By Cory Elsmore    |    cory@fndtn.com

Apple’s Worldwide Developer’s Conference took place June 9-13th.  This is one of two events throughout the year where Apple generally unveils something that they hope will blow your socks off.  This time around the big news was Mac OS X Snow Leopard.

The big news with Snow Leopard is that Apple has announced that this time around they are not going to be adding user level features.  Every operating system Apple has released since the original Mac OS X has included huge amounts of new features, so this decision is a large departure from the standard Apple has set for itself.

Instead of new features, Snow Leopard is focusing on core software technologies.  The first, and most important of these in my opinion, is full Microsoft Exchange support built into the operating system.  This means that us Mac users can finally fit into an Exchange system, without running Microsoft Entourage.

Other core systems are also getting an overhaul.  Very little has been announced about these, but it has been mentioned that they way Mac OS X handles multiple processor machines is getting rebuilt.  This could lead to huge performance, as almost all Macs in the wild currently have more than one processor.

The Snow Leopard announcement is a very exciting one.  We should be seeing more performance out of our machines once it is released.  Steve Jobs said that Snow Leopard should be shipping in “about a year”.