Snow Leopard: Finder in Cocoa Exchange and ImageBoot
The last preview (build) Snow Leopard sent to developers reported some progress that many have been waiting for years. Snow Leopard is the next operating system from Apple, and this is a way of stopping the time the company adds more new features (this certainly remains to be seen) but form the basis of its system for modernize.
With the addition of technologies such as Grand Central, which allows splitting the workload between the different core processor, or OpenCL, which opens doors to developers GPU calculations for general (not just graphs) Snow Leopard should pave the way later versions of Mac OS X. However, it will be an opportunity for Apple also to get rid of the last components written in Carbon.
Carbon is an API provided when Mac OS X was released in its first draft in 2001. It was an easier transition to software designed for Mac OS 9. In addition, Apple Cocoa, designed specifically for Mac OS X and its new features. Over the years, all or nearly applications were written with Cocoa, but within Mac OS X itself, there are some unavoidable, particularly the Finder and iTunes.
However, the latest preview of Snow Leopard has a brand new Finder fully rewritten in Cocoa. Nobody knows anything for the moment any changes to the interface, but this change in size for the main access to data in Mac OS X could indeed benefit from technologies like Grand Central and OpenCL, such as creation thumbnails for images and videos.
It is not known yet if iTunes suffered the same treatment, but other new elements have emerged. Apart from the fact that Apple is working in full support of Microsoft Exchange within Snow Leopard (with Mail, Address Book and iCal), the firm added a first version of a technology called ImageBoot. The purpose of this technology is multiple, but is simply to store images on another partition or on an external hard drive, Mac OS X while offering a choice between all start the machine.
The user can create a series of partitions in which it will place several different installations of Mac OS X, including for testing purposes. In a corporate network for example, disk images using ordinary NetBoot can be stored locally, the user then has to make its choice at startup.
