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The latest release notes of Apple's Snow Leopard operating system - still in preparation - show that the company is going to build in geopositioning for desktop and laptop computers, bringing it into line with its GPS-enabled iPhone.
The Guardian has seen the release notes accompanying the latest seed of the OS release, 10A261, which note that
This seed includes the CoreLocation framework which lets you determine the current latitude and longitude of a computer. The framework uses the available hardware to triangulate the user's position based on nearby signal information. Additional details can be found at /System/Library/Frameworks/CoreLocation.framework/Headers
Now, what could you do with that? Well, apart from fitting in with the new location-enabled services in the latest version of Apple's iLife, one can see that there's going to be lot of people offering apps that will tell you where your precious computer is at all times - including if/when it's stolen.
The new seed includes some other stuff (plenty about garbage collection) and we're hearing that it runs quite noticeably faster, at least on Apple's own apps compiled under the new gcc compiler. And it tells us that
great progress has been made in the Grand Central Dispatch (libdispatch) and OpenCL APIs
.
Grand Central and OpenCL, you'll recall, are the methods being used to get the graphics processing units (GPUs) to take over some of the processing load from the CPU.
There's also now Microsoft Exchange support. Though a few bugs do remain, such as
-The date shown in the iCal Dock icon does not update correctly.
For God's sake! Steve Jobs takes a break and the whole thing gets broken!
Still, it looks to me like it's still on schedule to satisfy my prediction of a May launch. But even if it misses, what will you use geolocation in your laptop or desktop for?
