Original URL: http://www.theregister.co.uk/2009/02/05/snow_leopard_location_rumors/
Apple's Snow Leopard may know where you are
Smells like an iPhone
Posted in Hardware, 5th February 2009 21:29 GMT
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Apple's upcoming Snow Leopard operating system will include location awareness and multi-touch capabilities. Or so it seems.
Citing an anonymous source, AppleInsider [1] says that Snow Leopard, aka Mac OS X version 10.6, will include the CoreLocation framework [2] introduced last March in the iPhone 2.0 SDK.
The iPhone runs a slimmed-down version of OS X. CoreLocation is a rare framework that exists on the iPhone OS and not - yet - in the version of OS X that powers Apple's Macs.
CoreLocation works with the iPhone's built-in GPS, cell phone-tower triangulation, and Wi-Fi positioning data provided by Skyhook Wireless [3] to determine the device's location - a feature Apple defines as "geographical location technology [4]."
Location-awareness is the New Hotness in many an application, from Google's recently announced Latitude [5] service to the Places feature in Apple's new iPhoto '09 [6] and iPhone apps such as Loopt [7] and AroundMe [8].
Apple's current MacBook line doesn't include either GPS support or cell-phone circuitry, so it stands to reason that Snow Leopard's CoreLocation framework would rely on less-accurate Wi-Fi positioning.
That is, of course, until the next round of MacBooks appears, which may add GPS to their feature list, bringing them in line with Sony's Vaio P [9] netbooks and Fujitsu's LifeBook U820 [10] "mini-notebook."
While the rumored multi-touch capabilities will undoubtedly revive fervid dreams of the oft-imagined Tablet Mac - which has been coming "real soon now" since as long ago as 2002 [11] - multi-touch APIs would more realistically simply make available to developers access to the capabilities of the multi-touch trackpads in the current MacBook line.
Snow Leopard is rumored to be scheduled for release in the first quarter of this year [12]. Whether "geographical location technology" and multi-touch APIs will make it into Mac OS 10.6.0 or be delayed until until 10.6.1 or later, the anonymous sources didn't say. ®
Links
- http://www.appleinsider.com/articles/09/02/05/apples_snow_leopard_to_include_location_multi_touch_tools.html
- http://mobrule.wordpress.com/2008/03/11/iphone-20s-location-based-services-powered-by-the-new-corelocation-framework/
- http://www.skyhookwireless.com/
- http://www.apple.com/pr/library/2008/03/06iphone.html
- http://www.theregister.co.uk/2009/02/04/google_latitude/
- http://www.theregister.co.uk/2009/02/05/iphoto_09_review/
- http://www.crunchbase.com/company/loopt
- http://www.tweakersoft.com/mobile/aroundme.html
- http://www.sonystyle.com/webapp/wcs/stores/servlet/CategoryDisplay?catalogId=10551&storeId=10151&langId=-1&categoryId=8198552921644608896&parentCategoryId=16154&XID=A:2418665:10396361:SS-VP:CJ&ref=http://www.google.com/search?client=safari&rls=en-us&q=Sony+VAIO+P&ie=UTF-8&oe=UTF-8
- http://store.shopfujitsu.com/fpc/Ecommerce/buildseriesbean.do?series=U820
- http://www.theregister.co.uk/2009/01/01/jumbo_ipod/
- http://www.engadget.com/2008/11/19/apple-snow-leopard-release-in-q1-2009/