This is the fifth part of our review of Snow Leopard, or if you want, you can call it a guided tour. Today we will continue our journey through the new operating system from Apple, called Mac OS X Snow Leopard, and we will look into some of the smaller features which Apple has provided us with, and god we are still grateful.

Printers & trackpad character recognition

Let’s start with printers. Apple has implemented automatic updates for printer drivers, so when you plug in a new printer to your Mac, Snow Leopard will automatically download the newest driver over the internet and you don’t have to check for the newest printer drivers ever again. Snow Leopard will do the job for you and this isn’t the only printer related feature in Mac OS X Snow Leopard. Another printer related feature is that the printer dialogs now display any nearby Bonjour-compatible printers so you can easily configure the printer on any network of your choice. In short, Snow Leopard makes your printing a lot easier.

Printers are usually used for images and text, and text editing has also been hugely improved in this operating system. Yesterday we showed you how to use Chinese handwriting with the multitouch trackpad. Besides the handwriting, Apple has also upgraded and redesigned the Pinyin Chinese input method so it’s easier to make Chinese sentences. Chinese people are not the only ones who will cheer about Snow Leopard, as the Hebrew and Arabic will do it too, since Snow Leopard now accepts text written from right to left. The last improvement in text editing in Snow Leopard is that Apple has introduced four new fonts: Menlo, Chalkduster, Heiti SC and TC, and Hiragino Sans GB.

Dictionary & Preview

You are probably acquainted with the thesaurus in dictionary. If you don’t know the meaning of a word, then open Dictionary, click ‘Thesaurus’ and search for the word you want an explanation of. This dictionary was also a part of Leopard, but in Snow Leopard the dictionary has been upgraded to the ‘Oxford American Writer’s Thesaurus, Second Edition’ written by well-known authors.

Preview is another application that you can’t live without. It has also been enhanced in Snow Leopard and is more user-friendly. According to Apple it is now able to understand each PDF document’s words, paragraphs, columns and visual layouts, and you can now mark the text you want and copy it exactly like if you were copying it from a text document or from the Internet. The search function has also been improved by applying the Grand Central Dispatch and you can see the result even when the image is being indexed. You can also add annotations and a lot of other stuff in the new Preview, just click the picture below too see some of the new things you can add to your document. I’m sorry Apple, for ruining your Cover Flow guide! It has sure helped me a lot.

Another feature in Preview is that you can now open multiple documents in a single window as you can see in the picture above.

Microsoft Exchange & iCal

One of the features in Snow Leopard that made the audience cheer the most back in June at WWDC were support for Microsoft Exchange. The support lets you have the exact same e-mail messages, the exact same meetings in your calendar and the exact same contacts in your address list. In other words: if you have those funny Microsoft applications at work, you can now get the same content to your Mac and get your e-mails in Mail, your contacts in Address Book, and your meetings in iCal, if your work has Microsoft Exchange Server 2007. Wouldn’t it be great to get rid of Word and Outlook? I’ll bet your answer is ‘yes’ . The Mac application called Mail has also been enhanced and can now detect a flight number and bring you to the Dashboard Flight Tracker widget so you can get additional informations about your flight. Besides, Mail is now, according to Apple,  up to 2 times faster to lunch because of it’s 64-bit technology.

The iCal application is now easier to configure and synchronize with Gmail and Yahoo! calendars. All you have to do is to type your username and password and then it will be set up automatically. The Address Book is also improved and you can now synchronize your contacts through MobileMe, Yahoo! and Google.

That’s all for today. We have now covered most of the features in Snow Leopard, but we still haven’t covered it all yet. Come back and see what we have for you tomorrow. Enjoy your tuesday lunch.