Why Snow Leopard?

The following is from roughlydrafted.com:

Apple is marketing the idea of there being ³no new features² for Snow
Leopard and instead promising an overall improvement in how Mac OS X
works under the hood, thanks to a diligent code optimization and
refactoring cycle discussed in the previous article. At the same time,
there are plenty of significant new features coming in Snow Leopard to
look forward to. Here are ten big new features (plus a few minor ones)
that you probably haven¹t heard much about from anywhere else, including
my previous articles on the subject that already described QuickTime X,
Grand Central, and OpenCL.

Pulling Invisible New Features into Snow Leopard.
Apple¹s increasing collaborations with the open source community have
pulled back the veil of secrecy on several new but mostly invisible
enhancements that will be showing up in Snow Leopard.

One relates to LLVM, the Low Level Virtual Machine compiler architecture
project originally founded at the University of Illinois. Apple began
contributing to LLVM development in 2005, and started using it Leopard
to expand support for OpenGL hardware features. Lower-end Macs that lack
the silicon to interpret that specialize graphics code can now do it in
software.

LLVM is also working its way into Apple¹s Xcode IDE, initially as a
highly efficient optimizer and code generator that works as a bolt-on
upgrade to components of GCC, but eventually as a complete compiler
replacement. That project, known as Clang, was opened up last year. LLVM
compiler technology not only makes developers more productive, but also
results in code that runs significantly faster on the same hardware.

Apple¹s other open secret: the LLVM Complier
The LLVM Compiler Infrastructure Project
Another openly hidden secret in Mac OS X is CUPS, the Common Unix
Printing System. Beginning with Jaguar in 2002, Apple adopted and
licensed CUPS from its developer as Mac OS X¹s printing engine. It then
purchased the project outright. CUPS is also the de facto printing
system for Linux distros and is available for BSD and other commercial
Unix systems.

That means Apple owns the project that develops the printing
architecture for Linux. That¹s not an issue because Apple has
established a reputation in open source as a strong contributor and open
sharer. According to a review of bug fixes and improvements in CUPS
software, 24% of the enhancements came from Apple while 76% came from
free and open source software contributors working with Linux,
OpenSolaris, and other projects. Of course, 100% of both sides benefited
from that sharing.

CUPS collaboration has resulted in high quality code and the advancement
of new features. CUPS 1.4, the version sources say Snow Leopard will
use, adds performance enhancements and a variety of security
improvements that use sandboxing to prevent malware attacks on the
printing system from being able to read sensitive documents that may be
in use by printers.

Common UNIX Printing System
A third significant new feature originating from an open source project
in Snow Leopard is ZFS support, portions of which come from the
OpenSolaris project (along with Sun¹s DTrace technology, which Apple
uses in its Instruments performance profiling tool). Leopard debuted
read-only ZFS features, but Snow Leopard and Snow Leopard Server will
provide both read and write support for Sun¹s new 128-bit file system.
ZFS was designed to provide ³simple administration, transactional
semantics, end-to-end data integrity, and immense scalability.²

ZFS hype during the development of Leopard helped the new file system
reach buzzword status as news of the three letter acronym swept through
blogs and the tech media. It is frequently described as being the
imminent replacement for the Mac¹s native HFS+. However, the benefits of
ZFS including as storage pooling, data redundancy, automatic error
correction, dynamic volume expansion, and snapshots all apply primarily
to servers and higher-end workstation users who deal with multiple disk
drives.

ZFS isn¹t going to replace HFS+ outright in Snow Leopard, and has
limited relevance today to desktop and laptop users, particularly those
who never move beyond the single disk drive installed in their system.


Apple¹s Open Source Assault
Pushing Visible New Features in Snow Leopard.
Apple¹s extensive work in developing push support for Exchange Server on
the iPhone will also be included in Snow Leopard¹s Mail, Address Book,
and iCal. Push support in those client side apps are also being used to
power MobileMe¹s push messaging subscription service and Snow Leopard
Server¹s push messaging services. Apple will be offering both in
parallel as alternatives to Exchange, thanks to smart planning on the
part of Apple¹s engineers to develop an interoperable push architecture
in Mac OS X and on the iPhone.

