After the Worldwide Developer Conference Keynote today, Apple previewed OS 10.6 “Snow Leopard.” True to rumors, the release will focus on performance rather than new features.
“We have delivered more than a thousand new features to OS X in just seven years and Snow Leopard lays the foundation for thousands more,” said Bertrand Serlet, Apple’s senior vice president of Software Engineering. “In our continued effort to deliver the best user experience, we hit the pause button on new features to focus on perfecting the world’s most advanced operating system.”
A new technology called “Grand Central” will make it easy for developers to create programs that take full advantage of the power of multi-core Macs. Also introduced is Open Computing Language (OpenCL), which extends the computing power of the GPU to any application written with OpenCL commands. Snow Leopard will also raise the software limit for RAM to 16 TB.
Also introduced is Quicktime X, which “optimizes support for modern audio and video formats resulting in extremely efficient media playback.” Safari will also be receiving an optimized Javascript rendering engine (previously rumored) that will increase performance by 53%.
Beyond speed enhancements, Snow Leopard will also include out-of-the-box support for Microsoft Exchange 2007. Apple is aiming for the software to ship in “about a year.”
Other announcements made at WWDC include 3G iPhone, 2.0 Firmware, SDK, Mobile Me.
from macrumors.com
June 10th, 2008 at 8:17 am
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June 14th, 2008 at 5:15 pm
OMG, leopard is still new, a new OS already???!!! will it be an update or completely new one?
June 16th, 2008 at 7:26 pm
I don’t think that this was a really smart move by apple because a lot of developers have just migrated to leopard and changed their coding. I don’t think that they would be to happy doing it again. Also this might not catch the public eye because there are NO new features according to apple; http://www.apple.com/macosx/snowleopard/?sr=hotnews?sr=hotnews.rss
The only new stuff is speed, security and stability. Also there are numerous bug fixes but I am sure that these fixes will come in future updates for Leopard, such as 10.5.4 and so on
June 16th, 2008 at 7:28 pm
Oh ya M_woody this is a completely new OS.
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