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Apple to Announce new Mac OS X version in June
swiert writes "Apple has announced that the WWDC conference has been rescheduled in order to present the new version of Mac OS X, codenamed "Panther". Unfortunately, Apple haven't given any details about what to expect from Panther, but after Jaguar this looks promising."
I hope this one is a freebie (doubtful), but at least it's not usability-mandatory like the move to Jaguar was. Mac OS X pre-Jaguar was not good enough to be productive, so then Apple releases Jaguar, and everyone shells out $79 (in my case, student discount) for the upgrade to a usable OS.
I wonder how much they'll suck us for this time.
is jdk 1.4.1 (currently available from apple's software update). this is BIG to java developers -- I had one friend sell his powerbook 6 months ago b/c he got tired of it coming out "any day now." But it's not vapor anymore, finally.
Apple has said that they are moving WWDC (the Apple Developer conference) to coincide with Macworld in June. here
They are doing this because they want the developers to have access to "new features" that won't be ready until then. There are also reports like this that indicate that Apple is about to release a new architecture based on the PowerPC 64 bit G5 processor.
It takes an important reason to reschedule a convention the size of WWDC. I believe that the move is an effort to keep details of the new G5 machines secret from everyone INCLUDING developers until the product announcement.
If the bids for the motherboards are due any day, then the release of the G5 boards could easily be made in June with production release soon after.
If you think Apple is REALLY switching to iX86 technology, I've got a small country to sell you.
I would like to see a few more finder a gui options. A few of the things I would like to see: desktop panes, speed improvements, faster boot time.
Adam
Last time around, Apple forced people to pay for 10.2 to fix the broken parts of 10.1 (most notably OpenGL.) Let's hope they don't ransom the bug fixes again with 10.3
For great justice.
Pink? Nah, Apple already tried that.
It's amazing what you find out when you Google for your old memories of stuff you never heard about again... *grins*
You are not alone. This is not normal. None of this is normal.
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This says that AMD might make (manufacture) PowerPC chips. So maybe CmdrTaco isn't asleep after all.
A deep unwavering belief is a sure sign you're missing something...
I'm running a theme that gives the metal interface to everything.
Not too shabby.
http://homepage.mac.com/max_08/themes.htm
"iWorks", if more than just a rumor, would probably consist of 1. a word processing app (TextEdit isn't truly powerful - what about initials and footnotes?), 2. (possibly) a publishing app (even if it's just for greeting cards and nasty boss letters), 3. a spreadsheet app, 4. a simple database app (most likely based on a FileMaker backend) and 5. a presentation app (Keynote, of course)
;-)
iLife was just released. iTunes will be upgraded (it's the oldest of the four, right now) soon, though.
There won't be that much benefit from a Cocoa rewrite. If you want a Cocoa Finder, give PathFinder a try; my experience with that one is that it has a few nice features, but is often way too slow (which reminds me of most other Cocoa apps, unfortunately).
New version of Safari? 1.0 isn't even out yet. Surely the 10.3 release will be the latest date they can offer the final; otherwise, it wouldn't make sense to me.
Video conferencing in iChat is quite likely - check its bundle for some unused icons
Multiple Customizable Docks - I doubt this. I hope they come up with a way to make the Dock a lot more useful, or, at least, fully replacable by third parties.
Now let's come to the less likely things:
- Metadata (Database FS)
As you said, they hired BeOS's file system engineer, who supposedly implemented journaling in HFS+. It would be very nice if he helped work on a metadata implementation.
My idea of it would be to work similarly as iTunes' Smart Playlists do, but even more transparently. Per default, the Metadata Finder won't show you the hierarchical file structure, but the semantical one. There could be such a topic as "downloads", which would show your recent downloads. It would consist of sections like "music" and "shareware". Each download would have information like "downloaded at" and "downloaded from" attached to it.
More interesting would be a topic like "e-mail", split up between your various e-mail folders. It would provide information like "date received", "subject", etc. Opening an e-mail letter would launch Mail.app with that specifict mail, of course. BeOS actually could do such a thing already, and that was half a decade ago.
Another topic is Aqua2: a resolution-independent approach. The Dock shows the benefit of (almost) perfectly resizable icons: No matter how good or bad your eyes are, you'll always be able to have the icons in your optimum size. But what about the rest of the GUI? Any of the text labels are already resizable, in theory. They're vector-based. Widgets, aren't, though.
I think one of the plans of Apple is to wait until we have very-high-resolution displays (closer to 300 dpi, instead of the currently typical 96 dpi) and then automatically scale any object on the GUI to fit best.
Rendezvous: I really hope Apple will offer a Rendezvous implementation for Windows. Some parts of it are there, already, but I have yet to see a working implementation example.
Actually, there's no reason Apple can't switch to Intel, while remaining a proprietary platform as well.
Apple simply needs to add a proprietary ASIC (application integrated circuit) to the motherboard to keep clone makers at bay.
Apple could use the cheap pc components to bring their prices down. They'd be able to say their machines run at the same MHz as pcs. But if you wanted to run Mac OS X on Intel, you'd still have to buy a computer from Apple.
Hence, no need for the drivers you mention.
(You may also recall, that Motorola and IBM briefly made PowerPC machines (I'm not talking about the Mac clones either) that were NOT capable of running Mac OS 8/9. These machines ran AIX or other unix OSes. But the motherboards lacked the correct ASICs to run the Mac OS.
- dj