New Build for Snow Leopard: closer to the launch date?

Apple released a new beta for Snow Leopard, the build 10A354 last Friday, and also told developers that the API for the Snow Leopard will be not only “frozen” but simplified in order to allow programmers to take full advantage of the Grand Central technology, created to better manage the multi-core Mac processors.

Blocking the API, which means no more modifications will be done, it’s a good step forward to developers: in that way, they will be certain that there won’t be any more modifications in the API with future build releases.

The build brings a few new things, such as the Chinese handwriting recognizion on the multi-touch track-pad Macs, bidirectional text support and a new compression format called MPEG-4 High Efficiency AAC (HE-AAC), an optimized codec for the audio/video streaming with low bitrate.

It seems then that the final version of Snow Leopard should be launched soon, and it’s likely that it’ll be presented at the next WWCD.