Chicago (IL) – First bits and pieces of information about Apple’s next Mac OS X "Snow Leopard" and it seems that Apple maintains a pace to unveil a working beta at the Macworld Expo in January 2009. We decided it is time to make a quick pit-stop to summarize what we know and look at Apple’s direction: There won’t be many new features, but there will be enough improvements to make this OS an important update: It will include a new Finder and Exchange support, image file boot capability, Grand Central, 64-bit and OpenCL support for speed improvements.    

So we were told that Apple will "hit the pause on innovations" for Snow Leopard and focus on core enhancements instead. The company is re-writing large parts of the OS code in Cocoa that it recommends to developers as the preferred application environment. However, while Cocoa received a lot of attention, it is just a small part of much more significant code changes designed to leverage the so far largely untapped horsepower of multi-core processors and GPUs. In Snow Leopard, speed is the new green.

There is a certain kind of excitement behind this release as it may be one of the first applications that truly reveal how good modern hardware really is. That is in a stark contrast to Windows 7, which shapes up to be a maintenance release for Vista to clean up the interface, add a few features and correct some mistakes Microsoft has made with Vista. We know that Microsoft is working on an accelerated operating system that will take advantage of heterogeneous CPUs (with multiple CPU and graphics cores) and GPUs as well, but this new OS, according to our sources, will not be ready before 2011.    

Apple is expected to showcase Snow Leopard during Macworld Expo in January 2009 and release the final at the WWDC in June 2009. Here is a quick look at what you can expect from this new OS.

Multiple OS X systems with Image Boot

In addition to booting a system from a hard drive, physical media or over network (NetBoot), Snow Leopard will allow users to select and boot their Macs from a disk image stored on external drives or different hard drive partitions. OS X currently allows only one bootable OS X installation on a single partition. With Image Boot, users may set up different OS X versions or environments, each residing in its own image file, and boot them as needed, even over a network.

A new Finder

Apple is allegedly re-writing a number of system applications in Cocoa, while Ars Technica cited sources who claim that "everything will eventually wrap in Cocoa." Recent developer builds reveal that Finder is also transitioning to Cocoa. Don't expect drastic changes from the end-user perspective. But under the hood, code changes are believed to make Finder more robust and less buggy, serving as a strong foundation for a rapid development of new features in the future.

Cocoa is one of many application environments available in OS X and the exclusive environment for the iPhone development. It brings common OS X features to applications "for free," removing code complexity which results in less code lines and, as a consequence, less bugs. Cocoa is object-oriented and consists of a suite of object-oriented software libraries and a run-time. It shares an integrated development environment with the other application environments.

In sync: Microsoft Exchange support out-of-the-box

Apple licensed the Exchange ActiveSync protocol for the iPhone and it will now extend it to the desktop with out-of-the-box Microsoft Exchange 2007 support in Snow Leopard. Exchange compatibility in Macs and iPhones will enable users to sync their business email, calendar and contacts on their desktop and on the go. The move is a big deal that may do wonders for the adoption of Macs in business environments.

The latest developer build of Snow Leopard integrates the Exchange Web Services protocol that provides access to Exchange Server 2007. Exchange support is built into Mail, Address Book, and iCal applications. For example, Address Book 5.0 can load contacts from Exchange server, iCal can be used to schedule events, and all these changes are automatically kept in sync with the Exchange server.

Read on the next page: 64-bit, Grand Central, OpenCL, Quicktime 

64-bit support to address up to 16 TB of memory

Snow Leopard will move to 64-bit support to allow the OS to address up to 16 TB of system memory. Applications will be able to manipulate large amounts of data, which will be particularly useful for applications such as video editing and high-resolution image processing.

Grand Central and multi-core power

Apple claims that "more cores, not faster clock speeds, drive performance increases in today's processors.” The problem is, however, that most current applications are still single-threaded and not made for multi-core processors – and rely on the OS to distribute computing among processor cores. In a recent blog entry titled "Unwelcome advice", Intel's researcher Anwar Ghuloum warned developers to catch up with the multi-core realities of today's consumer microprocessor design. He said most of today's applications fail to take advantage of the speed offered by multi-core processors. Snow Leopard's technology dubbed "Grand Central" is expected to more efficiently spread computing tasks across multiple cores/processors. Multi-core-aware APIs and new development tools promise to simplify the development of applications running in a multi-core environment.

OpenCL taps GPU power

Snow Leopard will support OpenCL (Open Computing Language) that can unleash all those giga- and teraflops locked up in GPUs and provide them for general-purpose computing. AMD and Nvidia are also moving toward OpenCL, while Nvidia has still a focus on its own CUDA technology. With Snow Leopard installed, newer Macs with OpenCL-compatible graphics chips will be able to use GPU cores to accelerate Mac OS X as well as certain applications that take advantage of OpenCL.

Next-generation media technologies

Snow Leopard will feature QuickTime X built on media technologies used in the iPhone. Apple dubs QuickTime X as "next-generation platform that advances modern media and Internet standards." In reality, it is likely that it will build on top of the existing Quick Time technology to enable more codecs and optimized media playback, thanks to Grand Central and OpenCL technologies.