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Jaguar is Over
The Panther Finder is brand-new, with a new brushed metal appearance, and enhanced column view, with the items used most commonly in the far left column. Searching is "live" and a lot faster, and is more user-centric instead of computer-centric.
The Finder now has labels, and icons can resize with window resizing.
The iDisk now caches itself locally, so it can be used offline, and the user can copy to and from it more efficiently (with the real copies happening in the background).
A new feature called Expose allows minimizing into a smaller window, all open windows, to temporarily move everything out of the way, sort of like workspaces.
File Vault can encrypt a user directory and decrypt it "on the fly."
Faxing is now built-in, and available system-wide.
Pixlet is a new compression codec that does video compression without noticable artifacts, for 48 bits per pixel: at 960x540 and 24 fps, can be decoded on a 1GHz Power Mac.
Preview is significantly faster, with searching, and PS to PDF conversion.
Panther features fast user switching, a feature in Windows XP, allowing under-one-second (on the demo machine) switching between two different users.
FontBook is a new "pro" app for font management.
iChat AV is an update to iChat that does audio and video conferencing in addition to text, that works with any built-in or USB mic, and any DV video camera, connecting using only a user's screen name. It is going to beta today, and will be included in Panther, and will be sold for $29 to Jaguar users. Apple will sell iSight for $149, a small camera that does audio and video over FireWire.
Apple is preparing a new set of developer tools called XCode, which works with GCC 3.3, does distributed compiles (using available resources on the network), and has other cool stuff. It is fast, it has improved searching (like the Finder, and over entire projects), and it looks like an iApp (though it isn't metal). It removes the need to link; onnly link objects you need to launch. It starts compiling while you are editing, cutting the time you need to compile drastically. It can modify the program while it is running.
OSX is definitly very, very impressive. With regular updates (every ~6-9months), Apple will be so far ahead before Longhorn comes out, that MS might actually have to try to compete! All I can say is that as a long time PC fan, way to go Apple
Steve Jobs just confirmed at the WWDC Keynote that Apple systems with the PPC970 are a reality! No word yet on availability.
Slashdot's first reaction to VMware
1.6 Ghz -- 800 Mhz FSB ...
1.8 Ghz -- 900 Mhz FSB
Dual 2.0 Ghz -- 1 Ghz FSB
Straight from his Stevie-ness.
Jaguar is not the OS, OS X is the OS. It is not being "killed off after a year," simply upgraded to a new version. No one is being forced to upgrade, nor will developers be forced to optimize for 10.3 (the minimum requirements for new software will probably continue to be 10.2, which was the first Really Stable release).
Comparing actual improvements and new features to a bundle of bug fixes in an OS that didn't work in the first place is.. well.. missing the point.
In any case, "enterprise" is clearly not Apple's target market, with the exception of graphics houses and the like. Corporate America can go right on crunching numbers in Excel on the gray boxes.
Am I the only one who doesn't like the iTunes/Safari/etc. "Brushed Metal" look? And now they're doing it to the beautiful Finder? I can't imagine that I'm the only one who thinks it looks significantly less pretty than the simpler white look. The dark gray is just too intrusive and distracting, and it just doesn't LOOK as nice. I mean, here..
r -1 1-med.jpg
http://www.studio2f.com/misc/images/1946sPanthe
Why is that better than this?:
http://www.apple.com/macosx/jaguar/finder.html
I ask you. Am I alone here?
Liberty in Our Lifetime - http://www.freeme.org/
A single fix turnaround in Xcode takes about 3 seconds on average.
If this works - this may change the way people develope large C++ projects.
I typically imbed a small parer into all of my large apps so I can quickly tweak the behavoiur of the app without a compile/link cycle.
IF I can tweak things and compile/like at this speed - who cares?
Moneyed corporations, non-working 'poor' and criminal prisoners are turning productive citizens into tax-slaves.
I just started using Macs, after using Windows and Linux for years...
I'll pay the extra, because I don't have to screw around with it to get stuff to work the way I want, like I did Linux and Windows.
Call it "dumb" if you like, but it works for me. I'm not "dumb", but I'll admit to be "cheap" (hoping for cheaper upgrade this time around...)
dochood
Personally, I see Apple forcing their users to upgrade since they don't make it simple for developers to write their code once and have it run on all their system versions.
Don't forget about all the software that requires 10.2, like Safari. Those of us who haven't spent the $130 for Jaguar can't run Safari... MS may be evil, but they never forced me to buy a new version of windows to get the latest web browser.
I am writing this from the Apple Store in Shaumburg, IL. The strangest thing I have seen is that the Apple Store website is currently down. THis is depite the fact that the only addition they have made today that is currently selling is the new video camera (so far... They just got done releasing the new G5 computers).
Maybe that is just to make sure no rumors start circulating. I am not sure.
The keynote has been great so far.
Seeing the dual Xeon stutter on things that the dual G5 is able to handle without sweating is great.
iChat AV looks nice. It will work really well when combined with Rendevous.
He just said that Safari is going 1.0 today.
8GB of RAM supported? Serial ATA? USB 2.0? 1 GHZ frontside bus? I said these things were too fantastical to be real. Apparently I was wrong... Glad to be wrong for once.
Keynote just ended, nothing new for sale.
About 120 people here watching. The most amazing thing? I got told that I could not take pictures with my camera. Weird...
- (c) 2018 Hank Zimmerman
Yah, that's one solution, but then your users don't like you anymore because somehow they can tell when an app is Cocoa and when it's Carbon. I dunno why, but details of the APIs used are allowed to leak into the UI.
The main problem that the original poster was referring to btw is the fact that MacOS has no real upgrade management. The way it works is this:
On Windows, you have installers, which check your system for the components they need. Typical components are, ActiveX, DirectX, MDAC, Internet Explorer, Shell32 etc. If the version is too old, it is upgraded. This sometimes breaks things, but generally people prefer it to having apps require XP for instance.
On Linux you have ELF (symbol) versioning. When you compile an app, you can control which set of libraries (and for glibc, symbols) it links against. Then you can install sideloaded libraries if the versions on the system are too old or two new, and glibc never breaks backwards compat so that's OK.
Apple generally doesn't make large core upgrades available for free, so application authors have a problem. Not all their users will be on the latest version, so they have to cleanly disable code that needs the new features. Unfortunately, MachO wierdness means that isn't always as simple as dlopen()ing a library like what you'd do on Linux or Windows, so they use something called "weak references". Basically if a symbol is missing, when run instead of failing to start, the app will run but with the missing symbol set to NULL. If it's used, the app will crash, but you can check if it's NULL before use.
Sounds great right? Well, it would be, but weak symbols were only introduced with 10.2, and API coverage was not complete. In fact, it wasn't even mostly complete. IIRC not even all of Cocoa was covered. So, in the absence of any easy way to cleanly fail features, and no way to upgrade the OS legally, apps end up having hard dependancies on the latest version of the OS.
That fulfills Apples goal of getting more upgrade sales because suddenly all your apps need the latest version (or the developers must be careful to code things and compile on separate copies of the OS etc), but makes life harder for the user and developer. Hopefully they will get weak symbols sorted out soon. It's still lame compared to Windows because you have to switch off features, but at least it's an acceptable compromise.