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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."
Rendezvous. Dynamic IP discovery. Lets computers "dynamically discover each other and share them." Proposing as a new industry standard. Jobs cited example of multiple Macs working at home sharing MP3 files with iTunes between multiple computers. Demonstrated example of MP3 files streaming over AirPort. Works with any IP-ready device; built into Jaguar and will also be offered as an open industry standard that can be built into specific devices.
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Don't sweat the petty things, and don't pet the sweaty things.
This makes huge sense for Apple: their future is Mac OS X and the company has been saying this for some time. I'm glad they are making the cut now, still relatively early in the new OS's life cycle. This will help push developers onto the new platform; in turn this is good for end users because the applications they need to run are more likely to appear on Mac OS X.
And again it shows that Apple are able to make gutsey decisions and lead the market rather than follow it. Whatever you think of the relative merits of X vs. 9, this is the kind of bleeding-edge decision making that Apple needs if it is to differentiate itself from the Windows platform.
Sailing over the event horizon
Down inside, the original MacOS was a lot like DOS - single-application, single thread, and no memory protection. Over the years, multiple applications were retrofitted to the thing, resulting in a horrible mess. CPU dispatching was the worst part. "Cooperative multitasking" wasn't enough. But instead of putting a real scheduler, all sorts of "tasks" (timer tasks, vertical blanking interval tasks, system tasks, deferred tasks, multiprocessor tasks, Open Transport tasks, etc.) were added over time. Each of these had a different set of restrictions on what it could do. It would have been far simpler to put in a real CPU dispatcher early on.
Better late than never, I suppose.
O.K. Moderators have your fun with me, but I can't help but comment on the new OS 9 icon where the only story under the topic is the end of OS9. Wouldn't this be better placed under Apple:)
"as plurdled gabbleblotchits on a lurgid bee" - Prostetnic Vogon Jeltz. (One man's humorous is another mans flamebait)
Apple seems to be taunting them on purpose, consider their "Rip. Mix. Burn." ads. Gateway payed Apple the sincerest form of flattery with their later ad campaign, but still Apple was the first to stick their neck out.
Chris Kuivenhoven is a thief, beware
For good minute-by-minute coverage of the keynote, commit HTTP to Apple Confidential. The latest news (as I post this) is iChat a new Apple IM client built into the 10.2 release of Mac OS X. I know the lead engineer on that project and I expect it will be pretty sweet.
Sailing over the event horizon
Dropping OS 9 has big implications on developers.
For our Mac version of the product, we had just decided (last week!) to drop support for Mac OS 8.6. Carbon on 8.6 was a major pain.
By going 9-up only, it'll spare us about 4 weeks testing.
Now that Apple itself is dropping support for Mac OS 9, it'll be easier on us to talk about dropping 8.6 support.
We'll continue supporting Mac OS 9 for this release, but for the next release, we'll have ample munitions to entirely drop classic Mac OSes. That ought to trim the application code by about 10%, and accelerate the runtime because of all the IF X switches in the code.
Might not sound like that big of a deal, but when your networking stack checks, at runtime, which layer you're using (Mac TCP for 8.6, OpenTransport for 8.6 up to X, and BSD for X), this really adds up. Let alone all the Classic vs AQUA UI tweaks.
Out of curiosity, I just grepped our sources for this specific runtime switch. There are 87 occurences of it!
WTF is that?!? The iBook, a machine they are selling RIGHT NOW does not meet those specs. So basically their current 'entry level' model is never going to have accelerated video? This is ridiculous.
I had one, it was so slow that I sold it. This video driver issue is probably the reason why.
Macs last longer than PCs, huh? How long is an iBook with no video acceleration going to be able to keep up with OS X? Apparently by "two years ahead", Steve means "you'll need the machine we'll be selling two years from now to keep up with the OS we're selling today".
I am glad to see OS 9 as 'dead' because this forces developers to start creating more native support for OS X and not settling for 9 compatibility. As of right now, I have an Epson scanner with no native X drivers.
On the other hand, I am very concerned of the loss of support for 9 users. One example that comes to my mind is the Western Michigan University Theatre department which run 9 on all of their Apple computers, most of which can't even run 10.1, let alone the new demands of 'Jaguar.' Also, all of the major programs (besides Office) are either not available in X or require a major upgrade to become X compatible. That's a lot of money to spend, epically when most of your computers can't run in X. The question can be raised that the department needs to update their hardware, but when the current setup is fully functional, why spend the money to change it all?
