Apple's operating systems are a byword for ease of use. Previous versions of the OS have always stayed a step ahead of their Windows counterparts, thanks to slick presentation. User-interface elements such as the Dock and Exposé are held in particularly high esteem.
Snow Leopard benefits from a couple of interface enhancements, including a superior Finder, which lets you customise Spotlight searches, and an advanced icon view that lets you browse through multipage documents or watch QuickTime movies without launching the relevant applications. Also, Exposé is now integrated into the Dock, so you can tile all active windows of a particular application to get a better overall picture of your work.
That's all fine and dandy, but these minor refinements pale in comparison to Windows 7's wealth of UI enhancements -- particularly its new taskbar. Hover over an application icon in the space next to the Start button and you're presented with live thumbnails of every open window in that application. Right-clicking on an icon presents a 'Jump List' that provides options for working with recent documents within that application, or a recent history of visited Web sites if it's a browser. Hovering over a particular thumbnail brings that window to the foreground and makes every other window translucent. The trick even works with tabs within browsers -- something Snow Leopard cannot do.
Windows 7 also gets a few useful updates to its Aero interface. Aero Peek lets you view your desktop instantly by moving your mouse to the bottom right of the screen. With Aero Shake, rapidly dragging an application window back and forth causes all others to minimise, giving you an easy way to work with your desktop and the application in question. In Aero Snap, clicking and dragging a window to the right or left side of the desktop causes those windows to fill their respective sides of the screen, giving you an easy way to compare documents side by side.
Mac or PC: We're tempted to give this one to Windows 7, but we'll call it a draw since you'll favour whatever you're used to.
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Comments 6
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Anonymous 29 September, 2010 17:33
I used to come to CNET before buying products and used to think this is the best place for good reviews of products, but recently all I read is about how good Microsoft is good articles. This is the best, Windows 7 better than Snow... lmao!!! Is this Guy Kidding me, my partner's laptop has Windows 7 which has crashed and had drivers problems and what not and is at a speed of a snail after having top off the line config. On the Other side my 3 year old mac, is a smooth as ever! No problems what so ever till now. Well see ya CNET you can make your money by your baised articles, but you can't fool this consumer, I work both on Windows 7 and Snow, and Snow is amazing!!! I know I am not coming here again to get your baised opinion/review.
Anonymous 12 October, 2010 11:33
I use both. I installed snow leopard onto my AMD machine with relative ease. Both operating systems excel in different areas, getting frustrated and aggressive on a website because you're a fanboi of a paticular operating system is quite frankly; sad.
Anonymous 14 November, 2010 03:10
aren't the 3 most importent things performance, security and interface?
Performance: Snow Leopard wins (except for games, but hey, isn't that why there are game consoles?)
Security: Mac... always Mac
Interface: Subjective, maybe Windows 7 is better... maybe not...
Anonymous 20 November, 2010 12:41
Having both systems on two machines, and being regular Win7 user from first beta - I must admit I had 0 problems so far. If you need to change hardware - all drivers are loaded silently via Windows Update. All programs and games work, never had a BSOD.
Snow Leopard is nice. Somehow I get the feeling they are following the way: "Less is more"
Windows user will like simplicity of SL, but when in need for that "extra setting" or "small, extra tool" will definitively come back to Win.
One funny thing about tweaking the looks of Snow Leopard. I tried to tweak the skin, and realised there is no "official" way to do this. Black would be nice, so I google it and found some semi-solutions (font in finder cant be changed). This led me to several YouTube links showing how to tweak. It was funny to see that all the posts were done by 12-14 year old kids.
One additional thought: Having wide monitor (fullHD) I sometimes play windowed cartoons for my daughter on the left side of it, while keeping my work on the right side. One thing that bothers me in SL is that program menu bar is always fixed on the top (left) part of the screen, so any changes I need to do to some document force me to interfere with QuickTime window. I like it better in Windows, where program menu bar is being hold by and can be scaled to program window.
Cheers!
anonymous 16 January, 2011 23:46
This article is astoundingly poorly researched. The tone is coloquial, and sarcastic, and claims are rarely backed up with facts. It significantly shakes my faith in using any of your site's reviews when making purchasing decisions. (I'm not going to go into your technical details about the operating systems--I personally disagree about the drivers, file system compatibility, and a great deal of the software compatibility issues, but I'm not really a professional.)
What really gets me is how you seem to think the businesses mac dominants, such as music, and film aren't real, and those making careers out of them aren't doing real work. Those are bilion dolar industries, and I think a whole lot of people have a right to be angry about much more than simply having their preferred OS insulted.
anonymous 8 February, 2012 07:03
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