Snow leopard.....

It is clearly stated that an Intel-based Mac is required. If some were wondering if Snow Leopard will ever change something, Apple clearly demonstrate that one can conduct a massive evolution of an OS without affecting most of its interface. Leopard will be the last PPC-compatible OS X version, and the huge market of PPC-based Macs will have to evolve to Intel-based models......

Documentation included with copies of Mac OS X 10.6 Snow Leopard distributed during Apple's developer conference this week confirms that the next-generation operating system does not presently support Macs with PowerPC processors.

LogicielMac.com has published a screen capture of the PDF-based requirements document included on the Snow Leopard disc that provides a rundown of the system's requirements.

The documentation states that in order to install Snow Leopard, developers must have a Mac computer with "an Intel processor" and at least 512MB of RAM, though additional memory is recommended for development purposes.

Apple on Monday confirmed that 10.6 Snow Leopard would be the next major incarnation of Mac OS X, with little details revealed, but individuals who obtained a developer's preview of the OS noted that it requires an Intel processor, confirming earlier suspicions. LogicielMac reveals that while still over a year away from store shelves, its current incarnation states that it requires 9GB of disk space – 12GB for developer tools – 512MB of RAM, and an internal, external, or shared DVD drive.

The original rumours concerning Mac OS X 10.6 Snow Leopard stated that it would be available only for 64bit Intel processors, leaving PowerPC G4, G5, and early Intel Macs out in the blue. While Steve Jobs' keynote and the preview pages at Apple.com did not speak of any hardware cut-offs, Gizmodo got their hands on a hardware requirements document for the Developer Preview release of Snow Leopard, and it contains bad news for PowerPC users......

The great Mental Floss blog actually did the research on something that occurred to me as soon as Steve said "Snow Leopard" during the keynote -- naming an OS after a cat "sometimes known as the ounce" might not be the best idea.

File this stuff in the "didja know" column: snow leopards aren't actually leopards - they're actually closer in family to cheetahs, which means that the new OS might be a little closer to Aqua than we're all comfortable with. Also, they're pretty timid - not only can they not roar (so new audio features in the OS are out), they're known to hide behind their fuzzy tails. We'll put it this way: you wouldn't exactly want to call your football team The Snow Leopards, so we're not quite sure why Steve decided to use the moniker.

Finally, the weirdest tie here is that the snow leopard as a symbol is already taken - by the Girl Scouts of Kyrgyzstan.....

One of the announcements that was not discussed during Steve Jobs's Worldwide Developers Conference (WWDC) keynote address on Monday was the forthcoming release of Snow Leopard, a maintenance update to Mac OS X scheduled for release next year.

Developers welcomed the news of Snow Leopard for a variety of reasons. Some want some time to focus on writing iPhone software and not have to worry about any new Application Programming Interfaces (APIs) that Apple may release with a major operating system update.

Other developers were happy that it will open the door for Apple to fix some bugs in the existing APIs, which will make it easier for developers to write applications for the Mac. Of course, the time also gives developers a chance to clean out any existing bugs in their own code.

Snow Leopard... will of course be available as a Server version. In addition to the new technologies already described today, among them Open CL and Grand Central, Snow Leopard Server will feature some specific services which look very promising:

- iCal Server 2....

- Podcast Producer 2.....

- Mail server has also been updated, improved.....

- Address Book Server: based on a new format named CardDAV...

- ZFS: The new feature, already announced with Leopard, then postponed and partially implemented (in read mode only), will be fully available in Mac O X 10.6 Snow Leopard Server....

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