Apple Snow Leopard second build released, now with more Cocoa found

October 26, 2008

Apple released the second build of Snow Leopard to developers this week. There are many more features and changes in this one, but the one that grabbed me was the change from Carbon to Cocoa for Apple’s Finder. Finder has been the last Carbon hold out until now.

Why hang on to the old Carbon development environment standard so long? The theory is compatibility with OS 9 resources, but that is something that has seen little use in recent years. Cocoa as a development environment is much faster and more efficient, and allows for better use of the computer’s resources.

The nice thing about Cocoa is that it is the same environment that Apple’s OS X is written in. This leads to flawless or near flawless performance of applications written in Cocoa for the Mac OS. From Apple’s developer site regarding Cocoa: “The Cocoa frameworks are primarily written in Objective-C, and support both 32-bit and 64-bit applications as well as Objective-C 2.0′s garbage collection, although there are a few components written in other languages such as C for performance or compatibility reasons, such as Core Foundation.”

Other features added to the second Snow Leopard build include a supposedly simpler installation, HFS+ file system compression, Microsoft Exchange integration with Mail and iCal, next generation 64-bit kernel support and a slew of tools for developers to play with. Apple did caution that Shark (its developer testing tool) is not working well with the new 64-bit changes as yet.

Snow Leopard also uses Java SE6 for all Java based applications. In addition to this, it has made gamma setting changes to the way it processes color to make it closer to Windows PCs and televisions, a change I’m not too fond of. I’ve always preferred looking at colors on my Macs. It’s probably better overall to be standard but if the quality of the color has changed I admit I’ll be disappointed. Snow Leopard is expected to come out as OS 10.6 sometime in 2009.