Apple Drops Mac OS 9

Eugenia Loli writes "MacCentral has the up-to-the-minute updates on the Apple WorldWide Developer Conference. The first big news is that Apple drops Mac OS 9. 'It's time to drop OS 9,' Steve Jobs said. 'We can do things in X that we just can't do in 9... a hundred percent of what we're doing is X only. [...] Mac OS 9 isn't dead for our customers, but it is for developers. Today we say goodbye to Mac OS 9 for all future development,' said Jobs." We all expected this to happen sooner or later, more sooner than later. There's been no new Apple development for Mac OS 9 in some time; only maintenance updates. But I won't stop Mac OS 9 development. You can't stop me! Muahahahaha! Update: 05/06 18:31 GMT by P : More news from WWDC continues to roll in. Eugenia Loli writes "Probably the really big news is with Jaguar, the codename for Mac OS X 10.2. There is handwriting recognition technology that will be recognized by any application that uses text. Apple also introduced Quartz Extreme, which takes the compositing engine in Quartz, and accelerates it in graphics cards, and combines 2D, 3D and video in one hardware pipeline via OpenGL. 'Everything on the screen is being drawn in hardware by OpenGL.' It requires AGP 2x and 32MB of video RAM. It is not possible on older graphics cards like RAGE 128 cards, said Jobs -- that means it'll work on newer iMacs and eMacs, but not on older machines, he emphasized. Jobs said this puts Apple two years ahead of 'the other guys.'"

Update: 05/06 18:46 GMT by P : An anonymous user writes: "Apple is releasing Mac OS X Rackmount Servers. Also releasing AIM-compatible messaging called iChat; you can create buddy lists of anyone on the local network, and you can use your mac.com username to log in to it."

Comments

It's called zeroconf

[Wesley Felter]

The IETF zeroconf working group, led by Apple's Stuart Cheshire, has been working on this for a while.

Re:Rendezvous sounds interesting... open standard

[j h woodyatt]

APIPA is yet another acronym for link-local IPv4 addressing.

What Apple is calling "Rendezvous" begins with link-local IPv4 addressing and adds "multicast DNS" (which Microsoft wants to call "link-local multicast name resolution," i.e. LLMNR... sigh).

Here's what Rendezvous *actually* is: it's the last little bit of what Appletalk had going for it, finally "ported over" to work on the Internet protocol. Not only is Mac OS 9 in the terminal patient's ward-- so is the Appletalk network protocol. Happy happy day.

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Re:Instead of sprinkling around duplicate code...

[Valdrax]

Maybe you should look into the Linux kernel for an example of what he's talking about. Rather than have several hardware or OS-dependent if-then statements inside of a single function, you break the function into several copies -- one version for each OS. Then, set a function pointer to the appropriate version for the OS you are running on at program initialization. If you are running under OS 9, point all your function pointers to the functions that use OpenTransport. If you are running under OS X, point all your function pointers to the functions that use sockets.

Since the OS isn't going to change under your program any more than the hardware changes underneath the Linux kernel, there's no reason to be constantly testing the platform. This changes the overhead of all the if-then statements to a single if-then statement, some function pointer initializations at startup, and a jump to a function pointer instead of a fixed constant each time you call the function. If the if-then statements are that much of a problem, you'll trade some minimal code bloat (in the form of the now repeated OS-independent parts of those functions) for much improved execution speed and significantly easier to read code (if done correctly).

A benefit is that it makes it relatively easy to add and drop OS support without having to go through code with a fine-tooth comb. Just delete or add the relevant functions and add/drop that OS from the test at start-up. The only downsides are tracking similar changes between versions and the tendency for code to severely mutate into completely diverse codebases if you don't have good design discipline.