14 DAY TRIAL // The first Snow Leopard and Safari 4 images have surfaced. A bit late, given that Apple's WWDC '08 is well over, with seeds and all. Still, the screenshots are exciting, though not as exciting as some of you may expect.
Apfeltalk.de found at least one new feature within Snow Leopard's Safari 4. The new build is allegedly able to create desktop web applications! Much like iPhone owners are able to store and view web bookmarks, macnn notes, Safari 4 users will also be able to do this as it includes a pull-down menu called "Save as Web Application." According to the two publications, this will allow users to create desktop versions of web apps and place them in the Dock.
But, since Apfeltalk offers little information about this feature, it is yet unclear if these are simply web bookmarks, or actual applications that can be used offline such as Flicker or Photoshop Express. A saved item is then accessible through a "stripped-down" version of Safari which provides the user with immediate access to a particular site or web application.
As far as speed is concerned, although Safari 4 is touted as the fastest out there, thanks to SquirrelFish, Apfeltalk's tests showed little to no improvements. The test was carried out on an iMac and Safari 4 actually fell behind the currently available version of Apple's web browser in some situations.
While Apple's focus is on stability and performance with Snow Leopard, at least one new feature was present with this build - a new version of Address Book. It includes a feature called "Exchange Component," which, according to the previewers, "worked very well" at syncing contact information when logged on to a Microsoft Exchange server. This was pretty much every change they could see with Snow Leopard's Address Book so far.
The web site was also able to confirm that Apple has dropped support for PowerPC machines, as far as Snow Leopard is concerned. The new OS will, however, run on 32-bit Intel Macs, to the delight of early Intel Mac owners.
Another visible change was the reduction in size for Leopard's applications. Other than that, Snow Leopard simply appears to be in an "extremely early stage of development," Apfeltalk says.
