Apple is set to release the newest addition to the OS X family, Snow Leopard, sometime this year. However, the slew of interface tweaks and cool new additions that have made OS X such a hot seller will be eschewed for features that will make your Mac a much faster system. Snow Leopard will be that plus a little more. Here's Obsessable's follow up to part 1 on the ways that Snow Leopard will change your Mac as we take a look at 3 more.

QuickTime X

QuickTime X will be the biggest overhaul to QuickTime since its inception 17 years ago. This release will add a wider support for media codecs and much more efficient playback. This will ensure QuickTime is your default media playback app as other video and audio formats that weren't supported will then be playable in QuickTime X without the need for additional apps or plugins.

Why it matters: When Apple ported the desktop version of OS X to the iPhone, it included one very important component to enable media playback: QuickTime. This of course makes one of the major selling points of the iPhone, the iPod app, work so well. But what separates the mobile version of QuickTime from its desktop counterpart is the expanded support for more commonly used media codecs and more efficient media playback.

The support for more widely used codecs will play a major part in Apple revamping Quicktime which seems to have been a major theme since development on Snow Leopard started. What this ultimately means is Quicktime will use fewer resources when playing. Notebook users could see an increase in battery life and Windows users could finally stop complaining about how sluggishly Quicktime runs under XP or Vista. You will also finally be able to stop hunting for obscure plugins to play media encoded in rarely used formats.

Multi-touch

The iPhone first pioneered the widespread use of multi-touch gestures or using multiple fingers to manipulate on screen objects such as photos or web pages. Snow Leopard will extend that experience outside of the iPhone and the few applications into which Apple has baked the functionality by allowing developers access to the multi-touch tools so they can enjoy the same functionality.

Why it matters: Lately Apple has been shipping Macbooks with a multi-touch capable trackpad. This means that you can use more than one finger to control your Mac, ranging from the simple point and click to using three of four fingers for switching applications and virtual desktop spaces. However, the fun doesn't stop there since the potential for multi-touch trackpads has yet to be fully tapped.

The iPhone is a great example of this but don't expect a touchscreen Mac in a tablet form factor soon. Snow Leopard will merely make the touch pad of any MacBook capable of accepting multiple types of gestures which could be more productive than just dragging a cursor and clicking. While Apple has been mum on what types of extra gestures will be included with Snow Leopard, there is still time before it is made available later this year.

Location awareness

In addition to QuickTime X, Snow Leopard will also bring with it another component exclusive to the iPhone: Core Location. Since the iPhone started using cellular and Wi-Fi triangulation (plotting a location by calculating the distance from several base stations) inside Google Maps, Core Location has been responsible for making this happen. Making this feature available is cheap and painless since no additional hardware is needed besides an active network connection. While you won't be able to pinpoint your exact location, Snow Leopard will be able to give you a general area of where you may be.

Why it matters: GPS and other software alternatives have come a long way from being a luxury item to another selling point in phones and laptops. What this ultimately means is every gadget you own could become location aware and give a heads up to your whereabouts to social networks such as Facebook or data aggregation services like Google Maps.

This has yet to catch on because it made little sense for someone using his or her computer to know about their general location when they hardly move around. That said, smartphones helped propel the crazy trend of telling you and all your friends the exact location of where you might and extending this to a laptop now seems less far-fetched. If you want a glimpse of where this is going, look at all the location-aware apps available for the iPhone. With an active internet connection you could track down your stolen Mac, find areas of interest within a certain distance, and update your social network wherever you are.