The major points regarding Snow Leopard (as shown by Vidas Neverauskas of Apple):
• Do not erase and install system software. Apple recommends running the updater over your existing system instead of the old wipe and clean install.
• Improvements to Exposé, Quick Look, and Preview including faster views, more options and user customization.
• Improved and more stable system.
• Mail improved to up to 2X faster processing.
• Safari 4 compatibility improvements. Also available on Windows and is approx. 6X faster than IE8 and Firefox.
• 64-bit operating system. It will still run 32-bit software so no need to upgrade apps. This also means the computer can access 16 billion (Dr. Evil voice) gigabits of RAM. The max in a 32-bit OS was 4 gigs.
• Quicktime X – totally rewritten architecture for multithreading (see below) and utilizes all hardware acceleration and 64-bit processing. There is no Quicktime Pro anymore. Everything is now available in Quicktime X (player) and FREE including minimal editing and exporting features. Also has HTTP streaming capabilities along with video capture using webcams or a screen capture feature! Still FREE!
• GCD- Grand Central Dispatch. This is a developer tool that allows developers to utilize the Multi-Core processor to increase application processing speed using “Threads”. By sending multiple Threads to the processor instead of cranking up the speed of the processor itself, the apps will have more RAM available for operations and the Mac OS will handle the processing. The framework allows them to access the full power of the hardware. For us end-users this means our apps will be getting much faster in the future.
Photoshop CS4 utilizes this “Multithread” environment and this allows us to have the cool graphic accelerated features.
• Exchange – Allows sharing files and services between home and office environments using MS Exchange including Mail, iCal and Address Book.
