Snow Leopard, the next version of Mac OS X, is scheduled for September, a month before Windows 7. It will be almost completely 64 bit, Intel-only, and cost $29€ for Leopard users. Apple first announced that Snow Leopard would merely include speedups and core improvements, but now they added a lot of new features as well – not all of which get the publicity they deserve.
1 Screen Recording with QuickTime X
This could make a lot of expensive software superfluous. I’m eager to try it out! Surely they somehow forbid to record DVD and YouTube playback – or not? (Update: No, they don’t.)
Apparently they fixed the problem of disks that would not unmount due to some crazy process working on them. …improved dialogs tell you which applications are using the drive… – very nice.
3 Restore Deleted Items to Original Folders
The new Trash bin knows where a file came from, and can restore it there. Windows users know this feature since 95. Now it is finally coming to the Mac.
I rarely reboot my Mac, but it is a very tiring process, since the shut-down mysteriously takes a lot of time. 75% faster would mean I wait about 20 seconds instead of over a minute for the Mac chime.
5 Omnipresent inspector in iCal
It’s back! Thank you. I never liked the Leopard iCal interface. It’s strange and clumsy. (Update: Actually, you can just move around detail windows, converting them into a palette window.)
6 HFS+ Read Support in Boot Camp
A very nice addition – and a hint that Apple might become more open with HFS in general? However, the argument against write support (…to prevent PC viruses from affecting Mac OS X…) is just preposterous. Windows is bad software, but it’s not malware!
Apple seems to react to more and more developers switching to Mac OS: They added support for Ruby on Rails last time, now they improve the Terminal application. Maybe we get to see a stand-alone SquirrelFish JavaScript interpreter next?