WWDC: Apple software seeds

Apple has released a plethora of in-development software to developers in the last 48-hours, various reports are explaining.

These include the first public build of newly-announced OS, Mac OS X 10.6 Snow Leopard, Safari 4 and a brand new version of iPhone Software 2.0.

WWDC attendees have been given a top secret physical disc containing an installation of Snow Leopard. The new OS hosts many new features under the hood, but, as Apple has explained, is primarily intended as a technology release from which to build the future of the OS. Speaking to the Wall Street Journal, Apple CEO Steve Jobs explained: "We’ve added over a thousand features to Mac OS X in the last five years. We’re going to hit the pause button on new features."

This may be a white lie, as the future OS will be stable enough, equipped with hardcore features including 64-bit support, support for the ZFS file system and the capacity to handle up to 16TB of memory to be of interest to top level enterprise users. And will ship with out-of-the-box support for Microsoft Exchange 2007. Apple has committed to ship the new system, "in about a year". Reportedly, a system preference lets users decide whether to initiate 64- or 32-bit support in their install of Snow Leopard.

Snow Leopard’s Grand Central technology is designed to facilitate developers who want to build applications that truly exploit multi-core processors. It also offers Open Computing Language (OpenCL), which lets any application use the graphics processor for non-graphics operations. Learn more about what is known about Snow Leopard here.

Safari 4 beta is available now (to developers) for Leopard, Tiger and Windows. Among other things, Safari 4 reportedly lets users save webpages as stand alone "web applications" which launch like desktop apps and is significantly faster than before.

Finally, the latest iPhone Software 2.0 build includes support for MobileMe and ushers in a few other tweaks designed to support the iPhone 3G and to meet the needs of sundry iPhone features as announced on Monday.