It’s that time again: A new big cat is upon us, and while it hasn’t brought about the rumored ‘Marble’ aesthetic, there’s been a lot of enhancements, tweaks, and improvements to the user interface and graphics of Mac OS X 10.6, commonly known as Snow Leopard.

After a huge release like Leopard, which brought very radical change to the way our favorite OS looks, feels, and works, including a complete redesign of its icons and UI ‘theme’, Snow Leopard’s (incomplete) roundup of UI changes can only feel minor. Nevertheless, it shows some beautiful classroom examples of what composes true attention to detail.

Since Snow Leopard has quite a few interface changes and tweaks, I’ve organized them into four sections. I’ll kick off with the most visible changes, and round the article up with (very) minor tweaks that are hardly noticeable, but show us that Apple still hasn’t lost its touch.

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I got the Design Commission’s iPhone UI design stencil kit as soon as it came out, as one of the 100 first customers. I may have been the last one to go before they sold out, as a friend of mine was literally checking out a minute after me and got a message saying they were out of stock.

And to make a long story short: I’m quite pleased with it. Upon opening the package, the first thing that struck me was how thin it was — a great ‘feature’, because you don’t want a thick piece of metal between your pencil and the paper. As a bonus, I was also pleasantly surprised to see that they included a thin mechanical pencil.
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