As one might expect, the packaging features a snow leopard, staring out at the user with the same white hot intensity of, say, Steve Jobs in his Apple lair as he examines the latest prototype build of an Apple Tablet that may or may not exist.

There’s also the slogan, reading: “The world’s most advanced operating system. Perfectly optimised.”

You know what else would be perfect? If, in the inevitable “I’m a Mac” ad that comes out to market this OS, Hodgman wrestles a real snow leopard. That scene, sadly, is not represented on the Portuguese Mac OS X Snow Leopard packaging. There’s still hope for the U.S. release. [MacRumors]

The thesis flags more or less every cosmetic and UI change in Snow Leopard as a move towards touch (and by extension, tablet) friendliness: the new Expose removes the keyboard and mouse from the equation, and empowers the big-buttoned dock; Stacks are now much more useful, negating the need to dive into Finder for many tasks; Quicktime controls (and editing) are poke-able; the tech behind the new (and oddly touted) Asian character input support could be extended to more drawing capabilities; and Safari 4’s new Cover Flow integration is more useful as a touch interface than a traditional one.

I’ll add a few more to that: Finder’s new preview functions reduce clicks, and Snow Leopard’s general speediness and space-savings would suit the presumably scaled-back hardware of a tablet.

It’s miles from conclusive, and CNET’s certainty and enthusiasm are easy to mock, but I like this. Jesus sees Apple’s tablet as a bigger, more powerful iPod Touch, running some variant of iPhone OS—an solid theory, since you could argue that iPhone OS is Apple’s touch version of OS X—but I’ve previously fingered OS X as the device’s software, based on Apple patents that describe Snow Leopard-esque interface modifications to accommodate finger input. On top of that, OS X is already a decent touch OS—Cover Flow is everywhere, and the dock is a thumb-friendly natural.

And at minimum this story gives us one more website to commiserate with when Apple finally announces their plans to never, ever make a tablet. Thanks! [CNET]

There’s this Wi-Fi strength indicator, long overdue, in the dock.

And when a battery is close to end of life, the OS will report that, too. (To clarify, not only a dead battery, but one that will fail to hold its charge well.)

Automatic spelling correction in textedit.

Among other speed enhancements, boot and shut down twice as fast as in OS X Leopard.

Of course, these are really trivial next to things like multicore and GPU processing. But refined details are something I appreciate in an operating system.

[Macrumors, AppleInsider and Mac Life]

Apple’s offering a $US30 discount to MobileMe users on both OS X Leopard and Time Capsule. This makes us think that a 2TB Time Capsule is coming soon. Here’s why.

• Snow Leopard is due out soon, so Apple needs to clear out Leopard inventory via a $US30 discount
• 2TB hard drives just hit the market relatively recently, so NASes and other storage devices using 2TB are the next logical step
• ClubMac and MacMall both showed rendered box shots of a 2TB Time Capsule drive

So with the above points, it seems likely to conclude that Apple’s either phasing out the 500GB Time Capsule units in order to make room for the 2TB ones, or just want to reward the people who have been MobileMe customers for a while.

Here are its features:

MSI U100 MacBook Nano
Windows XP Pro + Mac OS X 10.5.5
Intel Atom N270 1.6GHz
2G DDRII
10″ WSVGA LED (1024×600)
320GB SATA
1kg
MMC/SD/MS 4
Windows XP Pro + Mac OSX Leopard

[Flickr]

What’s included?

General

* Includes recent Apple security updates.
* Addresses stability issues with video playback, processor core idling, and remote disc sharing for MacBook Air.
* Addresses an issue in which some Macs could unexpectedly power on at the same time each day.
* Resolves a stability issue in TextEdit that could be found when accessing the colour palette.
* Improves Spotlight indexing performance.
* Fixes an issue in which contacts might not sync properly with PalmOS-based devices.
* Improves iPhone sync reliability with iCal and Address Book.
* Includes improvements to Active Directory (see this article for more information).
* Improves Speech Dictionary.
* Fixes Kerberos authentication issues for Mac OS X 10.5 clients that connect to certain Samba servers, such as Mac OS X Server version 10.4.
* Includes extensive graphics enhancements.

Address Book

* Addresses stability issues that may occur when creating a Smart Group.
* Resolves a printing issue with address cards containing information that spans more than one page.

Disk Utility and Directory Utility

* Improves reliability when rebuilding a software mirror RAID volume in Disk Utility.
* Improves reliability of server status displayed in Directory Utility.

iCal

* Updates iCal to more accurately handle repeating events.
* Improves performance when choosing meeting attendees.
* Resolves an issue in which the “Refresh All” option may be dimmed (”grayed out”) in the contextual menu for certain calendars.
* Fixes issues with read-only calendars.
* Addresses an issue that prevents an invitee from moving an event to a different calendar.
* Resolves an issue with syncing published calendars.

Mail

* Addresses performance issues related to displaying IMAP messages.
* Resolves an issue with SMTP settings for AIM, Compuserve, Hanmail, Yahoo!, and Time Warner Road Runner email accounts.
* Addresses stability issues that may occur when dragging a file to the Mail icon in the Dock.
* Addresses an issue with the “Organized by Thread” view in which the date does not appear when the thread is collapsed.
* Resolves an issue in which RSS feeds could temporarily disappear from the sidebar.
* Improves Mail robustness when sending messages.
* Improves reliability when saving drafts that have attachments.

MobileMe

* Improves overall sync reliability.
* Improves Back to My Mac reliability.

Time Machine

* Improves Time Machine reliability with Time Capsule.
* Addresses performance issues that may affect initial and in-progress backups.
* Fixes an issue in which an incorrect alert message could appear stating that a backup volume does not have enough free space.
* Time Machine can now back up iPhone backups that are on your Mac, as well as other items in (~/Library/Application Support).