Instead of the usual point release, Apple on Monday released a “Supplemental Update” for Mac OS X Snow Leopard 10.6.8.

The Mac OS X 10.6.8 Supplemental Update is recommended for all users running Mac OS X Snow Leopard 10.6.8 and resolves issues with:

• Transferring personal data, settings, and compatible applications from a Mac running Mac OS X Snow Leopard to a new Mac running Mac OS X Lion
• Certain network printers that pause print jobs immediately and fail to complete
• System audio that stops working when using HDMI or optical audio out

For users who are not running Snow Leopard 10.6.8, Apple has an update combo that will bring your Mac up to date to 10.6.8. The supplemental update is available via the usual software update.

Mac OS X Snow Leopard 10.6.8 Supplemental Update support article

Apple has released Safari 5.1 for Mac OS X Snow Leopard, bringing the improvement of Safari on Lion over to Snow Leopard such as Reading List, new privacy pane preference and new process architecture. Several notable new features in Safari 5.1 are however Lion specific and are not available when running under Snow Leopard: Multi-touch Gestures, Resume, Full Screen Browsing, Sandboxing, Downloads Popover, better HTML Canvas graphics etc.

Safari homepage

Mac OS X comes with a capable screen capture tool built-in. You probably already know that using Command-Shift-3 is for capturing the whole screen, and Command-Shift-4 will give you a crosshair cursor to choose the area of the screen you want to capture. Both Command-Shift-3 and Command-Shift-4 will output the screen capture as PNG file to you Desktop with a name “Screen shot xxxx” where xxxx will be the timestamp.

Instead of capturing to file, you can capture the image to Mac OS X system clipboard memory. This will allow you to paste the screen image into another application such as Photoshop or Pages. To capture screen into clipboard memory, use Control-Command-Shift-3 for whole screen or Control-Command-Shift-4 for portion of screen.

You can also capture specific window or object on the screen using the Command-Shift-4 or Control-Command-Shift-4 screen capture shortcuts:

• Press Command-Shift-4 or Control-Command-Shift-4. The cursor changes to crosshair.

• Press the spacebar to toggle the cursor into a camera icon.

• Move the camera cursor to the window or object that you want to capture. The window or object will be highlighted when the cursor is over them.

• Click the mouse anywhere on the highlighted window or object to take the screenshot.

A few users have reported in Apple forums incidents of total data loss using Guest account after upgraded to Snow Leopard. Apple has confirmed on Tuesday that the company is “aware of the issue, which only occurs in extremely rare cases, and we are working on a fix.”

According to reports, the bug occurs when you upgrade from Leopard to Snow Leopard with an existing Guest account in Leopard. After the upgrade, all data are gone after users logged into their Guest accounts and then back to their normal accounts.

PC World has unsuccessfully tried to replicate the bug, suggesting it is indeed rare.

It is better be safe than sorry, make sure there is a usable backup before you upgrade to Snow Leopard. And avoid using Guest account in Snow Leopard until Apple fixes the problem.

Snow Leopard comes with subtle changes that refine the Mac OS X experience, minimize application windows to application icon is one of them.

When you minimize a window under Mac OS X, the default behavior is to shrink the window into the thumbnails of the dock, one icon per window. This leads to irritating Doc clutter if you have a number of minimized windows.

Snow Leopard has an additional entry “Minimize windows into application icon” in its System Preferences > Dock settings where you can select to hide minimize windows into application icon instead of thumbnails of the dock.

You can accessed minimized windows as usual from the application’s Window menu or from the icon menu by Control-Click on the app icon on the Dock. Minimized windows also appear below at the bottom in Dock Expose when you click and hold the app icon on the Dock. Similarly minimized windows appear at the bottom when you activate Expose.

OS X 10.6 Snow Leopard is a smash hit. According to NPD Group’s retail tracking, sales during the first two weeks of Snow Leopard were more than two times higher than Leopard and four times higher than Tiger in the same period.

“Even though some considered Snow Leopard to be less feature-focused than the releases of Leopard or Tiger, the ease of upgrading to Snow Leopard and the affordable pricing made it a win-win for Apple computer owners – thus helping to push sales to record numbers” said Stephen Baker, vice president of industry analysis at NPD.

NPD attributed much of Snow Leopard’s success to its aggressive pricing.

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Apple has released the first update to Snow Leopard, in less than two weeks after its debut on Aug 28. In its release note, Snow Leopard Mac OS X 10.6.1 contains the following fixes:

• Improves compatibility with some Sierra Wireless 3G modems
• Addresses an issue in which some printer compatibility drivers might not appear properly in the Add Printer browser
• Addresses an issue that might cause DVD playback to stop unexpectedly
• Addresses an issue that might make it difficult to remove an item from the Dock
• Resolves an issue in which the Command-Option-T keyboard shortcut would sometimes bring up the special characters menu in applications such as Mail and TextEdit
• Addresses instances in which auto account setup in Mail might not work
• Resolves issues when sending mail with certain SMTP servers
• Addresses an issue in which Motion 4 could become unresponsive
• Includes an update to Adobe Flash Player plug-in version 10.0.32.18

The update is about 71MB and can be download from the usual Software Update or direct from Apple website.

With Snow Leopard’s low upgrade price and performance boost, many Mac OS X users are expected to upgrade if not already done so. The upgrade to most users so far has been smooth, most are inconvenient by certain third party apps that are not running well with the new OS. The following are 32 things that are new or changed in Snow Leopard, helpful info before your upgrade.

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Apple has published in a support document a list of incompatible software for Mac OS X 10.6 Snow Leopard.

When you install Snow Leopard or upgrade to Snow Leopard, the operating system by default moves known-incompatible software to a folder named “Incompatible Software” on your hard drive. The list of incompatible software includes:

• Parallels Desktop, version 2.5 and earlier
• McAfee VirusScan, version 8.6
• Norton AntiVirus, version 11.0
• Internet Cleanup 5, version 5.0.4
• Application Enhancer, version 2.0.1 and earlier
• AT&T Laptop Connect Card, version 1.0.4, 1.0.5, 1.10.0
• launch2net, version 2.13.0
• iWOW plug-in for iTunes, version 2.0
• Missing Sync for Palm Sony CLIE Driver, version 6.0.4
• TonePort UX8 Driver, version 4.1.0
• ioHD Driver, version 6.0.3
• Silicon Image SiI3132 Drivers, version 1.5.16.0

Snow Leopard also prevents known-incompatible software from opening. The list of software that Snow Leopard will not open and run:

• Parallels Desktop, version 3.0
• VirusBarrier X4, version 10.4.4 and earlier
• SPSS 17, version 17.1
• Director MX 2004, version 10.2
• EyeTV, version 3.0.0 to 3.1.0
• Ratatouille, version 1.1
• AirPort Admin Utility for Graphite and Snow, version 4.2.5

Visit Apple’s Snow Leopard Support Page for more help on installation, manuals and tutorial.

Updated

For a more comprehensive list of what software runs with Snow Leopard, visit Mac OS X 10.6 Snow Leopard Compatibility List at Wikidot.com.

Apple has cleaned up the blood stain of its poster pet Snow Leopard on its website and in the retail box. The second picture shown below with traces of blood around its mouth, is in Mac OS X Snow Leopard itself as a desktop background.

Via Gizmodo.