Just as expected, OS X Snow Leopard was also announced after the customary jibes against Windows Vista. We believe in touting the strengths of your products instead of making low blows against your rivals, unless your own product has nothing much to offer. Snow Leopard supposedly offers over 90% refinements, new technologies and the inclusion of Exchange support that ought to keep the corporate types happy. Finder wasn’t changed, but the base code has been re-written, although this doesn’t really go down well with some of the audience since Finder isn’t exactly high on their “fond of” list in the first place. Installation of Snow Leopard is 45% faster though, which wouldn’t really make too much of a difference unless you’re a tech guy who installs tons of OS X each day for customers.
Opening JPEG files will also be twice as fast, letting you go through your naughty picture collection in double quick time. The trackpad can also now be used to spell out Chinese characters – now that ought to make some people happy. Safari 4.0 will also be included with Snow Leopard, and will be 7.8x faster than IE8 – according to Apple’s benchmarks, of course. Safari 4.0 is supposed to be crash-resistant, and offers an increase in 64-bit Javascript performance of up to 50%. Quicktime 10 will feature Modern foundation, HTTP streaming, support for hardware acceleration and ColorSync alongside a tweaked user interface to keep up with the times.
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