With Snow Leopard set to be released in only a couple of days, what can be expected of the new “refined, not reinvented” version of OS X.

Apple’s CEO Steve Jobs first announced Snow Leopard at WWDC on June 8, 2008, with the first public demonstration being given at WWDC 2009 by Bertrand Serlet and Phil Schiller. After months of work it is now ready.

For Snow Leopard, Apple engineers had a single goal: to make a Snow Leopard a better Leopard. The aim was to refine, simplify, and speed up. Refinements (both big and small) have been made to a wide range of applications, processes, and interface elements. Here is a summary of what is new and refined!

1. The Finder has been completely rewritten in Cocoa to take advantage of all the modern technologies in Mac OS X.
2. Exposé is refined and more convenient. It’s now integrated in the Dock, so you can just click and hold an application icon in the Dock and all the windows for that application will unshuffle so you can quickly change to another one.
3. Time Machine is up to 80 percent faster and reduces the time it takes to complete your initial backup to Time Capsule.
4. Snow Leopard, wakes from sleep up to twice as quickly when you have screen locking enabled. And shutting down is up to 80 percent faster.
5. The upgrade process has been simplified, streamlined, and is up to 50 percent faster. Also Snow Leopard takes up less than half the disk space of the previous version, freeing about 7GB.
6. Snow Leopard includes QuickTime Player X with a new, clean, uncluttered design, a new trimming interface, and easy uploads to YouTube and MobileMe.
7. Mac OS X 10.6 can download the latest printer drivers available over the Internet. And it periodically checks to make sure it has the latest driver.
8. Automatic time zone setup. Snow Leopard locates known Wi-Fi hotspots to set the time zone automatically.
9. Easy PDF text selection. Mac OS X Snow Leopard applies sophisticated artificial intelligence algorithms so you can select text just in one column rather than across the whole page.
10. Snow Leopard improves the reliability of ejecting discs and external drives.
11. To see your files clearly in the Finder, you can use a slider to adjust the size of the icon previews up to 512 by 512 pixels, four times their maximum resolution in Leopard.
12. Snow Leopard takes the next big step by rewriting nearly all system applications in 64-bit code and by enabling the Mac to address massive amounts of memory. Nearly all system applications — including the Finder, Mail, Safari, iCal, and iChat — are now built with 64-bit code.
13. 10.6 includes OpenCL, a technology that makes it possible for developers to tap the vast gigaflops of computing power currently in the graphics processor and use it for any application.
14. Out of the box support for Microsoft Exchange. Snow Leopard comes with built-in support for the latest version of Microsoft Exchange Server.

QuickTime Player X