The New Enhancements in Snow Leopard

Apple has stated officially that there will be “no new features” in Snow Leopard. But Roughly Drafted and AppleInsider have taken a look at the so-called “under the hood improvements” and agree that they will “translate into a slew of new enhancements” which will make a big impact when Snow Leopard arrives next spring. Some of these have already been reported: SproutCore, the LLVM Compiler, the CUPS printing engine,
native exchange support in Mail, iCal and Address Book, and self-contained Web apps.

Other additions haven’t received much attention: file size reductions, text-processing features, the new multi-touch framework, auto activation of fonts, and full ZFS support.

All Apple notebook systems are due to ship with multi-touch enabled trackpads after this summer’s MacBook and MacBook Pro re-design. So it makes sense that Apple will be offering completely multi-touch framework which will ship as part of Snow Leopard.

The reduction of the overall footprint of Mac OS X is another goal. So Snow Leopard applications have been reduced so that the standard Mac OS X Utility folder drops from 468 MC to 111.6 MB. Mail will also be shaved by two-thirds, from 287 MB to 91 MB. iChat will reduce from 111 MB to 52 MB, iCal from 89 MB to 48 MB.

An extensively detailed list of these and other improvements and enhancements can be read at http://www.roughlydrafted.com/