There is also a fourth application of push that has developed alongside
push messaging: Apple¹s new Push Notification Service. PNS allows iPhone
and iPod touch users to set up server side notification alerts that
don¹t require mobile applications to stay running in the background just
to update users of the external events they track. Along with Bonjour
discovery, PNS will keep iPhones wirelessly connected in all sorts of
sophisticated ways that third party developers can imagine in their
applications.

Whether Apple will integrate a listener for the same PNS system into the
desktop side of Mac OS X remains to be seen, but it would allow a
single, unified interface for alerting client users of new events. I
proposed a system wide, Growl-style notification system in the Leopard
Wish List published back in 2005.

Snow Leopard Server Takes on Exchange, SharePoint
Apple¹s Mobile Me Takes On Exchange, Mobile Mesh
With the strong push into push messaging, Apple will make mobile devices
even more tightly integrated with its desktop products. Leopard
delivered Back To My Mac as a novel way to use Wide Area Bonjour¹s
dynamic service registration as a mechanism for sharing resources served
from home to any location without configuring static naming services for
address lookups. Because any software can register itself with
..Mac/MobileMe, this opens the door to third party developers with the
vision to exploit the potential of these enabling technologies.

Among the technologies profiled earlier in Myth 3 that have been
trickling from the iPhone into Mac OS X, there¹s at least one idea I
proposed for the iPhone that will be in Snow Leopard¹s Safari: self
contained web apps. The new feature will allow users to run web
applications as a local app in its own window, essentially making the
web platform into a native-looking app that can run outside of Safari.
I proposed a similar feature as a possibility for the iPhone prior to
the announcement of the Cocoa Touch SDK: web apps packaged up into a set
of files that could be run on the device as a Dashboard widget-like
standalone app, even when off the network. Why Apple hasn¹t pursued such
an obvious strategy is a little hard to figure out, but it seems they¹ve
got the ball rolling on the desktop.

That ball will be rolling even faster thanks to SquirrelFish, a new
JavaScript interpreter that will make Safari and any other WebKit-based
browsers, standalone self contained apps, and Dashboard widgets all a
lot faster. Apple¹s MobileMe, Yahoo¹s Flickr, and Google various web
apps will all gain new speed thanks to faster JavaScript execution.
SquirrelFish will also raise the bar in performance and efficiency in
the Rich Internet Applications sector in general, giving Flash,
Silverlight, and Java a faster, simpler, and more openly interoperable
runtime to compete against.


Microsoft¹s Application Features in Mac OS X, System Wide.
Microsoft¹s business model of tacking on features hasn¹t been a total
wash. The company¹s desperate efforts to invent novel marketing features
for every new release of Windows and Office have pioneered a number of
ideas that have later found their way into Mac OS X. One example is the
idea of Fast User Switching, which Apple added to Panther. Windows XP
pioneered the trick, but built it upon the kluge that is Terminal
Services.

Microsoft also helped originate the basis of Ajax web apps by inventing
XMLHttpRequest in order to make its Outlook Web Access 2000 web app work
decently within Internet Explorer. Today, standards-based web apps are
eating a hole into Microsoft¹s monopoly on the proprietary desktop
platform, and tools such as SproutCore and resulting products such as
MobileMe are poised to tear down interoperability barriers and level the
playing field. Microsoft may now regret having opened Pandora¹s Box in
terms of standards-based web applications, but its efforts to seal the
web back up with the proprietary Silverlight plugin, which turns web
apps into .NET programs, will now be next to impossible.

Another example of a Microsoft innovation are the fancy text features in
Word, such as red underlining to highlight spelling mistakes and the
green squiggle for grammar errors. Word also features a variety of word
auto correction, smart dash insertion, and text replacement features
(such as typing TM to get the � character). The former have already
become system-wide features in Mac OS X, while sources indicate that the
latter text processing features will find their way into Snow Leopard,
and therefore every application that runs on it.

On top of injecting Word features into its OS for the use of every
application, Apple will also expand the use of its own Data Detectors, a
technology it invented in the mid 90s for identifying useful bits of
text and making it actionable. Leopard introduced Data Detectors in Mail
as a way to extract contacts and events for use in Address Book and
iCal, but Snow Leopard will expose Data Detectors everywhere it draws
text.

