Apple Snow Leopard will get some iPhone functions

February 5, 2009

The new version of MacOS X will borrow GPS location and multi-touch capabilities from iPhone. Snow Leopard now has the CoreLocation framework introduced in the iPhone 2.0 SDK. CoreLocation works with the iPhone's built-in GPS, cell phone-tower triangulation, and Wi-Fi positioning data to determine the device's location. The current Macs don't contain GPS hardware and it will use WiFi triangulation similar to the original iPhone for geographical location. This new feature can be used in many applications such a Google Latitude, Apple's iPhoto '09 and others. Snow Leopard will include a framework for multi-touch gesture support in third-party applications. This will allow developers easily to interpret multi-touch gestures on the trackpads of MacBook and MacBook Pro and use them for custom features and commands.