Mac OS X Snow Leopard
Mac OS X 10.6 (Snow Leopard; German Snow Leopard) is the seventh version of the operating system Mac OS X for the company Apple. It is the successor to Mac OS X 10.5 " Leopard" and was available since 28 August 2009. This operating system version mainly includes improvements to the existing technology, numerous detail changes in the work processes and changes to the GUI. An Apple computer with an Intel processor is a prerequisite for older Macs with PowerPC processors are no longer supported. The following version is Mac OS X 10.7 "Lion" and was published on 20 July 2011.
Innovations
Apart from increasing the efficiency and performance of Snow Leopard has the following features:
- Support for Microsoft Exchange Server 2007 in Mail, Address Book and iCal.
- 6 GB less memory usage on disk and less memory requirement.
- Support up to 16 terabytes of memory.
- Grand Central Dispatch allows the efficient use of multi-core processors by the threads are divided in activity by the operating system to the cores and released during inactivity. The programmer can be parallelized tasks in their applications better.
- QuickTime X is a new QuickTime Player. He was re- developed on the basis of new APIs and now offers wider format support, better performance and a new user interface that provides the content to the fore. The old QuickTime 7 with advanced editing features is still included on the installation DVD, but will not be installed automatically.
- Open Computing Language ( OpenCL ) facilitates developers to take advantage of the graphics processor. Newer graphics processors ( GPUs) often offer several Tera - FLOPS ( Floating Point Operations Per Second, floating point operations per second) and partly also a greater accuracy than CPUs. The graphics processor is usually underutilized, while the CPU has to bear the whole load. With OpenCL compute-intensive operations can be allocated to the GPU.
- Almost all programs are now run in 64- bit mode. The change had already begun in Mac OS X 10.3 ( "Panther" ) and almost complete Apple. Only iTunes is still based on carbon instead of Cocoa, and is therefore a pure 32bit application.
- The Finder has been rewritten in Objective- C based Cocoa. Among other things, the search was renewed and added a controller for the icon and preview size of the files displayed in each window.
- Prefixes for byte data will be used in their decimal meaning when they relate to file or permanent storage media sizes. So is an indicated file size of 1 MB for 1,000,000 bytes.
- Mail 4
- The headings contained in Mac OS X are provided with a few exceptions in the TTF, TTC and OTF formats instead of DFONT.
- There is a system-wide text editing. This example provides the possibility of automatic spelling correction during writing, typography automatic corrections (eg quotation marks "smart quotes" and dashes "smart dashes ") and the automatic recognition of dates and times "smart dates".
System
Apple 's Snow Leopard to the following conditions so that all applications work:
- Mac with Intel processor ( Yonah processors of generation, such as Core Solo, Core Duo, running in 32- bit mode)
- 1GB of RAM
- 5 GB of free hard disk space ( internal or external)
- DVD drive ( only for installation, internal or external)
- Some applications require an Internet connection
- Some applications require MobileMe
Note: The MacBook Air DVD drive is not a system requirement, as for the installation, the DVD drive of another Mac (Remote Disc ) or the models of the third generation of hardware ( MacBookAir3, 1, as of October 2010) of the supplied USB stick can be used.
Revision history
OpenGL
At the time of the first Developer Preview OpenGL 2.1 was specified. OpenGL 3.0 was released about a year before the release of Snow Leopard and was implemented despite several system updates only to 91 %.