The myStarbucks application has a slew of features that include finding the nearest Starbucks store (one could also search using amenities), or to remember yours or your friend’s favorite flavor. The Starbucks card, on the other hand, lets people pay at Starbucks outlets using a barcode that appears/generates on their mobile screens.

With myStarbucks app, one could store the recipe of his/her favorite concoction and share it with others. For those who do not know what to drink, they can use the flavor selector to pick a coffee based on the different flavors available. One could also see the nutritional information for each concoction in the list.

The other app is the Starbucks card mobile app, which is now being tested at selected outlets in Cupertino, San Jose, Mountain View, and Sunnyvale in California and in Seattle. It works basically like a regular Starbucks card, wherein one buys credit to use it against orders in Starbucks outlets. That is, when someone wants to buy coffee, they just need to turn on the app, which in turn generates a barcode, if there is sufficient credit in the customer account. The store will then scan the barcode, before processing the order. Subsequently, the $ value of the selected drink will be subtracted from purchased credit.

So, for the common man, how faster is the new OS after the upgrade? Well, to get a measure of the new upgrade, a 9 GB email application that used to take around 15 seconds earlier will open now in Snow Leopard in less than three seconds. The new upgrade will also improve start up and shutdown times, alongside saving a whole bunch of disk space, to the tune of 7 GB, post installation. But there is a catch; in the new upgrade, Apple changed the way it calculates the space on hard disk (i.e. from base 2 to base 10), a move that will inflate the true hard-disk-space-saved figure.

The new upgrade comes with a whole set of bells and whistles. Apart from it being a 64-bit OS, Apple has also introduced a new technology called OpenCL that lets applications harness the number-crunching power of modern graphics cards. The application Grand Central Dispatch lets users create applications that could exploit the computational powers of current generation processors. The Finder, Mac’s IE, is user friendly and robust. Further, accessibility to visually impaired uses has improved, so are some other features in already existing applications. Also, since Apple had licensed Microsoft’s Exchange server technology, Mac users can now seamlessly integrate Mail, iCal and Address Book, the built in organizational tools on the Mac, with Microsoft mail system.

On the downside, there are some glitches reported in Parallels, the application that lets Mac users run Windows, plus few compatibility issues with other softwares. Otherwise, the snow leopard gives the much needed boost to Apple Mac OS against Windows.

The update that is only available in a DVD, and not for download, is priced $29 in US and £25 in the UK. For users of the old Intel-based Mac, running on Tiger OS, the new updates could set them back by $169 (£129 in the UK). The package comes packed with other applications among others iWork, the Apple’s version of Microsoft Office, Quicktime player, and an antivirus.

Even though the public response for the new offering from Apple was relatively muted, computer experts’ points out that the new OS is better tweaked and thinner in terms of disk space it takes post installation. The new version also comes better interfaced to accommodate softwares’ of third-party developers than its predecessor.