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While PC users sweat, complain and ponder which over-priced version of Windows 7 they’ll be forced into buying to fix everything wrong with Vista, most Mac users are likely licking their chops at what Snow Leopard will bring, and how little it will cost.

You’ve heard it’s cheaper, faster and even more stable than ever before. Though Apple has stated that, beyond a few high-profile features like a new version of Quicktime, Snow Leopard is more of a maintenance upgrade for Leopard users, rather than the feature-packed blockbuster we’re normally used to with a full version number upgrade. You might call Snow Leopard a comprehensive tune-up.

As is almost always the case with Apple, though, it’s those little tune-ups to Mac OS X that can make all the difference in your daily computing experience. If you happened upon the Snow Leopard Enhancements and Refinements page on Apple’s Web site, you no doubt found at least a handful of things that brings a smile to your face.

Sure, I’m looking forward to a speedier, fully-Cocoa Finder, a fancy new version of Quicktime, and a faster, much smaller OS X installation just as much as the next guy. But of much more interest to me are all of the minor tweaks that will make more of an impact in my daily routine.

Gamma Update

For starters, and one thing near and dear to my heart; Apple has chosen to change the default Gamma from 1.8 to 2.2. For many users the benefit may not be obvious. If you’ve ever noticed photos and graphics on the Web that appear much lighter or washed out than the ones you have on your Mac, it’s because Windows, the Internet, and most television content standardized on Gamma 2.2 long ago. With Snow Leopard, Mac users will enjoy more consistent color across platforms by default.

Finer Finder

iStat calendar menu feature

The Finder’s menu bar clock will soon show the date alongside the time. You can do this now with a finicky hack, but it’ll be handy to turn it on and off with the click of a button. One thing I wish Apple would add here is the ability to display a small calendar with clickable dates that launch iCal without using any third-party utilities, such as iStat. Baby steps, I guess.

Another minor Finder annoyance are the window sidebar headers: Search For, Devices and Places. They can be turned off in Snow Leopard. I always found them to be uselessly taking up space, since I don’t use the search feature, and rarely require Devices and Places. This leaves room for three more folder shortcuts in my sidebar without resizing the window. Adjusting the size of icons via a small slider in every Finder window, saving a trip to the View options window, will be a small, but welcome addition as well.

Apps and Utilities

iChat will see numerous improvements under Snow Leopard such as a lower bandwidth requirement, as will Preview, which will offer improved image scaling and an annotation toolbar. Preview is one of those apps that most users overlook. But if you take the time to investigate, you’ll find it to be quite a powerful and useful little app. For many consumer users, there’s no need to download Acrobat Reader because Preview actually offers more features.

File sharing via Airport Express will be improved for local network users. If you have a Mac acting as a file server over an Airport network, it will continue to share those files, even if the host Mac goes into sleep mode. And now your Airport strength meter will display the signal strength of all available networks before you connect to them. Nice!

Internet Improvements

Safari isn’t the only Internet app Apple has been working on. Mail and iCal have received some much-welcomed improvements, too. Mail’s ability to reorder mailboxes in the sidebar is enough to quench my thirst alone, but I won’t complain about the speedier display of messages, and improved HTML mail composition thrown-in for good measure. iCal will also make it easier to set up your Gmail or Yahoo calendars, and being forced to open a new inspector window for each task will be a thing of the past. While business users will surely love Microsoft Exchange support, most-everyone else could care less; these modest changes will give everyone something to feel warm and fuzzy about.

In Conclusion

While none of these features are game-changing, they’re all extremely useful. In my eyes, they’re much more sexy than Cocoa Finder, OpenCL, Grand Central Dispatch, smaller installation size, and the other big-ticket items. These little features are the ones I’ll interact with on a daily basis, along with faster start-up and shut-down times. I liken it to the cup-holder locations in a new car — it doesn’t mean a lot on its own, but if done poorly can certainly sway your buying decision whether you realize it or not.

For a $29 upgrade price for Leopard users ($169 for non-Leopard users), you’re getting some stunning under-the-hood improvements, and some pretty darn nice refinements that may not be typical Apple front-page news, but are incredibly useful. Finely tuned indeed.

