Apple is giving Snow Leopard, the next version of OS X, a proper unveiling today at WWDC. Here are all the details, as we get them.

Snow Leopard, otherwise known as OS X 10.5.6, was first announced at last year's WWDC, and we got a pretty comprehensive rundown of what to expect: serious 64-bit support; the ability to really use multi-core processors with Grand Central; GPGPU processing (that's graphics card processing, in English) with OpenCL; and more under-the-hood upgrades. There've been plenty of rumors since then, but here's the official word:

What's new:


• They've rewritten the base code in finder, for additional speed

• There's a new dock, with 3D rendering. Expose has been built in.

• Installation is 45% faster

• General optimizations abound: opening JPEGs, for example, is twice as fast in preview. PDFs are 1.5x faster.

• Same goes for Mail: it's nearly twice as fast to launch, search and move messages.

• Installing Snow Leopard actually saves space: you'll get back 6GB of hard drive space over Leopard standard.

• Safari 4: Javascript performance, which is basically the core of the browser wars now, is up by 50%. Browsing as a whole is faster, and Safari 4 passes the Acid CSS test at 100%

• Quicktime 10: QT gets a new interface, looks like the iTunes video player. Hardware acceleration for video playback, too. You can do some quick video editing as well, like in older versions of Quicktime Pro. This, of course, is now standard.


• You can now play movies directly in Finder icons, and preview PDFs as well.