Feel free to skip this article and jump right into ordering your copy of Mac OS X Snow Leopard 10.6 right now.

Software developers were extremely bound by the speed of the hardware that their applications were to be deployed on. In many cases, 100’s of man hours were put into optimizing the smallest of features, in order to fit a program into a space of memory that is a smaller than an inexpensive thumb drive.

Those days are over. There is significantly more CPU speed available to users than most will need. Casual web browsing, checking email, and other basic computing tasks take only a fraction of the CPU speed we have available to us. As an example, an iPhone has more CPU power than that of the first generation of iMac’s that began Apple’s return from the abyss of a negative balance sheet.

Why then, with all this seemingly extra CPU speed do applications get slower as time goes on, and not faster? Why does your computer feel slower now that in used to? Two words: “Software Bloat”. What will generally happen, is that version 1 of an application is released; created lean, well designed, with attention to performance being a key thought process for the applications development.

Over time, version 2, 3, 4, and so on are released. Each version takes the existing code, and adds new features to it. Not everyone needs these new features, most in general do not, but in order for the marketing departments to be able to continue to create compelling reasons that convince buyers to purchase their software, progress must be made.

This piling on of new features is not always bad. Yet, in most cases, each new feature is only an opportunity for the software to get slower. It is an opportunity for the software developer to add a new feature that pushes the envelope of what can be done. It may not be well executed, it may not be optimal, but the developer knows that in short time, the next batch of CPU’s will come out, faster than the last, making this new feature perform “good enough” for the time being.

Software developers literally bank on the prospect of computers becoming fast enough to run new features with acceptable performance.

Apple, to the best of my knowledge, did something completely unique to the commercial software industry. They decided “good enough” was not acceptable. Apple released an update to their operating system, that in large part, offered almost no new features.

You may be wondering; why would you want to update to Mac OS X Snow Leopard if there are no new significant new features? Because Apple added in the most important new feature of all. Apple looked over their System 10.5 code, and spent an entire development cycle, doing mostly optimizations.

This means you will not see fancy shiny features; you will not see a whole new set of applications coming from our friends in Cupertino. But it does mean you will feel the performance increase of those optimizations. As an added bonus, you gain a new operating system, one which performs better, yet has very little that you will need to learn or struggle with.

This is what Snow Leopard is for the end user. Little change on the surface, great and significant change under the hood.

That Time Machine backup that used to take 10 minutes, may now take only 2. The file that used to take 10 seconds to compress, now takes 1. The HD video that used to stutter and clip, has a much better chance of playing smoothly.

To add to the unique situation Apple created, they released this operating system as a full operating system. This is not just an upgrade operating system. You need not previously own Mac OS X 10.5 Leopard at all.

For the absurdly low price of $24.99, you essentially get a brand new computer out of the deal. A computer that will run faster on the same hardware you have now. (Please look at the Snow Leopard technical specs to make sure your computer does qualify for the update, as not all do.)

If you already are on Mac OS X Leopard, and you meet the requirements for updating to Snow Leopard, there is no reason to skip this update. Enough time has passed that nearly all applications have been updated to run on Snow Leopard. Time for you to take the plunge! Buy the update, insert the DVD, and run the installer. If the only thing you notice is your machine now starts up in half the time it did previously, over the course of a few months, you easily have saved yourself the $24.99 in your personal time.

If at all possible, please purchase the update purchase of Mac OS X Snow Leopard though Amazon, using our affiliate link. This will give OS X Help a small commission on the sale. These small commissions help for us to afford to maintain and pay for this site.

Simply press Command+Control+D while hovering your mouse over any word, and a little window pops up with the definition. No need to hold down the keys, as it has already been activated. However, if you do continue to hold the keys, you can move your mouse over another word to see its definition as well.

As I mentioned before, this is a separate application than the Dictionary App, and works on most applications in OS X, however not all. Older applications, most from the OS 9 era, were developed with a technology called Carbon. Newer applications use a technology called Cocoa. The pop up dictionary should work in all Cocoa applications such as Safari, Mail, iChat and TextEdit, but it will fall short in a few like iTunes and Word. I find it to be a lot quicker than copying and pasting the word in question into the Dictionary.app to look it up. Hope you all like it as much as I do.

The internets were quite upset about this “feature”. In my opinion, rightly so.

Luckily, so much noise was made about the change, that as long as you have ran your software updates, you can finally turn this “feature” off.

Why is it a problem?
I think the image below is a case where a picture tells a thousand words.

If you use the default Apple desktop image, certain applications, such as iTunes, will get a white dot, or a star, in menu item words. This makes it ugly at best, and difficult to read at worst.

