Cocoa Finder And Image Boot In Snow Leopard

Radical changes are being made to Apple’s operating system that will bring it up to speed with current tech but also future proof the next generation OS for increasing Hardware improvements. Besides drifting rumors of Snow Leopard finally bringing the axe to PowerPC based Macs and migrating to an Intel only architecture, speculation has been nill. However, AppleInsider says that developers who have already seen the newest seed report a revamped Finder completely rewritten in Apple’s Objective-C’s coding language, Cocoa.

Since the transition to OS X from Mac OS 9 began, Apple has been busy working with developers to port their code from the aging Carbon API to a more robust programming language based on Objective-C. The end result was many new Apps taking advantage of Cocoa under OS X and dumping the aging coding language that was heavily utilized in Mac OS 8 and 9. Ironically however, Apple chose to keep some aspects of OS X running as Carbon code such as the Finder.

Snow Leopard aims to bring the Finder up to speed through a rewrite utilizing Cocoa. This is amongst the other speed tweaks and Application size decreases planed for the new Operating System. Another reason for the move is lack of support for 64 bit binaries in Carbon which have taken a performance toll on Applications that still rely on it such as Adobe’s products, most prominently Photoshop.

Another new feature coming to Snow Leopard is one System Admins should be well familiar with already: Image Boot. While already available through OS X’s NetBoot function, Image Boot utilizes the same technology but allows for a greater plethora of boot sources and does not need to be restricted to a local server. Any Firewire, Ethernet, and theoretically USB connected drive can be an Image Boot Source. This new feature will allow a Mac to boot from a Disk Image of an OS which should streamline Application environment testing and provide a backup booting method from an external Disk should something go wrong with the main partition or multiple versions of an Operating System have to be tested for compatibility.

In addition, Apple is further refining Microsoft Exchange support through iCal, Mail and Address Book bringing automatic configuration for accounts that support it.

Via: MacNN