UPDATE: A post today claims to explain it all.
According to a post on AppleInsider
, the apps in Snow Leopard are going to be dramatically smaller and more efficient.
This weight-loss regime is prompted by the need to slim Mac OS X down for the growing number of mobile devices, so RoughlyDrafted
(the source of the AppleInsider report) suggests.
As the graphic below demonstrates, the new apps are significantly smaller; Mail.app alone loses 196MB, over 68% of its current size:

Who would have thought that Mail.app had so much weight to lose?
According to AppleInsider some of the efficiency comes from a greater centralisation of resources in Snow Leopard:
Among the technologies believed to be aiding the downsizing are Resolution Independence, which substitutes bitmapped raster graphics with smaller vector graphics files, and Localization, which extracts the plethora of localized language files from each individual application and instills them into a centralized container accessible to each application.
Mail.app users can also look forward to more complete text handling features like auto word correction, smart dash insertion and more.
Tags: Apple, Apple Mail, leopard mail, localization, mail.app, resolution indendence, snow leopard
Nova Media has released version 2.0 of its Phone plugins software, which restores to Leopard users the lost ability to dial phone numbers and send text messages in Address Book. And not only that, but more widely across a range of apps.


Apple’s iCal Team is looking to hire a software engineer.
Love it or hate it, it’s clear that the unveiling of MobileMe in yesterday’s keynote signals big changes ahead for .Mac.

I love Apple as much as the next guy. Probably more than the next guy. But today has been another day on which — as the .Mac outage report clinically put it — “100% of members were unable to access mail using an IMAP client.”
The shell script security exploit exposed and then fixed in Tiger Mail has been reintroduced into Leopard Mail.

10.5.1 is out! You can find it in Software Update and 