In between new notebooks and fawning over the iPhone, Bertrand Serlet got up on stage to talk about Snow Leopard, the next release of Mac OS X. Apple took a few digs at Microsoft for stumbling with Windows Vista and trying to play catch-up with Windows 7. The picture that our friends in Cupertino are trying to paint is that Leopard has been a huge success and that Snow Leopard will be even better. After listening to the keynote, I find that I have to agree. I am over the moon about the changes coming to the Mac OS.

Revisions

Apple is justifiably proud of Mac OS X and the excellent combination of power and usability in Leopard. Serlet was quick to point out that in this release, Apple is hoping to build on their success with Leopard and add refinements that will make it even better. There are so many refinements that I will not attempt to list them all here, but will instead refer you to Apple’s page about the refinements in Snow Leopard (be sure to click on the “even more refinements” link at the bottom of the page to get even more details).

Of all these improvements, I am most excited about three of them: Finder, Speed, and Disk Eject.

The new Finder is completely rewritten as a Cocoa native application, built with 64-bit code and Grand Central Dispatch support. This should make the Finder more responsive because it will execute tasks faster and also be able to take advantage of the multiprocessing prowess of Grand Central Dispatch to offload background tasks efficiently to idle processors. Apple says that some operations like icon preview refreshes are up to 1.7x faster. This new Finder is going to breath new life into your computer by making it more responsive.

There are other speed improvements all over Snow Leopard. Time Machine backups are faster. Waking up from sleep, shutting down, and joining a wireless network are all faster. Even installing Mac OS X is faster with Snow Leopard. Just like Maverick and Goose, I feel the need… the need for speed. And Snow Leopard delivers.

And lastly, I am thrilled about the more reliable disk ejection in Snow Leopard. 10.6 will reduce the frequency with which the OS will prevent you from ejecting a disk, and more importantly, it will tell you which application is causing the OS to keep the disk mounted. It’s a small thing, but I cannot tell you how many times I have had to reboot rather than figure out what is holding on to my external hard drive.

New Technologies

Snow Leopard is fully 64-bit, along with a number of the included applications. Moving from 32-bits to 64 means that the addressable memory space is increased to almost 16 billion GB of RAM. This ungodly number means that you do not have to worry about software limiting the amount of RAM that can be used. In the short term, we still have to live with the hardware limits of Macintosh computers, but these will improve over time (as the new MacBook Pro’s demonstrate with an increase to 8GB RAM). And 64-bit goodness also means that some instructions will actually get processed faster on the 64-bit CPU’s that all Macs are built on. More interesting than the RAM limits of incremental performance gains, the new 64-bit memory allocation routines in Snow Leopard are also more secure and less prone to injection attacks.

Grand Central Dispatch (mentioned above as being supported in the new Finder) is a game-changing technology that works to efficiently distribute computing tasks among all available processors. For the last few years, increases in CPU clock speeds have been downplayed compared to increasing the number of cores available on a single chip.

Every Mac now has at least two cores, and some Mac Pros have 16. In the next year or so clock speeds will continue to hang in the 2.2-3.0GHz region, but the standard number of cores should increase to four and Mac Pros may go beyond 16. GCD is a software layer that developers can take advantage of in their applications to help schedule tasks across all these cores. If Snow Leopard can do this better than Windows 7, and developers choose to utilize the technology, then this could open a serious performance gap between the Mac platform and PC’s running the exact same hardware.

OpenCL is another new technology meant to better harness the raw hardware power that is already in your Mac. Today’s video cards or graphics processing units (GPUs) are capable of performing calculations for 3D graphics and modeling at an amazing pace. OpenCL is an attempt to let developers harness that power for use in other applications beyond drawing thousands of polygons on screen with fancy textures. Again, if developers take advantage of OpenCL, then Mac applications may run noticeably faster on Snow Leopard than on the same hardware running Leopard or Windows.

