Cupertino, California (Scicasts) - Apple has today released a developer preview of OS X Mountain Lion, the ninth major release of the company's operating system, which brings popular apps and features from the iPad to the Mac and accelerates the pace of OS X innovation.
Redwood Shores and Cupertino, CA (Scicasts) - Oracle and Apple announced the OpenJDK project for Mac OS X, where Apple will contribute most of the key components, tools and technology required for a Java SE 7 implementation on Mac OS X. According to the announcement, Apple's contribution will include a 32-bit and 64-bit HotSpot-based Java virtual machine, class libraries, a networking stack and the foundation for a new graphical client.
“We have delivered more than a thousand new features to OS X in just seven years and Snow Leopard lays the foundation for thousands more”, said Bertrand Serlet, Apple’s senior vice president of Software Engineering. “In our continued effort to deliver the best user experience, we hit the pause button on new features to focus on perfecting the world’s most advanced operating system”.
Snow Leopard delivers support for multi-core processors with a new technology code-named “Grand Central”, making it easy for developers to create programmes that take full advantage of the power of multi-core Macs. Snow Leopard further extends support for modern hardware with Open Computing Language (OpenCL), which lets any application tap into the vast gigaflops of GPU computing power previously available only to graphics applications. OpenCL is based on the C programming language and has been proposed as an open standard. Furthermore, Snow Leopard raises the software limit on system memory up to a theoretical 16TB of RAM.
Using media technology which Apple has pioneered in OS X iPhone, Snow Leopard introduces QuickTime X, which optimizes support for modern audio and video formats resulting in extremely efficient media playback. Snow Leopard also includes Safari with a much faster implementation of JavaScript, increasing performance by 53 percent, enhancing the user experience for Web 2.0 applications.
For the first time, OS X includes native support for Microsoft Exchange 2007 in OS X applications Mail, iCal and Address Book, making it easier to integrate Macs into organizations of any size. According to Apple's press release, Mac OS X Snow Leopard is scheduled to ship in about a year.
With the announcement of its Linux strategy in spring 2003, Novell has committed to becoming a leader in the commercial Linux space by acquiring two of the leading Linux companies in 2003, SUSE Linux and XimianÆ, and has pushed forward the development of its networking services for both Linux and NetWareÆ. As the first commercial release from Novell, SUSE Linux 9.1 is certainly a great step towards Linux maturity. It is quite evident that Novell has invested a great deal of its resources into the development of SUSE Linux 9.1, and the developers from SUSE have certainly delivered.