Sources also indicate Snow Leopard will expand upon Font Book to provide
full Auto Activation of any fonts requested by any application, using
Spotlight to track them down. Snow Leopard is also suggested to have a
new set of frameworks specifically for working with multitouch trackpad
gestures, patterned after those introduced with the MacBook Air.

Speaking of the ultra-thin Air, sometimes less is more. However, the
high cost and relatively low capacity of Solid State Drives like the
$1000, 64 GB SSD option offered for the Air means that one Microsoft
feature Snow Leopard could do without is bloat. As one reader noted,
³Currently, Leopard requires 9 GB of available disk space for
installation and iLife requires an additional 3 GB. This means that a
product such as the [SSD] MacBook Air comes with the hard drive 20%
full.²

Think Small.
Snow Leopard aims below the bloat to accommodate the coming wave of
SSD-based systems. In the latest build, sources say Apple¹s own apps are
losing weigh dramatically across the board. The apps in the Utilities
folder all drop from 468 MB to 111.6 MB, for example. Other apps are
similarly svelte, as the graph below indicates.

Is this the product of just code optimization and shared resources? One
factor likely relates to work on Resolution Independence, which
substitutes bitmapped raster graphics (which define every pixel) with
smaller vector graphics files (which draw GUI elements and controls by
recipe).

Vector graphics can be scaled to any size while retaining a high quality
appearance, while bitmapped graphics can quickly look blocky when scaled
up. Adding larger bitmapped versions can solve that problem, but at the
cost of consuming more disk space. Apple earlier told developers it
would be providing a library of shared, high quality vector graphics
they could use instead of each packaging their own bitmapped art into
every app.

The dramatic size reductions in these apps must also involve more
efficient Localization. For example, Mac OS X Leopard¹s Mail currently
weighs in at over 285 MB, but the majority of its bulk comes from 18
language localizations inside the application bundle that consume 276
MB. The actual Universal Binary code is only a few megabytes and even
its associated graphics and other resources only amount to 2.8 MB.

Why does Apple default to dumping support for 18 or more languages in
every app without providing any simple, centralized way to get rid of
the unnecessary ones? Perhaps that question is answered in Snow Leopard,
where Mail is reportedly just 91 MB. That¹s too big to simply to be an
English-only, stripped down version for developers, but still far
smaller than than Leopard¹s. Across the board, it appears Snow Leopard
apps are about a third as large as their Leopard equivalents.

And so while Snow Leopard paradoxically gains more useful features
through code improvements and under-the-hood retooling rather than from
a Microsoft-style new feature focus that aims to deliver ³wow² with
flashy marketing gimmicks, the system is also getting smaller and
tighter. There must also be some other subtraction, right? Will Snow
Leopard scrape away the old Carbon API? That¹s the next myth.

--
Support the troops: Bring them home ASAP.

