I woke up bright and early today and headed over to my local Apple store to pick up Snow Leopard. I think they were anticipating a huge line since they put out velvet ropes, but when they finally opened the store, there were only half a dozen people behind me. lawl. And since I was first, they all applauded me when I completed my purchase, which was kind of awkward.

I was secretly hoping that they would give out shirts like at the Leopard launch, but I guess just having Snow Leopard made my day. I wonder if they gave out anything at the flagship stores…

Installation was pretty simple. I just popped in the CD and clicked install. About an hour later, I came back and it was ready for me to log in.

Immediately after logging in, I noticed some features that will probably come in handy.

10.6 has enhanced Chinese input support. Here you can see an option to convert highlighted text to and from simplified and traditional characters. Newer MacBooks with multi-touch trackpads support drawing on the trackpad. The computer basically recognizes characters as you draw them on the trackpad. Too bad my computer is too old for that ):

Now options in all applications can be accessed directly from the dock without actually switching to that application. If you right click on an icon, a window appears with most basic options. I think I will be using this feature a lot to rate songs when I have iTunes on shuffle.

Setting the system timezone has gotten pretty easy with Snow Leopard. It just automatically sets it based on IP address and nearby wifi networks. This isn’t much of a biggie, but it really makes life a little more convenient when I’m traveling back and forth between Texas and New York.

When joining wifi networks, you now know the signal strength of all available networks before actually joining them. I don’t know why it took them so long to implement this since PCs have had this feature for ages.

Snow Leopard isn’t exactly a major overhaul since most of the changes are under the hood. If you are interested, you can read about the new features 10.6 introduces here.