Jun 24

Snow Leopard Features

Did you miss the Snow Leopard? I am sure you did, but until Apple releases the new Mac OS X, known as "Snow Leopard," feel free to enjoy the snow leopard pictured below! Anyway, if we get serious, there's plenty to say about Apple's upcoming OS, especially since I have heard about some new features recently. Basically, "some new features" shouldn't be that interesting, but since Apple advertises Snow Leopard as being an improved Leopard, without any new features, things are different!

Snow Leopard

According to various sources of RoughylDrafted, quoted by AppleInsider, Snow Leopard will feature a new framework, and this is BIG. Why? If I say "multitouch," that should be enough. Without any doubt, support for multitouch in Mac OS X is something new!

Next, although this may not be a new feature, it's surely an improvement worth being mentioned - Snow Leopard applications are expected to be smaller, with the standard Mac OS X Utility folder down to 111.6 MB from 468 MB, Mail - from 287MB to 91MB, while iChat is down from 111MB to 52MB, and finally, iCal was pushed down to 48MB, from 89MB.

Text processing features, like typing TM to get the "™" character, or automatic font activation, are also expected to be available in Snow Leopard, but this is not everything!

Probably the most important new feature, apart from the multitouch support, is the support for the ZFS file system. While Mac OS X Leopard only has read-only ZFS support, Snow Leopard and Snow Leopard Server will pack full support for the 128-bit file system, but without replacing HFS+ just yet.

This is about everything known at this time, but if you know something else about the Snow Leopard, or you have some features you'd like to see in it, don't forget to drop your comment below! We won't be able to reach Steve Jobs to forward your request, but at least we'll know what other Apple users would like to get with the Snow Leopard!