Windows 7 is just another Vista according to Apple. There’s a lot of truth to that. Microsoft can’t escape the registry, DLLs and other poor decision choices that plague the Windows OS. Contrast that to where Apple is with their operating system. Apple’s Leopard 10.5 is fantastic. It’s loaded with features and stable as can be. At Apple’s developer conference today, Apple provided more information on Snow Leopard, the next release of the operating system. The past few versions of OS X have been loaded with user features. With Snow Leopard we are likely to see less of that. Snow Leopard is about building upon Leopard to build a better Leopard. Snow Leopard will focus on refinements, new technologies and Exchange support. This OS is not a full-blown enhancement in many respects, but provides the right next steps in the evolution of the OS.
Refinements: Don’t expect any big changes in areas like the Finder however it will be rewritten in Cocoa for better performance. The Finder has a few enhancements with magnification control of icons and the ability to view documents or movies based on an icon. The existing Stacks feature handles large contents better by allowing you to scroll through the contents of Stacks. Clicking on a folder in a Stack view keeps you in the Stack view as opposed to opening the folder in the Finder. Very handy. Other upcoming changes will include faster cancellation of actions, put back from trash, custom search scope and other developer benefits to enhance the experience. Expose is being built in to the Dock to provide easy access to application windows. Dock Expose even retains its position when switching between applications. Copying text from PDFs has vastly improved by detecting the makeup of a document to allow for better selection techniques. Hand gestures on the track pad will be incorporated with next character prediction for some languages. Mail speed has improved in basic areas. The new QuickTime user interface on the player has greatly improved and looks more like playing a DVD. Safari 4, when used with Leopard Snow, has full history search based on the text of pages. That feature can be used with Spotlight. Really cool.
New Technologies (for techies): Snow Leopard will complete the effort of moving the OS to 64 bit. All of core system applications will finally be upgraded. New hardware has brought about the need to better address OS basics. Multi core processors are one of those areas that can be optimized especially with processors including more cores. Apple has created Grand Central Dispatch as a means to increase performance using multicore processors. This will be an important topic for developers of applications with high demands on the CPU. Not much response from the crowd as they try to figure out what this exactly means. On the video front Apple introduced OpenCL to replace OpenGL. Apple created it as an open standard and they have the buy in from all the top graphics manufacturers.
Exchange Support: Exchange support will now be built into Mail, iCal and Address Book. Mail uses auto discovery to find Exchange servers based on login credentials. Viewing Office attachments works with Mail’s quick view even if you don’t have MS Office installed. You can do things like accept calendar items in Mail and search the Exchange Global Address List in the Address Book. On the back end you have to have Exchange 2007. Apple points out you get Exchange connectivity without having to buy Outlook like on Windows. Ouch.
Snow Leopard’s pricing is set at $29 for users upgrading from Leopard. Getting users to Snow Leopard is an important, but not critical upgrade to provide support for the next generation of applications. Leopard Snow doesn’t offer many bells and whistles at this point and is unlikely to before the final release this September. The price point tells it all in terms of what the perceived value will be to users.
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