Depending on your desktop image, it may not be as apparent, or it could even be worse.

Fixing the translucent menu bar
This one is really simple. Just open your System Preferences, click on Desktop and Screen Saver, look near the bottom, and select the checkbox for “Translucent Menu Bar”.

This may not apply to your hardware configuration
According to Apple support article # 306894

The translucent Leopard menu bar appears on most computers that are equipped with a graphics card which is compatible with Core Image.

Some graphics cards, such as an NVIDIA GeForce FX 5200, may not have the necessary OpenGL capabilities to display a translucent menu bar even though they are compatible with Core Image. Those cards should render most effects, but not the translucent menu bar.

I am sure there are a small handful of you out there who like this feature. That’s ok too. If you recall, one of our first posts was Experiment, modify, customize, so by all means, make your computer look how you want it. I for one am happy Apple was responsive enough to give us an option to change the setting on our own accord.

We had a few rounds of email, over the course of a few days, in the end, I was unable to help. A solution was found, but not by myself, rather the user figured it out on their own. The solution was simple, and one I usually try as a first step, as should everyone. This time, it never crossed my mind, as I wrongfully assumed the user would also try this method as a first step.

The short story, his software was out of date, and simply needed to be updated. Never crossed my mind to even ask. Sometimes I get stuck in a troubleshooting bubble, this happened to be one of those times.

My first step was to have him try a hard coded DNS server. Second was to use OpenDNS servers. Third was to try to load websites by IP address, ruling out DNS issues entirely. Finally, we plugged his computer directly into the DSL modem, thereby ruling out any wireless or networking issues.

None of those methods worked. At the least, we narrowed it down to software issues, and not hardware or network related.

A few days later, I received an email from the reader telling me he got it working. A simple software update to Virtual PC and he was good to go.

If your software is not working as advertised. Look at their website, and see if they have an update that addresses your issues. I should express caution to the idea of running wild and updating all your software; often is the case a software update will fix one thing and break others.

Read the website, or email their support department, asking them about your specific issues. If all else fails, and you still can not get it working, update your software and see if that does the trick.

In the case above, the reader was using Virtual PC. I doubt any emails to Microsoft would have even been replied to, so his only chance was to run a software update. The good news is it worked, the bad news is we wasted three days because I did not think to ask if his software was up to date. The best news is the reader ended up working it out on his own, and learned something about the troubleshooting process along the way.

OS X has a built in system for pulling words out of its dictionary, and showing you a list of those words. While not something I use all the time, it can be handy once you learn how to access it.

The best way to learn this tip is by trying it out. Since you are reading this in Safari, put your cursor in the Google search box in the upper right of Safari.

Type the beginning of a word, such as ‘auto’. Now press option-escape at the same time. You should see a list that looks similar to the image below.

How much utility this feature has is going to depend a lot on the type of things you personally use your computer for. I use it rarely; though on the occasion I do use it, I feel as if I have saved some time.

Do keep in mind; this feature does not work in all Applications. Most all-native OS X applications should be able to use auto completions. Certain third party applications may simply ignore the feature.

Quick Look saves time. For every file on your computer, if you want to view the contents of the file, you have to open the file. You then have to wait for it’s parent application to launch, and finally, you get to see what is in the file.

There is a much faster, and easier way.

While this only applies to OS X 10.5 Leopard, that should not be an issue, since you have all upgraded to Leopard by now. Find a file, select it, and press the space bar.

You should see a floating window pop up, allowing you to view the files contents. It can be a Word file, an image, a text file, almost anything.

Even nicer, you can select groups of files; for example, a large chunk of images someone just sent you. It is then simple to move through each image with the small arrows in the Quick Look window.

Quick Look offers other features, such as a thumbnail view, auto-import to iTunes, and much more. For now, enjoy knowing that just pressing the space bar will invoke Quick Look.

Stay tuned for an in-depth tutorial featuring all the aspects of Quick Look. In the mean time, please feel free to discuss Quick Look in the comments.

To this day, I love the Little Smokies; a favorite treat for me every time I have them. They are tiny, quick, simple, and quite awesome.

In that spirit, we are adding a new category to OS X Help; Little Smokies.

The goal here is tiny, quick, simple, awesome tips. These will be far from the usual epic length tutorials we normally put out. Of course, we will still will be putting out the full tutorials on the same regular schedule we do now. The only real difference is we will also have many more Little Smokies for you.

We hope you enjoy this new category. Some tutorials are just too small to merit an entire post. Some of you are too busy to keep up with a full tutorial every day of the week. Hopefully, this will help balance out the site in a way that is better for all our users.