Expecting Snow Leopard!

August 28th!

Cannot wait to enjoy the new Snow Leopard operating system! To me the most attractive features are its (1) QuickTime X and (2) the innovative Chinese character input:

(1) With a single click, QuickTime Player can now capture audio or video using the built-in camera and microphone in your Mac. You can easily trim media to the perfect length, then send it to iTunes for syncing to an iPhone, iPod, and Apple TV. You can also use QuickTime Player to publish your media to MobileMe or YouTube — without worrying about codec formats or resolutions. QuickTime X takes Internet video streaming to new levels with support for HTTP live streaming. Unlike other streaming technologies, HTTP live streaming uses the HTTP protocol — the same network technology that powers the web. That means QuickTime X streams audio and video from almost any web server instead of special streaming servers, and it works reliably with common firewall and wireless router settings. HTTP live streaming is designed for mobility and can dynamically adjust movie playback quality to match the available speed of wired or wireless networks, perfect whether the video is watched on a computer or on a mobile device like iPhone or iPod touch.

(2) Until Snow Leopard, if you wanted to enter Chinese characters on a computer, you had to type in the phonetic spelling of Chinese words and the computer would convert them into proper Chinese characters. Snow Leopard offers a breakthrough new way to enter characters: You draw them right on the Multi-Touch trackpad in your Mac notebook. They’ll appear on the screen in a new input window, which recommends characters based on what you drew and lets you choose the right one. The input window even offers suggestions for subsequent characters based on what you chose.