Michelle Steiner wrote:
> The following is from roughlydrafted.com:
>
> Apple is marketing the idea of there being ³no new features² for Snow
> Leopard and instead promising an overall improvement in how Mac OS X
> works under the hood, thanks to a diligent code optimization and
> refactoring cycle discussed in the previous article. At the same time,
> there are plenty of significant new features coming in Snow Leopard to
> look forward to. Here are ten big new features (plus a few minor ones)
> that you probably haven¹t heard much about from anywhere else, including
> my previous articles on the subject that already described QuickTime X,
> Grand Central, and OpenCL.
>
> Pulling Invisible New Features into Snow Leopard.
> Apple¹s increasing collaborations with the open source community have
> pulled back the veil of secrecy on several new but mostly invisible
> enhancements that will be showing up in Snow Leopard.
>
> One relates to LLVM, the Low Level Virtual Machine compiler architecture
> project originally founded at the University of Illinois. Apple began
> contributing to LLVM development in 2005, and started using it Leopard
> to expand support for OpenGL hardware features. Lower-end Macs that lack
> the silicon to interpret that specialize graphics code can now do it in
> software.
>
> LLVM is also working its way into Apple¹s Xcode IDE, initially as a
> highly efficient optimizer and code generator that works as a bolt-on
> upgrade to components of GCC, but eventually as a complete compiler
> replacement. That project, known as Clang, was opened up last year. LLVM
> compiler technology not only makes developers more productive, but also
> results in code that runs significantly faster on the same hardware.
>
> Apple¹s other open secret: the LLVM Complier
> The LLVM Compiler Infrastructure Project
> Another openly hidden secret in Mac OS X is CUPS, the Common Unix
> Printing System. Beginning with Jaguar in 2002, Apple adopted and
> licensed CUPS from its developer as Mac OS X¹s printing engine. It then
> purchased the project outright. CUPS is also the de facto printing
> system for Linux distros and is available for BSD and other commercial
> Unix systems.
>
> That means Apple owns the project that develops the printing
> architecture for Linux. That¹s not an issue because Apple has
> established a reputation in open source as a strong contributor and open
> sharer. According to a review of bug fixes and improvements in CUPS
> software, 24% of the enhancements came from Apple while 76% came from
> free and open source software contributors working with Linux,
> OpenSolaris, and other projects. Of course, 100% of both sides benefited
> from that sharing.
>
> CUPS collaboration has resulted in high quality code and the advancement
> of new features. CUPS 1.4, the version sources say Snow Leopard will
> use, adds performance enhancements and a variety of security
> improvements that use sandboxing to prevent malware attacks on the
> printing system from being able to read sensitive documents that may be
> in use by printers.
>
> Common UNIX Printing System
> A third significant new feature originating from an open source project
> in Snow Leopard is ZFS support, portions of which come from the
> OpenSolaris project (along with Sun¹s DTrace technology, which Apple
> uses in its Instruments performance profiling tool). Leopard debuted
> read-only ZFS features, but Snow Leopard and Snow Leopard Server will
> provide both read and write support for Sun¹s new 128-bit file system.
> ZFS was designed to provide ³simple administration, transactional
> semantics, end-to-end data integrity, and immense scalability.²
>
> ZFS hype during the development of Leopard helped the new file system
> reach buzzword status as news of the three letter acronym swept through
> blogs and the tech media. It is frequently described as being the
> imminent replacement for the Mac¹s native HFS+. However, the benefits of
> ZFS including as storage pooling, data redundancy, automatic error
> correction, dynamic volume expansion, and snapshots all apply primarily
> to servers and higher-end workstation users who deal with multiple disk
> drives.
>
> ZFS isn¹t going to replace HFS+ outright in Snow Leopard, and has
> limited relevance today to desktop and laptop users, particularly those
> who never move beyond the single disk drive installed in their system.
>
>
> Apple¹s Open Source Assault
> Pushing Visible New Features in Snow Leopard.
> Apple¹s extensive work in developing push support for Exchange Server on
> the iPhone will also be included in Snow Leopard¹s Mail, Address Book,
> and iCal. Push support in those client side apps are also being used to
> power MobileMe¹s push messaging subscription service and Snow Leopard
> Server¹s push messaging services. Apple will be offering both in
> parallel as alternatives to Exchange, thanks to smart planning on the
> part of Apple¹s engineers to develop an interoperable push architecture
> in Mac OS X and on the iPhone.
>
> There is also a fourth application of push that has developed alongside
> push messaging: Apple¹s new Push Notification Service. PNS allows iPhone
> and iPod touch users to set up server side notification alerts that
> don¹t require mobile applications to stay running in the background just
> to update users of the external events they track. Along with Bonjour
> discovery, PNS will keep iPhones wirelessly connected in all sorts of
> sophisticated ways that third party developers can imagine in their
> applications.
>
> Whether Apple will integrate a listener for the same PNS system into the
> desktop side of Mac OS X remains to be seen, but it would allow a
> single, unified interface for alerting client users of new events. I
> proposed a system wide, Growl-style notification system in the Leopard
> Wish List published back in 2005.
>
> Snow Leopard Server Takes on Exchange, SharePoint
> Apple¹s Mobile Me Takes On Exchange, Mobile Mesh
> With the strong push into push messaging, Apple will make mobile devices
> even more tightly integrated with its desktop products. Leopard
> delivered Back To My Mac as a novel way to use Wide Area Bonjour¹s
> dynamic service registration as a mechanism for sharing resources served
> from home to any location without configuring static naming services for
> address lookups. Because any software can register itself with
> .Mac/MobileMe, this opens the door to third party developers with the
> vision to exploit the potential of these enabling technologies.
>
> Among the technologies profiled earlier in Myth 3 that have been
> trickling from the iPhone into Mac OS X, there¹s at least one idea I
> proposed for the iPhone that will be in Snow Leopard¹s Safari: self
> contained web apps. The new feature will allow users to run web
> applications as a local app in its own window, essentially making the
> web platform into a native-looking app that can run outside of Safari.
> I proposed a similar feature as a possibility for the iPhone prior to
> the announcement of the Cocoa Touch SDK: web apps packaged up into a set
> of files that could be run on the device as a Dashboard widget-like
> standalone app, even when off the network. Why Apple hasn¹t pursued such
> an obvious strategy is a little hard to figure out, but it seems they¹ve
> got the ball rolling on the desktop.
>
>

