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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
You might want to rethink that new Mac OS 9 category, then, huh?
:)
-Waldo Jaquith
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.
I knew a lot of Windows users who said the same thing when Win95 came out. I knew a few who held onto Win 3.11 like some sort of retarded obsessive high-school crush until it simply no longer worked anymore. They whined, they complained, but, eventually, they were forced to run Win9x. And, guess what? They found out what everyone else did: Win 3.11 sucked. Win95 was better. Win98 was even better.
MacOS 9 sucked. MacOS X is better. The next release should suck even less. That's how these things work. You can whine about it all you want, but whining never turned the tides of progress (if it did, slashdot would be trend-setting.)
- A.P.
"Remember when the U.S. had a drug problem, and then we declared a War On Drugs, and now you can't buy drugs anymore?"
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)
A lot of things still don't work as well as 9.x yet. For example, a USB laser printer I got for my G4 Cube. It takes longer for it to print under OS X than in 9.2.
Then there are programs I used everyday, MUSIC programs, like Finale and Digital Performer, that don't work (Performer) in OS X or are buggy (Finale).
Well the biggest incentive for a developer to port their software to Mac OS X is that Mac OS 9 isn't going to be developed in the future. So their revnue streams dry up if they don't make the leap to the new OS. I'm sure this move is primarily aimed at getting more third party software to X, so it should address your concern.
I mean, it's great that they want to move to OS X. It's a great OS. I love running it. I just can't get all the things I need to work on it yet. And, if memory serves me, didn't Apple support System 7.X for a long time after System 8 came out? And when they switched to Power PC Chips from Motorola 680XX chips. We had FAT (68K/PPC) programs for like years.
Apple haven't announced they will stop supporting 9. I would guess (no inside info) that they'll support it for years to come. They've just announced they won't be developing it any further. That means no more releases of 9.x except for bug fixes. This is exactly what happened with the shift from 7.x to 8.x: they continued to support 7.x but didn't release any version after 7.6 (if that's the right number).
What is the big rush Steve?
Don't forget this was announced at the developer's conference. The venue is significant. It's Apple's way of telling its third party developers that it is time to port your software to Mac OS X.
Sailing over the event horizon
Apple will continue to update OS 9 a little, but no new features should be expected, only the occational bugfix and updates to CarbonLib so that OS 9/X compatibility will be maintained.
I expect that classic will become an optional install (not by default) sometime in 2003 and it will probably be wiped out all together by 2005.
Also, FWIW, OS 8 was going to be OS 7.7 but Apple decided to call it OS 8. There were not that many changes. It was certainly nowhere near the OS 9 to OS X shift.
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The internet is the greatest source of biased information in the history of mankind.
The IETF zeroconf working group, led by Apple's Stuart Cheshire, has been working on this for a while.
With it go some of the things that Mac users have come to love about their quirky boxes...high quality (but expensive) parts, Easter Eggs, strange homebrew interfaces (ADB, anyone?), tiny screens, humorous error messages that convey no information...everything that at one point made Apple Apple.
Well, I don't like it. You can have your protected memory. And while you're at it, you can remember to take your preemptive multitasking, too. We Mac users have always maintained that that kind of stuff just isn't needed for the home user, and I stand by it, even if Steve Jobs won't.
Call me crazy, but I appreciate an intuitive interface; yeah, that's right: intuitive. Since when does it make sense for "Shut Down" to be classified under a little picture of an Apple? How is your average Joe or Jane going to find it there, when it clearly should be labelled "Special". There was a time when the Apple icon was reserved for "Chooser" and "Calculator", but that time has come to pass.
Not to mention the new "brushed metal" appearance of the Apple CD player. Once upon a time, a user could choose (yes, remember choice?) from an extensive handful of horrid, non-standard color schemes for the late, great Apple CD Audio Player.
So let's raise our glasses in honor of Mac OS 1-9, the interface we hated to love for so many years. And let us launch off our Holiday Rockets in honor of Steven Jobs, our own great Lincoln, liberating the slaves of the antebellum command line. And raise too our voices, for tonight we give thanks where none thanks have dared yet go.
Thank you, Macintosh, for everything. The Last Mac Purist,
Karma: Good (despite my invention of the Karma: sig)
A. Next time, wait till the keynote is over, dont just post the first thing that happens and then have to go back and keep updating the article. There is always lots of interesting stuff said in the keynotes, no point jumping the gun.
B. Thanks for getting the maccentral.com link hammered halfway through the keynote. I always enjoy having my keynote newspage refreshing session destroyed by a few million of the unwashed slashdot masses, half of whom are probably just trying to read the article to find trolling material. This ties back to A. in that if you had waited to post this till after the keynote, those of us that *really* care would have been able to finish getting updates about the keynote before the link was trampled.
Mod me down, I don't care. I'm frustrated.
Time for some tasty Shiner Bock!
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!
"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.
This isn't going to "force" anybody to do anything. I am typing this from my 4-year-old Mac running OS X. It's slower to respond than OS 9, but I like the OS so much better that I put up with it. (The developer tools alone are simply wonderful, and worth the switch.) There's nothing I have to "go without" in using my old computer, I just have to wait longer for it to happen. Same deal here. Don't want to upgrade? Then deal with it -- it won't suddenly get worse than it was, just because of Apple's decision.
they are dead last in Legacy Support
I can't agree with this. Yes, there have been many times when Apple said, "We've decided to ditch this old technology, and move to something far superior". Every time it happens, people whine and moan. But they always have plenty of time to upgrade (years, usually), and backwards compatilibily has always been excellent (68k to PPC, for example).
Your computer doesn't become less productive when Apple decides to put in a new feature. This is ridiculous. I can understand some frustration when your 1337 new computer isn't the hottest thing on the market anymore... but it really is silly. Apple says, "Buy a new iBook tomorrow and you'll get [feature]!!" And everyone who bought an iBook last month complains that Apple isn't selling the same product for 5 years. Look at the big picture, people.
The streets shall flow with the blood of the Guberminky.
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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jhw
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.
If it's for-profit but free, you're not the customer -- you're the product (e.g., the Slashdot Beta's "audience").
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