Hot on the tails of World of Apple"s screenshots of Mac OS X 10.6 Snow Leopard (currently in early developer testing), we at Neowin have some more tidbits to feed your hunger for more Snow Leopard information. While World of Apple was quite comprehensive in their overview, we received some information a few days back that they skipped over entirely with their review of build 10a261.
First of all, a bit of a summary of what we know so far is needed here. The Finder, Mac OS X"s file manager and "desktop experience", has been rewritten in the 64-bit friendly, and more up-to-date Cocoa, moving on from its origins in Carbon. As of now, the new Finder is a little bit buggy (according to our source), but it is there, and is definitely 64-bit Cocoa. It also includes a slider to adjust the size of the icons, located on the bottom right of each window.
Additionally, it appears that QuickTime Pro has been enabled in this release, but may be disabled later on. The purpose, as has also occurred in the Leopard and Tiger betas, is to let the testers get the full experience. No bug is to be overlooked.
Recently it was exposed that the Stacks feature, originally released with Mac OS X 10.5 Leopard, has been expanded in Snow Leopard to allow for "drilling down" into folders when in grid view. This means you can navigate through folders without opening a Finder window at all; it"s all done from a popup from the dock.
Additionally, there is now a "Put Back" menu item for each file or folder in the trash, and as the name suggests, it puts the file back where it came from.
What Neowin has discovered
There are a few things that haven"t been discussed yet, which an anonymous source has provided to Neowin.
First of all, Rosetta is now optional. In the Mac OS X installer, you are given the option to leave it out of your install. This will save a significant amount of disk space.
Secondly, the applications (drastically reduced in size) still support the legacy PowerPC processor, as well as multiple languages. Seems as if the huge space reductions are coming from somewhere else. XSlimmer can still remove quite a bit from the applications folder.
A few more interesting bits of information: there is no longer a MobileMe screen in the welcome wizard upon first boot, and there"s still no option to install to ZFS. However, read and write support for ZFS and NTFS filesystems is not available, as has been discussed in our Snow Leopard discussion in our Mac forums. Almost all applications are 64-bit now, too, with the major exception being iTunes.
It is worth noting that Apple keeps its major features for keynote events. Many expect Apple to reveal more about Snow Leopard at its 2009 Worldwide Developers Conference (WWDC). Many also believe that Apple is not focusing on consumer-based features in this release, instead focusing on speed and stability. We will see how it plays out, however Snow Leopard isn"t due out until later this year.
Want to see some more screenshots? We"ve set up a gallery for you here.
Don"t forget to join in our Snow Leopard discussion in our forums here (new news will start here).