<snip>

It would seem that delaying Leopard to get the iPhone out the door had
hidden benefits after all - iPhone technologies are now coming to Snow
Leopard, quicker and in a more mature state. Cute.

In article <>,
Sandstone <> wrote:

> <snip>
>
> It would seem that delaying Leopard to get the iPhone out the door had
> hidden benefits after all - iPhone technologies are now coming to Snow
> Leopard, quicker and in a more mature state. Cute.

WTF did you snip?

--
Tom Stiller

PGP fingerprint = 5108 DDB2 9761 EDE5 E7E3 7BDA 71ED 6496 99C0 C7CF

In article <michelle->,
Michelle Steiner <> wrote:

> Apple is marketing the idea of there being ³no new features² for Snow
> Leopard and instead promising an overall improvement in how Mac OS X
> works under the hood, thanks to a diligent code optimization and
> refactoring cycle discussed in the previous article. [...]

As a geek, I appreciate all of that neat under the hood stuff.
As a paying customer, I don't know if I'd be willing to pay 129 euros
(or whichever currency one might have to take out of a wallet) for under
the hood improvements.

Now how many geeks are there compared to paying customers? Does Apple
really think that the average John Doe will shell that money out for
ZFS, LLVM-GCC, OpenCL and so on? Most people only come across the
concept of a filesystem when they buy an external hard drive, format it
on the Mac, move it to a Windows machine and find out it doesn't work.
They reformat it FAT32 and they forget about it.

When I say "compiler" to someone who's not into programming, they think
of some guy who fills forms in!
--
Jollino
Il mio primo fotolibro: http://www.blurb.com/bookstore/detail/250306
Cerchi spazio web? Io mi trovo bene con Servage:
http://www.servage.net/?coupon=cust24439

In article <jollino->,
Jollino <> wrote:

> In article <michelle->,
> Michelle Steiner <> wrote:
>
> > Apple is marketing the idea of there being ³no new features² for Snow
> > Leopard and instead promising an overall improvement in how Mac OS X
> > works under the hood, thanks to a diligent code optimization and
> > refactoring cycle discussed in the previous article. [...]
>
> As a geek, I appreciate all of that neat under the hood stuff.
> As a paying customer, I don't know if I'd be willing to pay 129 euros
> (or whichever currency one might have to take out of a wallet) for under
> the hood improvements.

I've noticed several references to the $129 (or euros) figure in other
posts, but nowhere have I seen any indication the "no new features"
SnowLeopard will be sold at that price.
>
> Now how many geeks are there compared to paying customers? Does Apple
> really think that the average John Doe will shell that money out for
> ZFS, LLVM-GCC, OpenCL and so on? Most people only come across the
> concept of a filesystem when they buy an external hard drive, format it
> on the Mac, move it to a Windows machine and find out it doesn't work.
> They reformat it FAT32 and they forget about it.
>
> When I say "compiler" to someone who's not into programming, they think
> of some guy who fills forms in!

