Snow Leopard unleashed on Friday

IT LOOKS LIKE the speculation and rumours will finally come to an end as Apple has officially anounced the release date of the next iteration of its OS X operating system.

Snow Leopard will be available at the online Apple Store and Apple retailers from August 28th. The launch was heralded by the usual Apple tactic of shutting down its web portals for an hour or so this morning.

Available for pre-order from today, the £25 upgrade may not over-excite many Macolytes looking for major changes to the Unix-based OS X ('oh-ess-ten' for the uninitiated), as most of the new features are hidden at the operating system level. In fact, most users will be hard-pressed to tell the difference between Leopard and its Arctic-dwelling cousin.

Dig a little deeper, however, and you'll be rewarded with a raft of minor refinements, and one or two major ones, which might all add up to a worthwhile whole.

The most obvious change is that Snow Leopard will now support Microsoft Exchange Servers straight out of the box, no doubt syncing emails, contacts and calendars through updated versions of Apple's own proprietary software Mail, Ical and Address Book. It's difficult to be entirely sure how Exchange Support will be implemented as the 'Learn more about' link on the official website is borked. Perhaps they're not too sure themselves yet?

Snow Leopard will also include enhanced support for 64-bit systems with Apple announcing that all of its key system applications will have finally moved away from 32-bit only versions.

Grand Central Dispatch (GCD) is a new addition to the OS which dynamically scales the workload of an application to take better advantage of multi core processors. An application which doesn't use GCD could grab 20 processor threads when it starts up or is at maximum capacity, but will continue to hog those threads even if it's sitting around twiddling its digital thumbs. GCD will steal those threads back and give them to more deserving applications or system processes, theoretically making the whole system faster and more responsive.

In a similar manner, OpenCL, another new addition to Snow Leopard, will allow developers to tap into huge amounts of wasted processing power which sits around in your Macs graphics chips doing sod all most of the time. Again, most users probably won't have a clue that this is going on, especially as software developers have not yet taken advantage of the newly available processing power. If the Cupertino company plays its cards as close to its chest as is usually the case, we wouldn't expect to see OpenCL optimised applications for a good few months yet.

Apple's media playing jack-of-all-trades Quicktime also gets a tune-up with a new player, better support for more codecs and GPU-accelerated decoding of HD video.

As expected, Snow Leopard is the first Intel-only OS from Apple and PowerPC toting Mac fans will have no choice but to upgrade their hardware or wait and see how the Cupertino company continues to support their outdated machine architecture.

Apple's intention for the latest version of OS X has always been to refine the product rather than trying to reinvent the wheel. Apple reckons the entire OS has lost a massive 7GB of unsightly fat, and that something approaching 90 per cent of the underlying code as well as the user facing applications (more than a thousand individual projects) have been tweaked and improved.

Upgraders expecting new bells and whistles may be sorely dissapointed, but what has always been a stable and user friendly OS now looks to have finally come of age. µ