System Preferences shuffle on Snow Leopard

As it does in every major upgrade to Mac OS X, Apple has renovated System Preferences in Snow Leopard, reorganizing individual panes and changing the layout of settings within panes. You’ll also find new settings and wonder where some old ones went. Here are some of the most notable changes.

Accounts This pane now provides the option of joining a Network Account Server.

Appearance You can no longer specify a font smoothing style (Leopard let you choose from Automatic, Standard, Light, Medium, and Strong); you can choose only whether or not to use the feature and the font size at which it automatically turns on or off.

Date & Time The most immediately obvious change is that the map of the world you use to choose your time zone is wider and higher-resolution. But the change many OS X users will really welcome is the capability to show the date in the menu bar, using the new Show Date option. Unfortunately, you can’t customize that date’s format; you’re stuck with Aug 28.

Desktop & Screen Saver The Desktop tab gains a number of new—and impressive—Desktop images. The Screen Saver tab gets a new Shuffle entry that lets you create a custom slideshow based on both stock images and your own photos.

Dock There’s now a new option to minimize windows into their parent applications’ Dock icons. See 11 major new Snow Leopard features, or our video of Snow Leopard tricks, for more on this feature.

Keyboard and Mouse Formerly combined in one Keyboard & Mouse pane, these are now separate panes. Each includes a button to set up a Bluetooth keyboard or mouse using the Bluetooth Setup Assistant; if you’ve got Apple’s Bluetooth keyboard or mouse paired with your Mac, each pane now includes the respective battery-level indicator.

Read article: MacWorld