Exchange Support

The third piece of today’s announcement is the inclusion of Exchange support directly in Mac applications like Mail, iCal, and Address Book. Apple licensed the Exchange technology for the iPhone, which helped that device make inroads into corporate IT environments. Now that same technology is being baked into Mac OS X so that Mac users can integrate more easily with their corporate infrastructure.

Setup was demonstrated to be quick and easy using auto-discovery of Exchange services and applications were then immediately aware of your accounts and resources on Exchange. You can continue to drag-and-drop people onto iCal calendars to make appointments and so on. Many people will appreciate that you can blend your personal and business information in one interface by seeing both personal calendars and Exchange calendars or personal contacts in Address Book alongside the Global Address List from Exchange.

In my opinion, the new Exchange support is going to do more for bringing the Mac OS into the workplace than Intel processors, Active Directory integration, virtualization, and the iPhone have accomplished in the last several years.

Pricing & Availability

Snow Leopard will be available in September for $129. Special pricing is available to current Leopard users who can buy the new release for the very modest price of $29 for a single user or $49 for a family pack. If you buy a new Mac with Leopard today, you will be eligible for the Snow Leopard Up-To-Date program, which is only $9.95.

With this sort of pricing, I don’t see any reason not to upgrade to Snow Leopard. I’ll be waiting in line myself.

A lot of this will not be news to those of you who’ve either experienced the iPhone OS 3.0 beta first-hand, or who’ve read about it here on TheAppleBlog or elsewhere, but the official announcement of what features will be coming via the final release version of 3.0 (dropping June 17) came today via the WWDC keynote address, so here’s a quick recap and breakdown, in case you’ve forgotten or have been hiding your head in the sand. We’ll also look at the 3G S-only features that are coming with the new handset, which Apple is also releasing next week (June 19).

Cut/Copy/Paste

It’s here, it’s universal, it should work in all apps since it’s built right into the iPhone’s Cocoa Touch controls. This is big news for a lot of people who’ve been waiting for this ever since the release of the original iPhone two years ago, but BlackBerry users are probably snickering at all of us right now. All I know is, thank goodness I can finally text message complicated URLs instead of telling people what keyword to Google and what number link to click on in the results.

Shake to Undo

Maybe it’s the lack of a physical keyboard, but I’m always doing the wrong thing with my iPhone and iPod touch. There used to be no easy way to retrace my steps, but now all it takes is a little wrist action to set things right again. Command + Z is the way of the world, and I predict its presence in iPhone 3.0 will be much appreciated. Now, there’s the little matter of Redo. I humbly propose Spin to Redo. Or blow into the iPhone mic. Both would be very stupid-looking.

Landscape Everywhere

Portraits are nice, but sprawling landscapes are sometimes more pleasing to the eye. With 3.0, Apple has enabled landscape mode for all of its official apps, which is great for heavy Mail and Notes users. Maybe this will act as a cue to Twitter app devs?

MMS Available (Selectively)

Your iPhone is no longer preventing you from having MMS capabilities, though your service provider might. Twenty-nine of Apple’s telco partners will have full MMS support available for iPhone users when OS 3.0 goes live in a week, but some will be left out in the cold, including AT&T users, until a later (summer, in AT&T’s case) date. Here in Canada, we may be slaves to terrible three-year contracts, but at least we’ll have MMS — for a price.

Spotlight

Search your whole phone, not just parts of it. That means music, contacts, email, notes, the works. As someone who’s been using the beta since its release, I can say for sure that this is a great feature. Especially if you’re an app glutton or have a large address book/iTunes library. Just swipe right or double tap from the home screen to access it.

iTunes: Movie/TV Show/Audiobook/iTunes U Direct Downloads

Buy, download, and view all iTunes video content directly on your device, using Wi-Fi or 3G. Not only that, if you like to read with your ears, audiobooks are now also available directly from the iPhone, as is iTunes U content for those students out there. One step closer to cutting the cord. Now where’s that Bluetooth syncing?

Tethering (Also Selective)

Twenty-seven carriers are backing tethering via the iPhone, including Rogers in my homeland. Guess who’s not? I’ll give you a hint: It rhymes with “Haiti and Tea.” Not exactly clear on whether that situation is temporary or not.

