The Finder lets you organize, view, and access practically everything on your Mac, including applications, files, folders, discs, SD memory cards, and shared drives on your network. It is represented by a blue smiling face icon on the Dock, as shown below (clicking the Finder icon in the Dock brings the Finder to the foreground).The desktop is the space on your screen where you see file, folder, and volume icons. When you connect a hard disk, DVD or SD memory card to your Mac, its icon shows up on the desktop and Finder window sidebars.Summary of improvements in Snow Leopard The Finder has been completely rewritten using the modern Cocoa framework in Mac OS X, taking advantage of the new technologies in Snow Leopard--including 64-bit support and Grand Central Dispatch. The familiar Finder interface is unchanged, but you will discover the Finder is faster and more responsive. It also includes an enhanced icon view with live file previews, so you can thumb through a multipage document or even watch a QuickTime movie. Snow Leopard improves the reliability of ejecting discs and external drives. Sometimes when an application or process is using the files on a drive, Mac OS X prevents you from ejecting it, but you might not know why. In Snow Leopard, you should see fewer of those situations, and when you do get them, you’ll be told exactly what is using the drive, so you can quit it and eject the drive properly.

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