Mac OS X Snow Leopard new features uncovered
What with all the buzz around the iPhone post-WWDC, Mac OS X hasn’t been getting much love here on TWA lately. But now AppleInsider has posted some lesser-acknowledged features in Apple’s forthcoming revision to its current OS, and highlights how these will come into play for users of the next-next-next-generation operating system.
Of the features listed, I’m particularly interested in the expansion of multi-touch functionality across the OS. When Apple debuted the MacBook Air with enhanced touch-pad-based touch control, it felt like a baby-step in the right direction, rather than the giant building-to-building leap of the iPhone. By integrating the touch control frameworks into the OS in a way developers can easily access for their own apps, I’m tremendously excited by the potential for more gesture-based computing, something we’ve long been promised but somehow hasn’t been properly explored until now.
It’s also nice to see a genuine effort to slim down the physical space the OS occupies on a hard drive. Windows has long been the butt of ‘bloatware’ gags, and Microsoft Office even more so, but I have to say in recent years Apple’s own apps have followed the trend for coming in bigger and heavier with every new release. Whilst in theory the exponential increase in storage space available to most users should make this less of a problem, nevertheless my MacBook Pro’s capacious 120Gb hard drive is pretty much full with all those weighty pro apps - although of course a Parallels partition to the tune of 30Gb and a whole bunch of video content doesn’t help either…
Probably my most-looking-forward-to feature, though, has to be the tight Exchange integration coming in Snow Leopard. When Apple first announced licensing ActiveSync for use in the iPhone, the first question that popped into my head was ‘does this mean we can have it on the Mac, too?’ - for, much as it pains me to say so, Exchange is by far and away the most common enterprise set-up in a work environment, and a lack of full integration is one of the biggest barriers to enterprise taking up the Mac platform (that and cost, in my experience).
I’ve happily been running a MBP through work, sitting on a number of shared Windows drives accessed through SMB (still not nearly as tight and quick as I’d like, but perfectly workable) and consigned to Microsoft Office for getting at my Exchange email, calendars and shared folders. Since even Entourage doesn’t fully talk to Exchange, but rather seems to use a number of voodoo-like workarounds to share info with the server, I can’t wait to fire up Mail (finally!) for my email and iCal for my calendar and happily leave Entourage in its dock.
So what about other users? Are you planning to upgrade to Snow Leopard when it comes out? If so, will you expect to pay another £79 for the privilege, or should this one be on Apple? Fire off in the comments.