Snow Leopard: Mac's answer to Windows 7
The two major operating system vendors are readying to slug it out in the second half of 2009 with Apple announcing it plans to release its OS X 10.6 operating system on September 19. Also known as “Snow Leopard”, OS X 10.6 will likely hit user desktops a month ahead of Microsoft’s Windows 7 operating system which is now expected to debut in October this year.
At its worldwide developer conference on June 8 Apple demonstrated Snow Leopard for the first time and released details of what users can expect come September when the operating system goes on sale.
The first big change for Mac owners will be the Intel-only support from Snow Leopard. Back in 2005 Apple first said that it planned to drop the PowerPC processors from its products but it is only with Snow Leopard that this has been the case. All Macs shipped since 2006 have been equipped with Intel processors so most users will be able to run the new Snow Leopard easily and a just a handful of older PowerPC Macs will be left out in the cold.
According to Apple the minimum specifications needed to run 10.6 will be Mac computer with an Intel processor, 1GB of memory, 5GB of free disk space and a DVD drive for installation.
One of the other welcome changes for users will be that the new operating system is significantly more economical with disk space than its predecessor, Leopard. Apple says that Snow Leopard uses almost 6GB less disk space than Leopard did.
Other under-the-hood changes included in Snow Leopard are the decision by Apple to write all native OS X applications in 64-bit code. That means that applications such as Mail, Quicktime, Finder and Safari should benefit from a significant boost in speed. In addition to the 64-bit support Snow Leopard also includes the new Grand Central Dispatch (GCD) feature which improves performance on multi-core processors.
Exchange
On the desktop, one of the more significant additions is that of Microsoft Exchange support which has been built into the core Mac OS X applications. Support for Microsoft Exchange will be built into Mail, iChat and Address Book, OS X’s main communications tools.
Apple has also re-written QuickTime for this release and says that the player is now significantly faster than previous versions. The new QuickTime X also allows users to publish their movies directly to their YouTube account.
One of the exciting new features of Snow Leopard also demonstrated at the developer conference was the inclusion of trackpad handwriting recognition. Using the multi-touch trackpad, Apple demonstrated how users could write on the trackpad to input text onto the screen. Initially this is available for Chinese characters only but does open the way for future developments with English inputs.
Graphics power
Following a growing trend in the supercomputer world of harnessing the power of graphics processors to boost performance, Snow Leopard includes a new technology called OpenCL. Using OpenCL, application developers will be able to harness the unused power of high-end graphics processors to speed up their applications, even non-graphics ones. Graphics processors are able to crunch significant amounts of data which is usually used to render 3D applications and the like. But using OpenCL developers will be able to re-direct the power to boosting everyday application power.
Also included in Snow Leopard will be Safari 4, Apple’s latest web browser. Apple says that Safari 4 is the fastest browser on any platform and has a 100/100 on the Acid3 rendering test which checks web standards compatibility. Safari 4 is already out of beta and is available for Leopard and Windows systems now.
Snow Leopard versus Windows 7 – give your views
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