New Quicktime player, backgrounds and kernel in Snow Leopard (Updated)

Cleve Nettles
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July 25, 2009
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Quicktime 10.0 (51) arrived today with a new look icon. Yeah, it is just an icon but we like! (feel free to snap it up for yourselves). You can also scrub through Quicktime movies by scrolling left or right on the trackpad, just like on iPhone OS 3.0.

Also in this release, some new backgrounds  (Thanks OSXNerd).  These include actual Snow Leopard (the animal) pictures from Steve Winter:

 

And the 10.0.0 Darwin Kernel is finally out of beta

 

 Also new Expose behavior for minimized windows  above and below the "fold"(thanks commenter)

 

Did we miss anything?

Comments (29)

9to5Mac Noob (not verified) | July 24, 2009 - 6:55pm

much nicer than the purple one imo

Robbie (not verified) | July 24, 2009 - 7:06pm

Nice wallpaper backgrounds!

The distinctive selection of art is another great example of Apple's taste in 'all things beautiful' =)

9to5Mac Noob (not verified) | July 24, 2009 - 8:54pm

Surely, for maximum snappiness, Kwiktime?

JeffB (not verified) | July 24, 2009 - 9:15pm

Love the new logo. You think the new blue center is for Blu-Ray?

I do.

Derry Quinn (not verified) | July 24, 2009 - 10:08pm

Quicktime has always been blue, they probably just changed it back to it's original colours.

Gazoobee (not verified) | July 24, 2009 - 10:19pm

Nicer than the purple/pink one but still butt-ugly IMO.

Gorilla (not verified) | July 25, 2009 - 3:02am

Go snow !

samosun (not verified) | July 25, 2009 - 5:07am

Has snow leopard always shown an open file when in list view? When you click on the little triangle next to the folder in list view, the icon changes to an open folder.

A (not verified) | July 25, 2009 - 6:29am

I dont see any difference compared to 10A411...

Warwick Brown (not verified) | July 25, 2009 - 6:48am

Dislike the new way of arranging windows in Expose. Yes, it's neater, but I much prefer having them sized and arranged to show them as large as possible.

The iTunes and Safari windows at the top are tiny! I fear Expose is going to become a major pain in the ass to use. Also, I see no need to have the window title displayed the whole time. What's wrong with just showing it when mousing over? Worked fine for the last 6 years!

9to5Mac Noob (not verified) | July 25, 2009 - 8:49am

Have you use the Space bar when in Expose? More like QuickLook feature though it shown in full size.

9to5Mac Noob (not verified) | July 25, 2009 - 8:51am

I think you have to notice that the windows it's showing is from minimized windows.
Expose do not show minimized windows today, only open ones.

Walt French (not verified) | July 25, 2009 - 11:01am

"...new Expose behavior..."
.
Any word as to whether they've fixed the awful behavior in Exposé when all windows are the same size? Fr'instance, open 9 Safari windows and invoke Exposé; all line up in a single row, leaving most of the screen empty. Dumb, especially since a 3X3 grid would let each window be 9X bigger.
.
Change one window's size by a smidge, and an irregular grid results, much closer -- close enough for Gummint work -- to the desired result.

mad102190 (not verified) | July 26, 2009 - 12:29am

Actually, I opened 9 windows of safari and it aligned them in a 3x3 grid, just as you wished it would.

Screenshots:

9 windows:
http://farm3.static.flickr.com/2646/3757508060_bf126143b0_b.jpg

8 windows:
http://farm3.static.flickr.com/2622/3756709543_fc755f9ee3_b.jpg

9to5Mac Noob (not verified) | July 25, 2009 - 11:18am

While I understand the complaints, each of these changes are to make the Snow Leopard interface touch screenable. All the expose changes make the windows a better finger target and eliminate features that depend upon mouse-over.

Jay Robinson (not verified) | July 25, 2009 - 11:58am

High resolution Snow Leopard desktop pictures, not just 1024: http://uneasysilence.com/archive/2009/07/14293/

9to5Mac Noob (not verified) | July 25, 2009 - 12:50pm

QT is so useless to me until I can play WM and other movies without importing first (like Flip4Mac does). Just like with VMC - why can`t QT be so like?

