Snow Leopard nears completion

Apple has told developers that the Snow Leopard beta released over the weekend contains the last changes that will be made in programming methodology before the release of the new operating system.

The final changes involve the application programming interface (API) to the new Grand Central software architecture that changes the way that developers interact with Macs having multiple processing cores. To users, the important thing about Apples announcement is that it means the development process for the widely anticipated operating system is nearly complete, signaling the release of Snow Leopard in the very near future.

On the pure technology front, the final changes in the API are important. Grand Central breaks up complex programming code flow into smaller pieces, which are then sent to separate CPU cores for more efficient use of processors, according to an Apple Insider story. The methodology is an alternative to the much more complicated procedures involved in multithreaded programming. The addition of Grand Central means that more developers will take better advantage of multiple CPU cores, making their applications more efficient. It also means that developers  wanting to use Grand Central functionality can now begin to finalize their applications.

For Mac users, it means that Apple has included all of the features that it is going to for the final version of Snow Leopard. In other words, Apple is in the home stretch on the Snow Leopard development project, working now on the stability and integration issues and a final code dust and sweep in the test phase. In a nutshell, Snow Leopard is nearing  release and we can all soon stop waiting and start upgrading.

The final release candidate will probably be introduced at the Apple developers conference in June. The release of the new OS version will likely follow that event by a month or so. There are a lot of cool new features, improvements, and enhancements in Snow Leopard, and the new OS version is eagerly awaited by users. It always seems like such a long time between new versions…

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