Apple is making progress on the development of its new Mac OS X 10.6 Snow Leopard. The company invited a group of developers to test the operating system to see the response when running a series of third-party applications and also test the built-in Microsoft Exchange support and the new printer drivers.

Even though there are no official details about the final version, it is rumored to include location-based and multi-touch technologies. The general belief is that the release will coincide with the next iMac hardware update, which is expected to use newer four- and possibly eight-core processors from Intel. The Snow Leopard will be fully 64-bit, which means that the operating system and the applications could support up to 16TB of RAM.

This latest Snow Leopard build is tagged under the number 10A261, the third after the previous 10A190 and 10A22.  

Apple’s officials explained that the new release would "pause on innovation" in order to focus on speed optimizations, which is considered extremely important by its customers. The two technologies involved are Grand Central and OpenCL. The first was introduced to manage and efficiently assign tasks to multiple processor cores, in order to get faster performance especially while doing heavy multitasking. The second one harnesses the processing potential of graphics chips and re-routs it for general purpose computing.

Still, there will be several features included such as integrated support for Microsoft Exchange 2007 in Address Book, Mail and iCal which will allow users to sync their corporate email, contacts and calendars on Macs and iPhones.