Apple’s snow leopard hides some interesting and new features under its hood. Not only it is faster than its predecessors, but also gives ample interfacing for third party developers to build their applications on the Mac OS X, 10.6 platform.

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.