I believe this move is to create a focus for developers to develop support of X that take charge of very innovative technologies that X has to benefit the users. I only hope that we 9 will still be supported and at least welcomed. Hopefully someone will visit the retirement home once-in-a-while and say hello to 9.
AnamanFan - Trying to find the Truth, one post at a time.
"I wonder if anyone is masochistic enough to attempt run an old 68xxx application in emulation mode in OS9 while running that under classic mode in OSX :"
I just couldn't let this one pass by unchallenged. My first Mac was a Quadra 700 and the software I used then was WriteNow (68K Assembly ), FoxBase+ (68K) and I added
Cyberdog as a browser with OS 8 on my PM6500. All run flawlessly under OS X 10.1 on my G3 400 PowerBook. In fact they a much more stable and I don't notice any
difference in speed. My hat off to Apple Enginerring. An incredible feat of backwards compatability.
First off, you need a LOT of video ram to make this work fast. I guess 32mb is a lot, but still, if you run out the card starts swapping between video ram and main ram, which is slow. I don't know how much space all those Aqua graphics take up with animations, but I'd be surprised if it's a lot less than 32mb.
Secondly, OpenGL just wasn't designed for 2D graphics! It has virtually NO support for 2D drawing, if you wish to display something it must either be sent directly to the card as pixel data (slow) or uploaded to video RAM and displayed as a texture on a polygon. This seems like a rather strange way to go about things.
Take the lack of support for text in the API. When writing the VGL, which is the OpenGL widget set for my game (btw I'd be the first to admit I'm not a hotshot coder) I had to create my own text/font system. It was fast certainly, but required you to upload the font to video ram again, which placed restrictions on how you managed font textures.
I can't figure out why anyone would want to use 3D acceleration for making 2D stuff go faster. As far as I know, 2D and 3D acceleration are different things - am I wrong?
The answer you didn't want to hear:
.0.2, .0.3, etc. This is usually for things like bug fixes, speed improvements, etc.
"Sometimes"
Apple has never charged for online downloads of point upgrades. This usually means things like 10.0.1,
That being said, Apple *does* charge for "big" point upgrades. Technically, they charged for 10.1, although it was available *for free* if you had a MacOS Up-to-Date card. All you had to do was give the guy at an Apple Store or a Comp-USA the card [one of the three] and you walked out of the store with a "free" upgrade.
So what is MacOS Up-to-Date?? When you purchased your mac, it came with all sorts of paper/docs, etc. One of those bit of paper is important. It allows you 3 "free" updates to the Mac OS. After you use your cards, you are expected to pay full retail for your OS purchase. The cool bit about this being that the cards aren't needed for the downloadable updates.
While it hasn't been announced as of yet, I would speculate that 10.2 *is* a "pay" upgrade. The new features that they are adding are *huge*, and anything of this magnatude is a pay upgrade. Apple is an interesting company, as they realise that users won't pay $100 to $130 for a "dot upgrade". This means that they will charge maybe $50, but with that you get a CD, so if you lunch your HDD you won't need to play "software update control panel wheel of fortune".
I hope this helped
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Blocklevel: Practical Information Architecture
What really got me excited today was the news about Inkwell, the handwriting recognition engine for 10.2.
I'm excited because it's so useless. There is no way that Jobs would put his people through the effort of bringing handwriting recognition to OS X unless it was a precursor to the iPad. My guess is October, January at the latest.
Soooooo happy.
Kevin Fox
Open GL does not directly support 2d manipulations. but there is a way of doing it, pioneered by the guys at Raycer Graphics Corp. Look up their patents on large matrix and 2d manipulations.
Here is a quiz for you:
1. which company bought. Raycer Graphics?
2 Who was the Head of 3d engineering at Apple
(Answers: Apple, ex-CTO of Raycer)
Unfortunately it's tough to do, especially when it comes to device drivers. Windows 96/98/ME were still able to load 16-bit device drivers, if necessary. There are quite a few people around with strange, old, hardware that they need to run. With Windows ME, Microsoft introducted a compatible device driver model so people could write drivers for 98/ME and XP with a single code base.
It was worth it for Microsoft, and it will be worth it for Apple. OS 9 has a great deal of "legacy" code in it that bogs it down. Let's hope they can make the transition as smoothly as Apple did. (Please, Apple zealots, don't mod me down just because I didn't say that Bill Gates was satan in this post.)
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Ask the Ya-Hoot Oracle Anything!