9to5Mac Noob (not verified) | July 25, 2009 - 3:03pm

I just changed my Quicktime 7 icon to this new blue one to see how it looks in my Dock!

It's definitely uber-sexy, but it's so stylishly modern (as all things mac should be) that it makes the rest of my icons around look totally outdated!

I know there's many complaints about the itunes icon these days, but some of the other icons that really dont do it for me are preview, image capture and iphoto. Not really sure why, must just be something about the photos and the tiny fiddly camera images etc, they need something far more simple and elegant. I was thinking something loosely based upon an eye shape for preview?

Zach (not verified) | July 25, 2009 - 10:41pm

So there wont be a way to upgrade from the dev preview to the final release?

So if I upgrade to the dev preview and use time machine to back up, up until I buy it in September, when I do the clean install will my developer preview back up be recognized and put on the new OS?

9to5Mac Noob (not verified) | July 26, 2009 - 12:51am

This version seems to have broken QT compatibility with Flip4Mac - playing a WMV file gets a 'QT needs to be installed' error, with a F4M icon.

Also, I'm having problems with large .mkv files in Front Row - they play OK for a couple of minutes, then lose picture. Anyone else got this?

Oh, and it's broken my Front Row iPlayer plug-in. (and yes, I know it's a beta - just saying there are some 3rd-party issues. Doubtless much of this will be fixed after the official release)

9to5Mac Noob (not verified) | July 26, 2009 - 1:52am

You have an iPlayer plugin for Front Row? As in BBC iPlayer?
Out of interest where did you get this, I'd love that functionality?

9to5Mac Noob (not verified) | July 28, 2009 - 7:41pm

Here: http://www.neilgall.com/Neil/Cocoa.html

It's basically a front end for the get_iplayer script. It works pretty well, but as the guy makes very clear, it's just something he knocked together by way of learning Cocoa. That said, it works well, and the playback is less jumpy on a slow connection than the iPlayer website.

But SL seems to have broken it. Boo.

That said, I'm having lots of QT playback issues with SL on my Mac Mini (09 model, 2GHz/2GB). The MacBook (late 08, 13" UB 2.4GHz/4GB) seems fine, which is puzzling.

rajesh (not verified) | July 26, 2009 - 2:13am

There is also a new version of the Safari (4.0.3(6531.7))

9to5Mac Noob (not verified) | July 26, 2009 - 4:01am

Why on that Expose screenshot are the "Top Sites" and "iTunes" windows not placed side-by-side? Surely that makes sooo much more sense?

I hope this new Expose is intelligent enough to work out maximum window sizes for everything! Also the minimised windows could be a litle smaller - so they're there, but not as prominent as open windows!

9to5Mac Noob (not verified) | July 26, 2009 - 8:03pm

I'm not sure if this started under 411 for me or only after 421, but the process MDS starts up indexing for spotlight and just keeps sucking up VM. Several times I let it get to 100GB of VM. Excluding ALL drives from spotlight seems to fix it... not sure if it's a drive/permission problem or a bug, but not a big deal for me because I'm still just using SL to test future software releases... but it's ironic since I had thought if 421 was stable I'd move to production on it on one of my machines... guess not.

Jon (not verified) | July 26, 2009 - 8:05pm

I'm not sure if this started under 411 for me or only after 421, but the process MDS starts up indexing for spotlight and just keeps sucking up VM. Several times I let it get to 100GB of VM. Excluding ALL drives from spotlight seems to fix it... not sure if it's a drive/permission problem or a bug, but not a big deal for me because I'm still just using SL to test future software releases... but it's ironic since I had thought if 421 was stable I'd move to production on it on one of my machines... guess not.

Sam (not verified) | July 26, 2009 - 9:00pm

I'm disappointed that several keyboard shortcuts for marking in and out points in QuickTime Player have been dropped in Snow Leopard beta. The current version of QuickTime Player provides this. This was/is a great feature that provided frame accurate editing in QuickTime Player.

9to5Mac Noob (not verified) | July 27, 2009 - 5:43am

Does Quicktime X support exporting m4v files to mov? Because I can't import m4v files to iMovie.

kw (not verified) | July 27, 2009 - 7:50am

I swear it looks like Apple simply tilted the GM logo 90 degrees
http://www.goodwrench.com/