Many years ago, back when lamp-style iMacs were cool and iPods came in only one color, Apple promoted a vision of the Mac as the hub of the then-emerging “digital lifestyle.” With so much of the spotlight on iPhone OS products, there has not been a clear central pillar of this digital hub strategy. The recent release of Snow Leopard for Mac users, coupled with the just-announced iTunes 9, has refocused the digital hub strategy squarely on the Mac, and brought a wide audience some extremely cool features.

German Apple site Apfeltalk has released new screenshots of Mac OS X 10.6 “Snow Leopard” onto the internet. There’s not really much to see, but the screenshots offer “photo evidence” of Safari 4′s web-application feature, Address Book Exchange Support, and more.

While the screenshots don’t really show much, as most improvements are under the hood, the shots seem to show that Apple is really on top of Snow Leopard’s surface features, however limited they may be. Given that they have a whole year to continue development, I can’t wait to see the performance increases…or perhaps some yet-unannounced features?

Screenshots after the break.

Phil Schiller came onstage today to tell us about Mobile Me. Exchange for the rest of us. We can all now get push email, calendars, and contacts. On a Mac, a PC, or an iPhone or iPod Touch. And it is called Mobile Me.

Mobile Me will work for Mobile Me. It works with Outlook and other native applications. But best of all, it is best used in a Web 2.0 application suite at me.com. According to Phil, it “feels like a desktop application.” it even includes drag and drop, live search (just like Spotlight,) iDisk functionality, and a basic photo editor integrated with web galleries. There will be direct access to Mail, and all other features currently in .Mac.

Given all the jailbreak attempts and subsequent successes in the iPhone 1.0 software, you might be expecting a thicker security layer in iPhone 2.0 software. Well, so much for that. iPhone 2.0 is already hacked. iPhone 1.2 (which will be released to the public as 2.0 in June) was hacked by the iPhone Dev Team more »

Today’s iPhone roadmap event was chock full of news. Here is the quick and dirty breakdown of what all was announced as part of the iPhone/iPod Touch 2.0 software. iPhone Developer SDK The SDK provides developers with the same APIs as Apple, so they can develop full fledged applications for the iPhone and iPod Touch. more »