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Snow Leopard

"Snow Leopard" is the name for the operating systemMac OS X 10.6 from Apple. The operating system was officially launched on August 28, 2009 and is only suitable for Apple Macintoshdesktop and notebook computers. A variant of the operating system is "Snow Leopard Server", which coordinates networked individual computers.

As the first operating system for the Apple MacIntosh, Snow Leopard fully supports 64-bit mode. The system cannot be run on older computers with PowerPC processors, which were purchased before the Apple Macintosh was completely converted to Intel processors by mid-2006. For computationally intensive tasks and multimedia applications, Snow Leopard has been optimized primarily for multicore systems, allowing computing to be distributed across multiple processor cores. Grand Central Dispatch (GCD) allows software developers to take maximum advantage of the power of multicore systems, which significantly increases the performance of their programs.

The graphics processing of Snow Leopard

User interface of Apple's Snow Leopard

User interface of Apple's Snow Leopard

With Snow Leopard, the Macintosh's graphics processing is based on OpenCL technology. This allows developers to visually enhance office applications with modeling techniques familiar from games and 3D applications, prepare media applications for more complex video and graphics files, or calculate even more accurate simulations.

Features and additional programs

Part of Snow Leopard's feature set is the search feature "Spotlight", which can be found on the far right of the top menu bar, represented as a magnifying glass in a blue circle. Since new and updated files are constantly indexed, Spotlight will find a search term in all files on a hard drive and attached storage devices. Another component of Snow Leopard is the "Time Machine" for backups, since Mac OS X 10.5 (Tiger) for the first time in the feature set of the operating system. Time Machine backs up all new and updated documents in their different versions. If necessary, a user can restore deleted or modified files that were on his hard drive or external storage to their original state.

Snow Leopard and its add-ons

Snow Leopard also includes the calendar program "iCal", an address book and a mail client. These programs are interlocked in such a way that the address book automatically makes its e-mail addresses available when writing an e-mail. To access email, calendar and addresses, Snow Leopard works with Microsoft's Exchange Server 2007, so instead of using Outlook, Apple's Mail, iCal and Address Book Macintosh applications take over.

The operating system also includes Apple's Safari 4 web browser and" QuickTime X". The new media player plays audio and video with higher quality and supports even more codecs. Quicktime, which has been available since 1991, now features core animation technology, hideable controls and larger thumbnails.

The Apple Macintosh's built-in digital camera can be used to record, trim, and transfer dubbed video to the iPhone, iPod, Apple TV, or iTunes for synchronization. QuickTime X is also suitable for publishing audio and video to Apple's MobileMeonline service or YouTube, with no codec formats or resolutions for the user to consider.

Informations:
Englisch: Snow Leopard
Updated at: 16.11.2013
#Words: 486
Links: name, open service (GPS, Galileo) (OS), Apple, operating system (OS), notebook
Translations: DE
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