Mac OS X users have been anxiously awaiting version 10.6, called Snow Leopard, for some time now. We've already given you a breakdown of the major changes and talked about how they're going to affect the user experience. As we get closer to its release, we now have some more juicy tidbits of what the OS will hold in store, as well as the best indication as to just when that release date will be.

The smart money now is on Apple releasing Snow Leopard the second week of June, with some really ambitious Nostradamuses pegging it down to specifically June 8th. The reasoning behind all this is pretty smart, looking at the Apple Worldwide Developers Conference. It would make perfect sense for Apple to feature Snow Leopard there, except no one knows for sure when the conference will be. A reporter at the Baltimore Sun thought to check out the scheduling availability for San Francisco's Moscone Center, where the conference has been held for the past several years.

According to the posted schedule, there's one event scheduled for that second week of June that's just the right length for the WWDC, labeled generically (probably due to Apple's request for secrecy) as a "Corporate Meeting". Though there are other such meetings on the summer schedule, the others aren't long enough to fit what we expect from the WWDC. The guess of the eighth, the Monday of that week, is to coincide with the expected keynote address.

Besides having a better hold on the date, we also know more about what to expect in Snow Leopard. 64-bit compatibility sounded good from the get-go, allowing you to install and take advantage of ridiculous amounts of RAM, but now we hear that Apple is pushing 64-bit mode even harder on developers. QuickTime X will bundle in what we've come to expect from QuickTime Pro into the default install, adding some new features. Now it seems that it's getting a user interface tweak as well, sporting a new, minimalist design. For fans of Apple's web browser, you'll be glad to see that Safari 4 beta will be included in the install. We'll just have to wait until June to learn about all the other goodies Apple has planned.

This story around the web: