After wowing us with a little hardware, Apple turned its attention to Mac OS X, and its next release called “Snow Leopard.” As it has repeatedly said in the past, this version would be more of a tune up than anything, and Apple’s announcements at WWDC seemed to follow that pattern.

Best yet, you’ll get your hands on this in September for an upgrade price of $29. No, that’s not a misprint. Take that, Microsoft 😉

Installation of the OS will be 45 percent faster, and Apple claims you will regain up to 6GB of lost hard drive space following installation due to better compression

Over 90 percent of the code behind the OS has been rewritten to focus on speed. While the overall design of Finder has not changed much, the code behind it has.

Overall, the focus seems to be on speed, making applications faster. Preview is twice as fast, Mail 2.3 times faster. It seems the only real major change in UI is to QuickTime, which has been redesigned to focus on the content. Controls will fade away to leave just a video window, and sharing features will allow you to select portions of a video that you want to share with others.

In addition to all this, the company is also announcing Safari 4 for Mac and Windows, which is releasing in final form today. It would obviously be included as a standard feature in Snow Leopard.

 
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