you can remotely wipe your phone, how easy is it for someone else to do it to you?