New Snow Leopard Features Disclosed, Accompanied by Screens

It has been revealed that Mac OS X 10.6, aka Snow Leopard, had a couple of new features that were undisclosed... until recently. According to those testing the latest beta build of Snow Leopard, the new findings are minor, but Apple always stressed that Snow Leopard was about building on top of 10.5, making the software more robust and able to take advantage of multi-core processors. Additional changes were spotted in the now-confirmed Cocoa-based Finder.

One of the new features, "Put Back," is said to allow users to restore an item stored in the Trash by simply right-clicking on it. The feature was somehow lost in the transition from OS 9 to OS X. As for the second feature recently discovered in OS X 10.6, Leopard allegedly now allows its user to select a folder within a stack and browse that folder in the stack view. Give the currently available Leopard this situation and it will simply open that folder in the Finder.

So, here's exactly how the two features are described, according to a Macrumors report citing people familiar with the latest developer build:

Put Back - Under Mac OS 9, users had the option to restore any "Trash"ed files (before the Trash is emptied) back to their original locations with a simple "Put Away" command. For some reason, this capability was lost in the transition to Mac OS X. In the latest Snow Leopard builds, it's back (as "Put Back"). So any accidental disposals can now easily be restored with a simple click.

Stacks Folder Navigation - The introduction of the "Stacks" metaphor in Mac OS 10.5 was met with mixed reactions. One issue with Stacks has been the inability to "drill down" into additional folders. In Leopard, clicking on a folder in Stacks simply opened that folder in the Finder ... [In Snow Leopard] clicking on a folder in Stacks smoothly opens the new folder in Stacks while shrinking the parent window as a small icon on the top left. This allows you to quickly navigate in and out of folders in Stacks.

As for the changes in Finder, according to new screenshots posted over at Italiamac, application icons are apparently smaller in size, while the Cocoa-based Finder has also been confirmed.

Snow Leopard is widely expected to arrive in the first half of 2009, with some speculating the new iteration of OS X will land by the end of Q1.