--
Tom Stiller

PGP fingerprint = 5108 DDB2 9761 EDE5 E7E3 7BDA 71ED 6496 99C0 C7CF

On 2008-06-23 20:43:14 -0400, Tom Stiller <> said:

> In article <jollino->,
> Jollino <> wrote:
>
>> In article <michelle->,
>> Michelle Steiner <> wrote:
>>
>>> Apple is marketing the idea of there being ³no new features² for Snow
>>> Leopard and instead promising an overall improvement in how Mac OS X
>>> works under the hood, thanks to a diligent code optimization and
>>> refactoring cycle discussed in the previous article. [...]
>>
>> As a geek, I appreciate all of that neat under the hood stuff.
>> As a paying customer, I don't know if I'd be willing to pay 129 euros
>> (or whichever currency one might have to take out of a wallet) for under
>> the hood improvements.
>
> I've noticed several references to the $129 (or euros) figure in other
> posts, but nowhere have I seen any indication the "no new features"
> SnowLeopard will be sold at that price.

I've noticed that too.

It seems to me that many people are simply looking at past releases and
assuming it'll cost $129. If the history of Mac OS X (and indeed Mac
OS) is any indication, Snow Leopard (being a performance/stability
release, rather than a feature release) will be available at a reduced
price, if not free.

In article <jollyroger->,
Jolly Roger <> wrote:

> > It seems to me that many people are simply looking at past releases
> > and assuming it'll cost $129. If the history of Mac OS X (and
> > indeed Mac OS) is any indication, Snow Leopard (being a
> > performance/stability release, rather than a feature release) will
> > be available at a reduced price, if not free.
>
> I can't see that happening. Apple will need to recover the money they
> spend developing the next release.

10.1 was free. I'm sure that Snow Leopard won't be free, but I'm
equally sure that it won't be $129 unless there's more to it than what
Jobs has let on so far.

--
Support the troops: Bring them home ASAP.

In article <michelle->,
Michelle Steiner <> wrote:

> 10.1 was free. I'm sure that Snow Leopard won't be free, but I'm
> equally sure that it won't be $129 unless there's more to it than what
> Jobs has let on so far.

10.1 was an update to what was basically a preview. I don't know if 10.0
had any price tag (it was preinstalled when I bought my first iMac), but
it was certainly barely usable. If they made people pay for 10.1,
adoption of OS X might have been much slower.

My reference to the magic number 129 has no proof, but that's the price
of all versions -- correct me if I'm wrong.

I really think that there will be at least ONE feature that will make
people drool and want it. Even if it were free, many people (think
professionals who are often scared of messing a perfectly working set
up) might not upgrade.
Or, more likely, we have been spoiled like hell with Tiger and Leopard's
previews with the hundreds of upcoming features and all of that. We
tasted blood and we want more (more, more, more).
--
Jollino
Il mio primo fotolibro: http://www.blurb.com/bookstore/detail/250306
Cerchi spazio web? Io mi trovo bene con Servage:
http://www.servage.net/?coupon=cust24439

In article <jollino->,
Jollino <> wrote:

> 10.1 was an update to what was basically a preview. I don't know if
> 10.0 had any price tag (it was preinstalled when I bought my first
> iMac),

10.0 cost $129, but if you had previously bought the public beta (for
$29.95) and still had the proof of purchase coupon, it cost $99.

> My reference to the magic number 129 has no proof, but that's the
> price of all versions -- correct me if I'm wrong.

Yes, that's the price of all versions, but as I said, right now, the
information available for 10.6 doesn't warrant that high of a price.

> I really think that there will be at least ONE feature that will make
> people drool and want it.

That's what I said; unless there's more to it than what we know now,
it's not going to be $129.

--
Support the troops: Bring them home ASAP.

On Tue, 24 Jun 2008 08:02:41 -0500, Michelle Steiner wrote
(in article <michelle->):

[continuing in the speculation as to the price of Snow Leopard]

> That's what I said; unless there's more to it than what we know now,
> it's not going to be $129.

I find myself agreeing with Michelle in that I don't expect Snow Leopard to
cost $129. The very name Snow Leopard, to me, suggests an upgrade to Leopard
and not a version with, as with the other "cats", an abundance of new, at
least on the surface, features.


--
James Leo Ryan ..... Austin, Texas .....