With the lessons learned from coding for the iPhone’s operating system, Apple engineers are looking to cut a lot of the bulk out Snow Leopard (10.6), the next iteration of Mac OS X. Due out next year, the next version will take up a fraction (possibly 25 percent) of the hard drive space that Apple’s Leopard operating system takes up. It will be optimized to make use of multi-core processors and may more fully incorporate the multi-touch features of the iPhone. It’s very likely that, for the first time, a new operating system will actually drastically improve performance on existing machines. In essence, it is one heck of a maintenance release. Or is it?

What may, at first glance, not seem like a major feature upgrade could actually prove revolutionary. The future version of the Safari Internet browser will allow users to save any Web site as a web application. This, combined with other improvements, could make Snow Leopard Apple’s first major move into the realm of cloud computing, which is the assumed next stage of evolution for computers. With cloud computing, software is accessed from a Web page and your files are stored on your system, on the Internet or both.

In a way, users can already save Web apps by saving entire Web sites or portions of sites as web clips using Safari. Web clips are then launched as widgets, which are basically mini applications for things like clocks, calculators, translators and currency converters. The real revolution, however, would happen by allowing the user to download Web applications that can be launched from the dock just like any other program. Built with advanced coding languages that allow access to more of your system’s resources, true next-gen Web apps would run alongside your system-based programs and be just as powerful and usable with the added benefit of living partly on the Internet, which means they can be upgraded at any time without the user ever needing to install anything. And, best of all, a Web app allows you to have your data wherever you are. The days of thumb drives,CDs and emailing files to yourself could be no more. The perfect example is Google Docs. A competitor for Microsoft Office, Google Docs is accessed from a web browser. All of the documents, spreadsheets and presentations created using Docs are stored on one of Google’s servers somewhere. No matter what computer you’re at, Google Docs makes it a seamless process to access your files. For a long time the only drawback was that you had to be connected to the Internet to use Docs. Recently, however, offline access was made possible by installing the Google Gears plug-in, providing access to Google Docs whenever you want. The next time you connect to the Internet the documents will sync up with what’s on the server without you, the end user, even noticing.

It’s very clear that Apple thinks that such web applications have a strong future. Apple CEO Steve Jobs initially suggested that the only development allowed for the iPhone would be via web applications, a position he was later forced to abandon based on popular demand. One of the major announcements at WWDC a couple weeks ago was MobileMe, a replacement for Apple’s ailing .Mac web service. MobileMe pushes all mail, contacts and calendars into “the cloud” and gives you access to that information on any computer and device anywhere - you can use Apple’s bundled mail, photo, and calendar applications on a Macintosh or you can use Outlook on a PC. On public or shared computers, you can use powerful web applications Apple has developed that look and act exactly like their Mac counterparts but work in the browser. Most importantly for Apple, you can use your iPhone. If you make a change to a contact on your iPhone while you’re out and about, it updates your Mac at home, your PC at work, and the web applications in a matter of seconds. Make a change on your Mac, PC or the computer in your local public library and the iPhone in your pocket will already be updated to reflect the changes in the time it takes to pull it out of your pocket.

The world was scandalized when Apple released the original iMac sans floppy drive. The future Apple sees now is even more radical: a world without physical media like CDs, DVDs or even Blu-ray discs. That’s the reason why, while its competitors have brought out laptops with Blu-ray drives, Apple brought out a laptop with no drive at all: the envelope-thin MacBook Air. The Air even allows you to forgo a hard drive in favor of a lower-capacity flash memory system known as an SSD drive. SSD drives don’t suffer from damage caused by movement like hard drives do. With the lower capacity, space is at premium, and surely Snow Leopard’s rumored 4:1 reduction in install size will go a long way toward improving the situation.

Snow Leopard also introduces two new technologies for Mac software developers: OpenCL and Grand Central. End users will experience these as speed increases (skip the rest of this paragraph if you don’t want to hear a whole lot more technospeak). On a more technical level, OpenCL allows developers to use the computer’s graphics card to do mathematical calculations much faster than they can on the CPU. Grand Central will allow developers to easily take advantage of multipleCPUs , which are common in most new computers. This is a very big deal because it is incredibly difficult right now. For example, a normal program runs in sequence like a grade-school word problem: “if a equals b do something, or else if a does not equal b do something else.” But if a fourth grader can do that, a multi-core program would trouble a grad student: “if a equals b do something and while you’re doing it on processor two check if b equals c, and on processor four see if a equals d and check if processor three has finished dividing the square root of e plus f to the fourth power.” Grand Central allows developers to write the easy one-processor version of things and then helps them decide which strings of code can operate simultaneously. But Grand Central goes one step further. It knows which processes in all of your open programs can run at the same time and keeps them flowing in and out of your two, four, eight, or even sixteen processors like trains on parallel tracks at, well, Grand Central Station. In this way Apple can stay ahead of its competition in terms of raw computing power, even while using much of the same hardware as PC makers.

What you can expect to see as a result of this is a divergence in design philosophies. PC makers have lately been focusing on maxing out graphics cards rather than CPUs because it increases performance in Windows Vista. Meanwhile Apple has generally used mid-range graphics cards for its computers. In the future Apple will likely focus on putting as many processing cores as it can fit into its machines, as well as higher-end graphics cards to take advantage of OpenCL . For Apple, Snow Leopard may pay dividends for the company by creating a performance gap between Apple’s offerings and similarly-priced PCs.

So is Snow Leopard simply a maintenance release that optimizes years of code so it runs really effectively on future computers, or is it a trojan horse for a company-wide shift toward Web apps and cloud computing? My guess is both. By optimizing OS X so it’s lightning fast and lean, Apple cuts down on the amount of work it needs to do maintaining a separate version for the iPhone. One OS will be able to power anything from an iPod to the most expensive workstation money can buy, just by adding and removing user interface frameworks and device drivers. In this way Apple is positioning itself for the next 10 years of computer industry innovation.

Who knows, if Apple is able to pull off an efficient operating system that makes it easy to use next-generation Web apps, we may actually see a market which is perfect for theMacbook Air or the fabled Mac Tablet - a device which would conceivably be larger than the iPhone and uses the same multi-finger-based interface.

Gadget4Life Latest

• Last Week’s Top Posts
• Vendors Shipped 13% Less Mobiles in Q4 2008
• One of the problems with buying an open source company…
• Grapevine boy sets Guitar Hero world record
• 25 Random Things: New meme explained