Advanced Dynamic Ramblings

This page is for information regarding the development of Mac OS X Snow Leopard. New information is added at the top of the page, so start from the bottom if you want it all…

Quick Update: Looks like Snow Leopard will be out 1st quarter next year! Fingers crossed!

If properly conceived, resolution independence in Snow Leopard should allow a user to set their screen resolution to the maximum native resolution of their display, and then scale the interface to taste. This results in a crisp, beautiful interface that does not got pixelated simply because the user wants things to be larger. This also has the added benefit of replacing the aging raster format for interface elements with the much leaner and meaner vector format. Neato.

At present, some of the features we can expect to ship with Snow Leopard are the SproutCore web application framework, MS Exchange compatibility for Mail, iCal, and AddressBook, a multi-Touch framework for developers so that more Apps can easily benefit from the multi touch trackpads, full ZFS support, Resolution Independence, and much slimmer applications – which I would think would result in faster launch times and greater performance. Check out the graphic for an idea of just how much code is being trimmed from these Snow Leopard apps:

Something I should have mentioned earlier – Snow Leopard will not be completely lacking in new features, one of which is a biggie: Full MS Exchange support! This will bring the OS up to par with the iPhone’s communication services in the 2.0 firmware. Exchange compatibility will be built into the Apple provided apps like iCal, Mail, and Address Book. Couldn’t come soon enough.

DELAYED REALIZATION: Uhh… 9GB does not seem like a reduced footprint. That would barely fit on a DL DVD, and 10.5 was the first Mac OS to require a DL. In other words, Tiger fit on a single layer, and I should hope that they’re targeting something in that range for Snow Leopard.

MOSR is reporting that Snow Leopard will indeed require an Intel processor. This had been rumored before it was announced. It seems logical to me, that if they really want to reduce the footprint, it would be very smart to remove all of that legacy code that nearly doubles the size of “Universal” apps and system files.

Intel required for Snow Leopard