First Look: Mac OS X v10.6 Snow Leopard

Exchange Support

Apple went back to bashing Microsoft when it announced that Snow Leopard comes with native support for Microsoft Exchange in Mail, iCal and Address Book. Of course, you will need Microsoft Exchange Server 2007 to take advantage of this, but the set up is ludicrously easy.

Simply open up the Add Account dialogue in Mail and it will auto-fill your Exchange username from your own contact info in your Address Book. All you have to do is add your password and you're set up across all three applications - it's that simple.

Apple says that all of its technologies work with the Exchange server, meaning SpotLight and QuickLook should work seamlessly. What's more, iCal and Exchange calendars can work together, so if you're emailed a meeting request, you can either click accept in Mail or open it in iCal.


Even more impressive is the fact that if you want to schedule a group meeting with an Exchange group, you can simply drag that group from Address Book onto iCal. This will schedule the meeting and notify the participants, while also informing you of room and attendee availability, informing you of conflicts and suggesting you of alternatives should they arise.

Thoughts

Snow Leopard looks to build on a lot of the complaints users had about Leopard and there are some interesting new technologies hidden under the shiny front end. What's going to be interesting is to see how technologies such as full 64-bit support, Grand Central Dispatch and OpenCL actually impact the real world. If developers embrace them and more applications start to take advantage of these technologies, we could see some big changes in the way we think about certain tasks.

The advancements made in Exposé are forward looking and should help with productivity, while the Stacks improvements appear to solve the issues many had with Leopard's implementation. Safari also has some nifty improvements - our personal favourite is a small part of the Top Sites feature, which tells you whether there are updates on the sites since your last visit.

If Snow Leopard ends up being as good as the promise it showed during Apple's Worldwide Developer Conference keynote last week, it will be hard for existing Leopard owners to resist at its $29 price tag. That is, of course, providing you own an Intel-based Mac - if you don't, you'll be stuck with Leopard for the foreseeable future.

Whether it is going to be enough to bring another new influx of new Mac OS X users across from Windows is an entirely different proposition though and we believe it's going to depend on a number of factors. The most obvious will be Microsoft's pricing strategy for Windows 7 - if Microsoft doesn't offer a discount of some description for those upgrading from Vista, we could see another shift over to Mac OS X because the newly announced MacBook Pros do look sorely tempting. Taking that into account, it's easy to understand why Apple might be worried that its impressive growth over the past few years may not continue after Windows 7 launches.