It’s official: Snow Leopard will be shipping on August 28th, a full month ahead of schedule!!! See the front page of Apple.com to some of the concept art that goes along with this important release of Mac OS X (not that many of you haven’t already gotten a sneak peak at it from the rumor sites).
What’s new? The Finder has been re-written in Cocoa, the whole OS is 64 bit, all the old PPC (non-Intel/i386) code is out, making the OS smaller/sleeker/leaner, Stacks got some new graphics, automatic updates for printer (can you say third party) drivers (hopefully a framework that will have Office & Adobe products added to it thus easing mass management long-term), iChat got a bump in performance/reliability/graphics versions, Expose is accessible from the dock, faster wake up and shut down (you know you’re supposed to put it to sleep before you close the lid, right?), QuickTime HTTP based live streaming (kinda’ like how Silverlight works), file sharing while the computer is asleep (um, weird) and the multi-touch can be used to input Chinese characters, clearly a feature to try and make the worlds largest market take notice.
As for server, you ever use Blackberry Enterprise Server (BES)? Well, Mobile Access Server is a new feature, think BES. There’s also iCal Server 2 (more pushy), Podcast Producer Server 2 (more wizardly) & Wiki Server 2 (now with lightbox, er I mean, QuickLook & Spotlight, er, I mean QuickSearch): all upgrades to what is becoming part of the core feature set of Mac OS X Server. Then there’s Address Book Server (I know, it’s about time). iChat Server can do persistent chat rooms now (create a chat room so users can come and go (ie – Chemistry 101, staff meeting, etc) at will rather than have chat rooms be on demand. While you’ve bee able to do federation with iChat Server previously using the command line, you can now use the GUI to do XMPP federation (have two iChat Servers have users between them). NetRestore has been added, giving mASR a pretty new GUI. Oh and you can use Spotlight to search the server (aka Spotlight Server?) and the iPhone Configuration Utility is built in, meaning you no longer have to download it manually.
Despite some of my silly remarks, Snow Leopard & more importantly for most of my readers, Snow Leopard Server’s new features are really, really cool.
No NDA’s were violated in the making of this article: all of the information from this article was culled from Apple.com.
