Snow Leopard Versus Windows 7 (Part 1)

Compared: Mac OS X Snow Leopard and Windows 7

This is shaping up to be the autumn of new operating systems. The latest version of Mac OS X, Snow Leopard, ships to customers this Friday. Windows 7, the follow-up to the much-maligned Windows Vista, hits store shelves in late October. Neither operating system will drastically change the way you work.

Windows 7 builds on Windows Vista, smoothing out Vista’s rough spots and bringing a number of new end-user features (such as the reworked taskbar) to the table. Meanwhile, with Snow Leopard, Apple focuses on new under-the-hood technologies that offer subtle refinements and fixes. Still, there is plenty to say about how Apple’s next big cat and Microsoft’s lucky number stack up against each other.

Managing Your Files

Snow Leopard’s Finder and Windows 7’s Explorer have strikingly similar interfaces, with quick-search fields in the upper-right corner, path bars (OS X’s is optional and can be switched on in the View menu), and sidebars that provide easy access to various common locations on your computer.

Smart Folders

Nothing in Snow Leopard directly compares with Windows' libraries. The closest OS X feature is saved searches (known as Smart Folders), but a saved search pulls together files based on search criteria, not location. You can’t, for example, create a smart folder that contains all of the photos from two particular folders. On the other hand, you can't combine Windows 7 libraries with saved search results.

Windows 7, of course, has a smart folder feature as well.

Ridicuously Big Icons

Both Snow Leopard and Windows 7 permit a large icon view. Windows 7 supports icons in sizes up to 256 by 256 pixels. Snow Leopard one-ups Windows 7, though: The Finder can display icons in sizes up to a seemingly absurd 512 by 512 pixels (512-pixel icons were around in 10.5, but the Finder couldn't take advantage of them outside the Quick Look and Cover Flow views).

Quick Access via the Dock or Taskbar

Some OS X apps can use the Dock’s pop-up menus to display application-specific information and to provide easy access to frequently used commands. For example, if you right-click iTunes’ Dock icon in Snow Leopard, you’ll get a menu that you can use to see what’s playing, to play or pause your music, to assign a rating to the current song, and to control other simple iTunes commands.

With Windows 7’s retooled taskbar, Microsoft introduces a similar feature called jump lists. Jump lists not only provide access to common commands (Windows Media Player‘s jump list has a Play command, for example), they also let you “pin” items to a specific list. For example, you can pin commonly used folders to the Windows Explorer jump list and important documents to the WordPad jump list.

(To be continued..)