Apple Highlights Faster, Smarter $29 Snow Leopard, New Safari 4 Browser

According to Apple, Snow Leopard is about three things: refinements, new technologies, and Exchange. Here’s a quick overview of what’s new. The best part may be the price; it will be available this Sept for only $29

Apple has rewritten Finder to be more efficient. New installation now leaves 6GB more disk space. Snow Leopard preview performance is also much faster. Now supports ability to draw Chinese characters. Mail performance is faster.

The latest version of Safari is 4. It has new features like Top Sites that shows you your favorites. It’s shipping today for Leopard, Tiger, and Windows. Apple claims unsurpassed speeds of 7.8X the performance of IE8. Safari 4 will be embedded in Snow Leopard. If your plug-in crashes in Snow Leopard more of your windows will remain intact.

There will be an all new QuickTime player, known as QuickTime X in Leopard that uses hardware acceleration and has a new HTTP streaming feature.

There’s also a new magnification control in Finder that lets you step through documents in this mode and you can even play videos in this mode and zoom in. Dock expose lets you step back and see windows but now you can organize by application (like mail, or the browser). You can easily move content across windows. For example, you can drag and drop a video into a new e-mail message.

Safari 4 is claimed to be the fastest browser on any platform. A Google Maps demo we saw was very fast but we’d like to see how fast it is on new Macs vs. Windows machines. The browser provides a panoramic view of all your Top Sites. Even tracks changes since you last visited. Full history search gives you a CoverFlow view of your browser history. You can also get full Spotlight search of these pages that you’ve visited. Pretty cool stuff.

QuickTime X is re-engineered and optimized for video. Playback controls are overlaid on top of video and fade away. QuickTime now has ability to trim and share your video, providing a visual timeline of your footage. Looks very smooth and easy. Maybe you don’t need iMovie. Can share via MobileMe, YouTube.

Apple then moved on to new technology support inside Snow Leopard. With 64-bit support, your amount of memory support is almost limitless. Built in support for multicore uses more threads. When mail is idle, for example, you get a lot more performance back then vs. when its active.

OpenCL graphics optimizes performance and is an open standard and Apple wants to play up graphics in areas beyond games. They want to give Apple’s developers a competitive edge.

Now moving onto Exchange support and how Macs are good for businesses. Exchange is getting built into Mail, Calendar, and Address Book. Onto a demo. You can view Office docs even if you don’t have Office. Integrated view of Exchange and personal calendars. Can search global address list. If you want to set up a meeting all you need to do is drag a group of contacts into a timeslot. Smart. You can ask iCal to find next available time if other people in your group are busy.