This year's Large Installation System Administration Conference (LISA) saw Apple's Director of Engineering of Unix Technologies, Jordan Hubbard, speak about the evolution of Mac OS X from large servers to embedded platforms. MacRumors points out to an interesting aspect within Hubbard's presentation slides – a more specific target for the release date of Apple's Mac OS X 10.6 (Snow Leopard).

Apple's 64-bit OS is expected to hit in the 1st Quarter of 2009, according to Hubbard. Apple was previously expected to release the new iteration of its OS in mid-2009.

When previewing Snow Leopard at this years WWDC, Bertrand Serlet, Apple’s senior vice president of Software Engineering stated: “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,” he said. “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,” Serlet explained.

Starting with Mac OS X 10.6 Build 10A190, Leopard now has a Finder completely re-written in Cocoa, marking this as the first time Apple's “explorer” has moved away from Carbon, since its debut in Mac OS X.

Almost all visible applications that ship Apple's Mac OS X have also been treated to the Cocoa object-oriented program environment. According to an older report by AppleInsider, the transition is expected to be finished by Snow Leopard's public release. Prior to the release of build 10A190, Snow Leopard had already been rumored to add a Finder re-written in Cocoa, while other Apple applications accompanying the new builds were also said to be wrapped in the advanced programming language.

According to the latest seed notes, Snow Leopard now contains additional support for Microsoft Exchange 2007 via Mail, iCal and Address Book. “While there is support for basic browsing, creation and editing of Microsoft Exchange data, much functionality and polish is still forthcoming, which may impede full Exchange use in this seed,” Apple said.