By Sam Oliver

Published: 01:00 PM EST

Modern text-handling technologies made popular on Apple's iPhone should turn up on the Mac next year as part of the company's Mac OS X 10.6 Snow Leopard release.

Purported screenshots making the rounds from build 10A190 of the OS overhaul show that a new version of Apple's TextEdit application will offer preferences for at least three new text handling operations.

The first, which is already a staple of the company's iPhone interface, offers to correct spelling automatically as a user types. Another offers to automatically insert 'smart dashes' while a user types, while a third feature is simply titled 'Text replacement.'

The features could presumably be extended to all applications that will run on Snow Leopard.

Separately, the screenshots reveal that several Apple-authored applications will see major version number upgrades as a result of Cocoa enhancements and previously announced Exchange support. These include Mail 4.0, AddressBook 5.0, Migration Assistant 2.0, iChat 5.0, and Image Capture 6.0.

The latter is said to have seen a complete interface overhaul with several new features. More subtle application revisions will reportedly include Spaces 1.1, Time Machine 1.1, and iSync 3.1.

Screenshots show that Snow Leopard's Cocoa Finder, listed as version 10.6 (with DS version 1.5), includes options to run individual applications in 32 Bit mode. The Apple logo and menubar reportedly turn a lighter color when applications are run in 64 bit mode.