For the past seven years, cutting-edge Apple users have been spoiled by a constant stream of features and enhancements that have kept Mac OS X fresh and exciting. While putting the brakes on what once was an annual update, Apple has managed to keep rolling out significant OS upgrades worthy of their $129 price tags, and Mac devotees have become accustomed to watching Steve Jobs ceremoniously pull back the curtain on round after round of killer apps.

 

So, it came as somewhat of a surprise when he opted to forgo a flashy demo at WWDC in favor of a post-lunch session with Bertrand Serlet, Apple’s senior vice president of Software Engineering, a terse press release and a placeholder page on its Web site:

 

Taking a break from adding new features, Snow Leopard — scheduled to ship in about a year — builds on Leopard’s enormous innovations by delivering a new generation of core software technologies that will streamline Mac OS X, enhance its performance, and set new standards for quality.


 

But despite the lack of any tangible features to sink our teeth into, Snow Leopard will include some major enhancements (and probably a few surprises along the way) that have all the makings of a must-have upgrade:

 

What We Know

 

Cat be nimble: With more than 300 new features, Leopard was quite a hefty feline, clocking in at more than 6GB and requiring at least 9GB of available hard drive space. With Snow Leopard, on the other hard, Apple plans to reverse the growing trend and dramatically reduce OS X’s footprint, “making it even more efficient for users, and giving them back valuable hard drive space for their music and photos.” According to RoughlyDrafted, OS X’s apps have gone a major diet between Leopards, with Mail alone shedding nearly 200MB.

 

Grand Central station: With the switch to Intel, Apple has taken full advantage of each and every bit of processing power, and now Snow Leopard will be able to handle it all. Utilizing a brand new architecture, Open Computing Language (OpenCL or Botan), Snow Leopard “lets any application tap into the vast gigaflops of GPU computing power previously available only to graphics applications ... and raises the software limit on system memory up to a theoretical 16TB of RAM.”

 

X marks its spots: Following the path forged by iPhone, Apple has beefed up its video framework with a QuickTime update so powerful, it jumps from digits all the way to Roman numerals. QuickTime X (What happened to 8 and 9?)  “optimizes support for modern audio and video formats resulting in extremely efficient media playback.”

 

Wild Safari: Long overdue for an overhaul, Snow Leopard lays down the tracks for the speediest browser around, “with the fastest implementation of JavaScript ever, increasing performance by (up to) 53 percent, making Web 2.0 applications feel more responsive.” Safari 4 will also adopt oddly-named SquirrelFish to improve on its handling of JavaScript.

 

Exchange for the better: With iPhone 2.0, Apple licensed ActiveSync and added support for Microsoft Exchange, allowing enterprise users to push e-mail, sync calendar items and contacts, and securely erase sensitive information. Snow Leopard will bring all of this and more to the Mac desktop, with “out-of-the-box support for Microsoft Exchange 2007 built into Mail, Address Book, and iCal.”

 

Liquid assets: Borrowing a page from yet another third-party app, Fluid, Apple has added support for self-contained Web apps in Safari 4. Building on the Web Clip widget introduced in Leopard, Safari will allow users to simply save Web pages as standalone apps that function independently of a browser, for ad-free reading and speedy uploads.

 

Open for business: To harness the infinite potential of the Web, Apple has turned to SproutCore, “an open source, platform-independent, Cocoa-inspired JavaScript framework for creating web applications that look and feel like Desktop applications.” Joining SproutCore in Snow Leopard is another open source project, LLVM (Low Level Virtual Machine), which will help developers compile better, more secure applications.

 

Catch some Z’s: After years of speculation (and a read-only tease in Leopard), Snow Leopard will usher in full support for Sun’s 128-bit ZFS, “a new kind of file system that provides simple administration, transactional semantics, end-to-end data integrity, and immense scalability ... that’s actually a pleasure to use,” according to its creator.

 

What We’ve Heard

 

RoughlyDrafted, citing several unnamed sources who have presumably dissected the Developer Preview, has compiled a list of Snow Leopard features that are most likely to pop up in Steve’s next keynote presentation:

 

Just a little touch: Currently limited to iPhone and MacBook Air, Snow Leopard is expected to bring Multi-Touch to the masses, with a fully rewritten framework for taps and gestures that finally pushes the rest of the MacBook family to the next level.

 

Word play: While OS X users already enjoy system-wide spelling and grammar checks, Snow Leopard will make careless errors a thing of the past, with a flurry of automated text features, including word replacement and quick keys.

 

Font blanc: A new auto activation in Snow Leopard will utilize Spotlight to find fonts and seamlessly incorporate them into the applications that need them, so they’re ready to go when you are.

 

Independence day: Building upon a foundation that was laid in Leopard, Apple appears ready to implement full resolution independence as part of Snow Leopard, presumably paving the way for a new generation of Cinema Displays. To ease the transition, Apple is apparently supplying developers with a set of high-resolution vector images that can be scaled to their hearts’ content, replacing the pixel-y, bitmapped ones and allowing for smooth, virtually limitless screen real estate.

What We Don’t Know

 

How much is that kitty in the window?: So far, OS X users have been content to plunk down their hard-earned money for the likes of iChat, Spotlight, Expose and Time Machine, but without any killer apps on which to hang its hat, it remains to be seen how much Apple will deem Snow Leopard worth.

 

Chip envy: Based on the Developer Preview’s system requirements, Snow Leopard will leave PowerPC users on the sidelines, as Apple focuses on paving the road for a bright Mac future. It would seem that non-Intel users would have little to gain from a featureless upgrade, but we’ll reserve judgement until we receive official word from Apple.

 

Tick, tock, tick, tock: Apple has announced that Snow Leopard will ship “in about a year,” but we’ve heard that before. After all, Leopard was supposed to ship about 12 months after its own WWDC preview, but was delayed by several months; we hope the same won’t happen to Snow Leopard.