Snow Leopard to get support for Multitouch and Location

Operating System wars are its prime these days with both Microsoft and Apple pushing out the pre-release versions of their latest operating systems. We have already seen most of the new things Windows 7 can do, which are very impressive in my opinion.

Though Apple is usually tight lipped about the details of the new features in the Snow Leopard, AppleInsider reports that testers who received the pre-release version of the operating system have discovered that the core APIs now feature some libraries where native to the iPhone SDK.

The first one of these is CoreLocation, which would triangulate the location of your system using the surrounding WiFi networks. This functionality was introduced with the iPhone which lacked true GPS. Instead it used to determine its location based on the signal from the BTS or the surrounding WiFi networks. Since there is no cellular signal reception capabilities in the Mac, it would need to rely on the existing hardware to achieve similar results.

The second set of APIs will allow Cocoa based applications to utilize the new multitouch capabilities of the latest MacBooks and MacBook Pros. The applications will probably receive the inputs through the new glass trackpads on the MacBooks because Macs do lack touch screens.

Support of multitouch in applications would be an interesting feature as Windows 7 also has some pretty good Multi Touch capabilities which can be accessed via compatible hardware. One can't help but doubt the involvement of Google in here too which recently unveiled Google Latitude, one of its first location based services. How developers would leverage these capabilities still remains to be seen, but since its a Mac, we can have high hopes.