AppleInsider claims that Mac OS X 10.6 Snow Leopard will feature (among other things) a Finder re-written entirely in Cocoa. The Finder has remained Carbon-based for the entire history of Mac OS X so far, but the long journey from those frameworks towards Cocoa seems to be reaching its end for Apple's homegrown apps.

Test versions of the new Finder are being seeded to select developers in revisions of Snow Leopard with build numbers beginning with 10A. AppleInsider notes that seeds could be more broadly available to the developer community as early as tomorrow.

As Ars Technica noted in June, Apple apps will also apparently come "wrapped" in Cocoa. Further deprecation of some Carbon APIs seems likely as well, but it's unclear yet as to how Snow Leopard's support for Carbon apps will differ from plain-ol' Leopard's.

In addition to the Finder, improvements to support for Microsoft Exchange are expected for Mail, iCal, and Address Book. Also included is a new option for booting a Mac called ImageBoot. ImageBoot takes NetBoot a step further, allowing administrators to boot a workstation into Mac OS X directly from an image on a local disk.

Apple made a concerted effort today to highlight the reduced impact its new products have on the environment.

This effort all started with Steve Jobs' open letter in 2007, A Greener Apple, announcing a long-term plan to "protect the environment and make our business more sustainable." The letter was released partly in response to a Greenpeace campaign, encouraging Apple to reduce the amount of toxic chemicals in its products and improve its recycling programs.

Today, the star of the show was Apple's new "unibody," a single, complex chassis for new MacBook and MacBook Pro units fabricated from a single brick of aluminum. In a video posted on its website, Apple noted that as a result of the new fabrication process, fewer parts in the laptop means a reduction in weight, size, and the amount of other material necessary to hold the device together.

Adobe's announcement that Photoshop CS4 will be 32-bit only on OS X has the Mac web buzzing today. Accusations of blame are being shot at both Adobe and Apple by various pundits (though notably not by the companies themselves). Fortunately, some of the better Mac pundits are also weighing in with interesting opinions on this development.

Over at Ars, John Siracusa has penned an interesting historical account of the relationship of Adobe and Apple, and the Carbon API which is at the center of the controversy. He somewhat grimly sees this Photoshop development as the furthering of bad blood between the two companies and suggests that "the real storm may be yet to come" as Adobe and Apple clash over Flash and Air, etc. (witness the Flash on iPhone kerfuffle).

Over at Daring Fireball, John Gruber takes up the question of CS5 -- i.e. the next version of Photoshop after the aforementioned CS4 -- which will be biggest Cocoa port ever attempted. He points out the interesting difference between Photoshop and Microsoft Office in that the former shares a codebase between Windows and OS X, while the latter represents two completely separate projects on the two platforms. The big question is whether Adobe will even be able to pull off the Cocoa port in time and maintain its cross-platform nature (though as both Johns have pointed out, Lightroom bodes well in this regard).

In any case, this drama is just beginning to play itself out and depending on how you look at it we're in for a good many years of entertainment or frustration as the Cocoa transition of Photoshop progresses (never mind the next version of Office).

During The Grube's UI presentation at C4, he pointed to one particular example of "functional inconsistency" in Apple's software: the discrepancy in results when you drag-and-drop text in Carbon apps (TextWrangler, AppleWorks, etc.) vs. Cocoa apps (TextEdit, Safari, etc.).

When you select text in Carbon applications, you're able to drag the text by simply clicking the selection and dragging it. In Cocoa apps, however, you need to click the selected text and hold the mouse button down for a fraction of a second before you're able to drag it. Your cursor changes from the text selector to the pointer. But clicking and immediately dragging results in you re-selecting the text.

The Cocoa differentiation is a result of NeXT designing a way to enable both dragging and re-selecting, which was carried into OS X.

It's a minor inconsistency, but has frustrated me countless times. Glad that's all cleared up.

Thanks John!