HTML 5, HTTP Streaming A/V, Autofill, Javascript Improvements

Safari is getting a whole whack of improvements which should make the iPhone mobile browsing experience much smoother. HTML 5.0 standards support, 3X faster Javascript rendering, intelligent HTTP audio and video streaming that picks bitrate and data quality based on your connection speed, and autofill for forms and logins are all included in the 3.0 update.

Over 30 Languages Supported

Chinese, Hebrew, Arabic, Greek, Korean and Thai are among the new languages supported in 3.0, extending the iPhone’s international appeal.

Parental Controls

Just as suspected, you’ll be able to control iPhone content via a settings pane and age group ratings. Good for parents who are spoiling their kids with iPhones, but don’t want to go so far as to let them ogle bikini babes.

Find My Phone

A “30 Rock” clip featuring Tina Fey as Liz Lemon having lost her iPhone was used to demo the new Find My Phone feature, which has been an option in the beta, but didn’t actually do anything until now. It allows you to track the location of your phone via MobileMe’s web interface, and even send it a message with a phone number for a kind stranger to call if they’re feeling benevolent and want to return your device.

Remote Wipe

If you’re worried that the person who finds your lost phone might not be so benevolent, you can always initiate a remote wipe, which will erase all your data permanently. Nice security feature.

In-App Media Library Access

Get at your iTunes library from within games and other apps. The demo used Gameloft’s Asphalt 5, which now allows you to access your music and playlists via your in-game car’s radio. Pretty cool, and something a lot of games will probably end up taking advantage of. Much cheaper than licensing music for use.

Device Access

Hardware peripherals can now access iPhone software via the dock connector so that third-party companies can develop apps to accompany their iPhone and iPod touch accessories. The tech demo today involved a nifty science experiment, and guitars. Lots of cool stuff possible here, though I predict a lot of buggy stuff coming to market first. Tom Tom showed off a GPS augmentation dock that could be pretty neat with its turn-by-turn software.

Push Notification

Text, audio, and icon badging are all supported as forms of push notification in iPhone OS 3.0. Apple didn’t kid around with the tech demo for this at WWDC, which featured a medical app that can update a doctor in real time of a patient’s status. It rightly awed the crowd.

In-App Purchasing

Let the flood of DLC begin. Level packs, magazine subscriptions, book purchases, cute hats for your in-game avatars, anything you can imagine will be made available by someone. Can’t wait for fart noise add-on packs.

3-Megapixel Autofocus Still/Video Camera (3GS Only)

At least in the controlled environment of the keynote presentation, the new camera looks loads better than the existing 3G’s. Lots of neat “tap to focus” options, better saturation/exposure control, and video capture. Videos can also be instantly edited on the device, as many predicted. The implementation of video functions looks very slick. There is also developer API access to the still and video camera.

Voice Control (3G S Only)

I’m not entirely sure why this is limited to the 3G S, since the iPhone 3G has a mic and software, so it should be able to handle a little voice recognition. I guess it looks cool, though, especially with universal iPod commands (”Play my playlist” and “Play songs like this” to activate Genius) and audio track information just like the iPod Shuffle.

Nike+ Support (3G S Only)

It was supposed to happen, and it did. Not very surprising, but a nice addition. Definitely ups my interest.

Battery Life Improvements (3G S Only)

Nine hours on Wi-Fi, 30 hours audio playback, 10 hours video, 12 hours 2G talk, and five hours 3G. Again, Apple estimates, so likely exaggerated, but should beat the existing iPhone pretty handily. On a more muscular device, too.

Digital Compass (3G S Only)

Just as speculated, the magnetometer made it in. It allows Google Maps to know your orientation, among other things. Developer API access is also included.

It’s a long list, it’s a good list, it’s an incomplete list. iPhone OS 3.0 brings 100+ new features, many of which won’t be immediately apparent. These are the ones that will likely matter to you on a day-to-day basis, and that’s why they’re here. If there’s anything I’ve missed, feel free to comment below.