World of Apple

AppleInsider reports that QuickLook will be making its way to Finder icons themselves in Mac OS X 10.6 Snow Leopard.

The detail which was revealed to the site by a person familiar with the future Mac OS X release. The site writes that hovering the mouse pointer over an audio file in Snow Leopard’s Finder will trigger a triangular ‘play’ button to appear on the icon. Hitting the button will trigger the audio to play without opening any applications.

The process also works for video files.

AppleInsider reports that other files such as Pages, Keynote and Number files also cause the Finder to show navigation buttons on its icon to allow navigation of the document.

German website Apfeltalk has published a series of screenshots said to be showing Apple’s next OS “Snow Leopard”.

The screenshots mainly show Safari 4 which World of Apple offered details on last week. However some screenshots show Exchange integration in Address Book.

When Mac OS X Snow Leopard was just a rumour it surfaced that the operating system could be built just for Intel hardware, and be the first version of Mac OS X to drop support for the ageing PowerPC processors.

Today LogicielMac confirms this with a screenshot of the minimum requirements to install the developers previews of Snow Leopard handed out at WWDC this week.

The requirements are as follows:

• An Intel Processor
• An internal, external, or shared DVD drive
• At least 512 MB of RAM
• Display connected to an Apple-supplied video card
• 9GB of disk space, or 12GB for developer tools

Snow Leopard is being touted as a performance, stability and security release and is expected to ship “within a year.”

During an interview with New York Times’ John Markoff, Apple CEO Steve Jobs has revealed some more details about Apple’s upcoming operating system “Snow Leopard” and the companies acquisition of PA Semi.

When talking about Mac OS X Snow Leopard Jobs stated that “Apple would focus principally on technology for the next generation of the industry’s increasingly parallel computer processors.”

“We’ve added over a thousand features to Mac OS X in the last five years,” he said Monday in an interview after his presentation. “We’re going to hit the pause button on new features.”

Instead, the company is going to focus on what he called “foundational features” that will be the basis for a future version of the operating system.

“The way the processor industry is going is to add more and more cores, but nobody knows how to program those things,” he said. “I mean, two, yeah; four, not really; eight, forget it.”

Apple, he claimed, has made a parallel-programming breakthrough.

Snow Leopard will also tap into the power of powerful GPUs that sit idle most of the time in many modern computers, “Jobs described a new processing standard that Apple is proposing called OpenCL (Open Compute Library) which is intended to refocus graphics processors on standard computing functions.”

“Basically it lets you use graphics processors to do computation,” he said. “It’s way beyond what Nvidia or anyone else has, and it’s really simple.”

Apple and Steve Jobs are currently touting Snow Leopard has featureless but a quick look at the preview pages for both the client and server reveals that this isn’t the whole truth.

The client version of Snow Leopard lists full Microsoft Exchange Support while the server version boasts read and write support for ZFS. Both considerably sought after features that are being added to Snow Leopard.

During the interview Steve Jobs also briefly mentioned PA Semi which Apple acquired back in April, at the time much speculation was thrown around.

“PA Semi is going to do system-on-chips for iPhones and iPods,” he said.

During today’s WWDC keynote Apple mentioned that it would preview Mac OS X 10.6 to developers attending WWDC.

Mac OS X Snow Leopard, which builds on the incredible success of OS X Leopard and is the next major version of the world’s most advanced operating system. Rather than focusing primarily on new features, Snow Leopard will enhance the performance of OS X, set a new standard for quality and lay the foundation for future OS X innovation. Snow Leopard is optimized for multi-core processors, taps into the vast computing power of graphic processing units (GPUs), enables breakthrough amounts of RAM and features a new, modern media platform with QuickTime X. Snow Leopard includes out-of-the-box support for Microsoft Exchange 2007 and is scheduled to ship in about a year.

“We have delivered more than a thousand new features to OS X in just seven years and Snow Leopard lays the foundation for thousands more,” said Bertrand Serlet, Apple’s senior vice president of Software Engineering. “In our continued effort to deliver the best user experience, we hit the pause button on new features to focus on perfecting the world’s most advanced operating system.”

Snow Leopard delivers unrivaled support for multi-core processors with a new technology code-named “Grand Central,” making it easy for developers to create programs that take full advantage of the power of multi-core Macs. Snow Leopard further extends support for modern hardware with Open Computing Language (OpenCL), which lets any application tap into the vast gigaflops of GPU computing power previously available only to graphics applications. OpenCL is based on the C programming language and has been proposed as an open standard. Furthering OS X’s lead in 64-bit technology, Snow Leopard raises the software limit on system memory up to a theoretical 16TB of RAM.

Using media technology pioneered in OS X iPhone, Snow Leopard introduces QuickTime X, which optimizes support for modern audio and video formats resulting in extremely efficient media playback. Snow Leopard also includes Safari with the fastest implementation of JavaScript ever, increasing performance by 53 percent, making Web 2.0 applications feel more responsive.

For the first time, OS X includes native support for Microsoft Exchange 2007 in OS X applications Mail, iCal and Address Book, making it even easier to integrate Macs into organizations of any size.

[Update] Apple has also posted a dedicated Snow Leopard page.

Contrary to reports late last week, Gizmodo writes that PowerPC support will most likely live on in the next major version of Mac OS X.

The source who reported to Gizmodo claims to have used a seed of Mac OS X 10.6 and early evidence shows that work has been done on PowerPC drivers suggesting that the platform won’t be dropped yet.

TUAW reported yesterday that Apple could be seeding developers an early build of Mac OS X 10.6 at WWDC next week.

TUAW also reports that Mac OS X 10.6 will ship in January 2009 and that Apple will drop PowerPC support from OS X making it Intel-only. Mac OS X 10.6 is also said to add very few new features and focus purely on “stability and security.”

MacRumors vouches for the report stating that they heard that Mac OS X 10.6 would make a debut at WWDC this year.

Today Ars Technica added to the hype surrounding Mac OS X 10.6 by concurring that the next version of OS X will be Intel-only and is currently code-named “Snow Leopard”.

Ars also clarifies that the release will be “heavily focused on performance and nailing down speed and stability” and should debut in January 2009.

Finally the site adds that Mac OS X 10.6 will be “Cocoa-only” but adds:

There may be some disagreement here as to what exactly “Cocoa-only” means, so take that into account when thinking about this. For example, Apple may only axe Carbon UI stuff.

John Gruber adds:

The “pure Cocoa” stuff is about additional Cocoa wrappers for APIs that currently are only available in Carbon (and/or at the BSD level) — more stuff that developers can do using Objective-C APIs. It is not about dropping Carbon from the OS, which would make no sense. It’s a message for developers, not a description of Snow Leopard.