TheQuantumByte

Right after the introduction of the new MacBook line-up during the WWDC keynote, Phil Schiller called on a bunch of Apple execs to help him talk about, preview, and demo the much-anticipated next-gen OS X cat, 10.6 Snow Leopard. The OS was introduced earlier last year as one that contained mainly refinements to Leopard (thus the name), and was not going to mimic the leap from Tiger to Leopard. From yesterday’s preview, this can be seen to be true to some extent; although many important changes took place under the hood of the user interface, there are also several sweet changes to the interface and the way OS X works.

A few of the UI changes include the ability to drill into container folders in stacks, a magnification slider in Finder windows, faster boot and installation times, etc. One of the biggest UI changes, though, is that Exposé is now fully integrated into the dock. Also, a new version of QuickTime, QuickTime X, has been rewritten and given a completely new ‘minimal’ interface and several video trimming and sharing features.

The refinements, as promised, include top-to-bottom 64-bit support, completely rewritten Cocoa Finder, Grand Central Dispatch (multi-processor threading support), OpenCL graphics acceleration, system-wide Microsoft Exchange support, improved iChat resolutions, integrated Services contextual menus, etc.

All in all, Snow Leopard looks to be a very good example of how Apple’s sheer attention to detail makes its products superior to those of its competitors. Bertrand Serlet said that Mac OS X consists of over 1,000 separate projects, and over 90% of all those have been rewritten and tweaked in Snow Leopard. Sure, we won’t be getting the kind of UI leap that we got two years ago transitioning from Tiger to Leopard, but this following update will smooth many aspects of OS X up, and allow it to be that much better. The best thing? Snow Leopard will be released in ‘September’ (in Apple lingo, that means September 30th), for just US$29 for existing Leopard users. Yes, that’s right, I didn’t miss out the “1″. It’s a whopping $100 cheaper than Leopard’s $129. And on top of that, families only need to pay $49 for the 5-license family pack.

And for the jittery people who can’t wait to feel as though they’re using this new cat, here is the ‘Aurora’ wallpaper from Snow Leopard!