This presentation introduces Apple's upcoming operating system, Mac OS X Snow Leopard, positioned as a refinement of the highly successful Leopard release. The speaker contrasts OS X's user-friendly features and modern architecture with what he describes as outdated technologies and complexities found in Windows Vista and the forthcoming Windows 7. Snow Leopard aims to be a "better Leopard" through widespread refinements across over 90% of its projects, powerful new core technologies, and support for Microsoft Exchange. Key refinements highlighted include a Cocoa rewrite of Finder, integration of Expose into the Dock, faster installation with significant disk space recovery, and improvements to Preview, Mail, and Chinese input methods. The talk also announces the immediate release of Safari 4, emphasizing its superior speed and standards compliance compared to competitors, and previews QuickTime 10 with hardware acceleration and new HTTP streaming capabilities.
Unveiling Mac OS X Snow Leopard: Refinements and New Technologies
0:00 Introduction by Bron, setting the stage for the Mac OS X presentation.
0:17 The speaker highlights the success of the current release, Leopard, calling it Apple's most successful software product ever, praised for features like Cover Flow, Quick Look, and Time Machine.
0:50 A strong contrast is drawn with Microsoft Windows, specifically criticizing Vista's failure and Windows 7's reliance on "same old technologies" like DLLs, the registry, disk defragmentation (which users shouldn't need to know about), and the complex User Account Control system.
2:02 The next major version of OS X is introduced, named "Snow Leopard," building directly upon the success of Leopard.
2:28 The goal for Snow Leopard is defined as building a "better Leopard," focusing on three key areas: lots of refinements across the board, powerful new technologies, and Exchange support.
2:56 The speaker details the widespread "refinements," stating that over 90% of the more than one thousand projects within OS X have been refined for Snow Leopard.
3:13 The Finder has been rewritten using Apple's modern Cocoa toolbox, promising future benefits and subtle "little touches" for the user.
3:49 Expose functionality is built directly into the Dock; users can click and hold an application icon to invoke Expose just for that app's windows.
4:29 Installation is made significantly faster (up to 45%) and notably recovers over 6 gigabytes of disk space compared to Leopard, thanks to technologies like file system compression.
5:07 The Preview application sees faster common operations and improved text selection in PDF files, using AI to infer the logical order of text.
5:48 Enhanced Chinese input methods allow users to draw characters with their trackpad, with the system predicting the most appropriate character and subsequent characters.
6:11 The Mail application is also improved with faster performance for common operations.
6:26 A new version of the web browser, Safari 4 (which had been in beta), is announced as shipping immediately for Leopard, Tiger, and Windows platforms.
7:00 Safari 4 boasts "unsurpassed speed" for HTML and JavaScript, significantly outperforming Internet Explorer 8 in benchmarks.
7:25 Safari 4 passes the Acid3 web standards test with 100% compliance, contrasted with IE8's 21%.
7:49 Safari 4 will be included in Snow Leopard, featuring exclusive enhancements.
8:00 A Snow Leopard-exclusive feature for Safari 4 is crash resistance, where problematic web plugins will only cause a single tab or rectangle to fail, leaving the rest of the browser intact.
8:43 Safari 4 on Snow Leopard benefits from even more speed when running in 64-bit mode.
9:05 An "all-new" QuickTime 10 is introduced for Snow Leopard, built on a modern stack, leveraging hardware acceleration, offering efficiency, and color correctness.
9:27 QuickTime 10 debuts HTTP streaming based on open standards (HTTP, AAC, H.264), working with standard web servers like Apache.
9:47 QuickTime 10 features a new user interface that puts content "center stage," with controls and the window title fading away during playback.
10:13 The speaker concludes by inviting Craig Federighi up to demonstrate some of the new features and touches in Snow Leopard.