What changes will be made to the new Apple "Snow Leopard" OSX ?

So Apple Has announced today that Snow Leopard is to be released for Mac in September of this year, a month before Windows 7 is due for worldwide release and it may only cost £29.99 as it is more of an update to the existing Leopard OS.


But just how different is snow leopard going to be from all of the previous versions, and surely it is time that OSX had a bit of a face lift, after all it has looked the same now for over 10 years? Don't get me wrong it is a fantastic operating system which put the recent effort from Bill Gates to shame, but I think it is starting to look a little old in the tooth now and I believe that Apple needs to be brave and give the operating system an overhaul similar to the changes it has made to the hardware.

So what does the update to Leopard contain?


Well first of all as I stated, don't expect too many cosmetic changes. One noticeable change is that snow leopard WILL require an Intel based Mac. So no more IBM power pc computability here I'm afraid. As quoted on the Apple website, the browser is the "all new, exactly the same finder". Which now has 64 bit support and "Grand central dispatch" which is a clear technique to get all of those support fast Intel cores working on independent tasks making the OS more efficient, not that it wasn't in the first place.
You can now customise spotlight and dictate the search options with Snow Leopard.

Expose and stacks has been given a makeover making it "more refined and convenient". Both are now integrated in the dock and dock items are now scrollable and he interface is much more practical now as all items are displayed in an organised grid. This I believe is a welcome change.

Improvements to Time Machine.


Now I have to hold my hands up and admit that I have not used Time Machine yet, but those that have can rest in the comfort that it has been improved with snow Leopard. I work for an IT Support London based company and a lot of our Mac based clients swear by it. Apparently it is now 50 % faster to use now compared to the current version.
Other improvements to note are faster loading and shutdown times and quicker installation times as Snow Leopard takes up far less disk space then leopard. This is very interesting, as Apple claim that Snow Leopard takes up 6 GB less disk space compared to leopard. You have to wonder where they found that space from. Printer drivers are now updated automatically and file sharing has been improved which is very welcome.
Safari has also been given an update to version 4. It now renders web pages at a higher speed and has a new set of features including 50% faster JavaScript performance.