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Mac OS X 10.4 "Tiger" Preview at WWDC
hype7 writes "Apple just announced that it will kick off WWDC 2004 with a preview of the next iteration of Apple's operating system, Mac OS X, in a Steve Jobs keynote. This version of Mac OS X, 10.4, has been code named 'Tiger.' As usual, Apple is being incredibly tight lipped about what's going to be added; there hasn't even been that much speculation of new features on the rumor sites. WWDC is scheduled to begin on the 28th of June."
And as usual they will charge 129.99 for an upgrade. Maybe OS updates should be a subscription thing?
Personally, I'd be very pissed off if I had shelled out for a previous upgrade. Maybe my memory is off here, but it seems like these upgrades are as bad as Windows, only with less substantial sounding version number changes.
Kinetic stupidity has a new brand leader: Allen Zadr.
OK,
......
I love my iBook, I love my Cube, but come on!
I can understand why Apple wanted to move forward quickly from the 10 to 10.1 and then to 10.2. These were all big leaps forward to add simple features back in that were missing.
But I can't see why we needed the jump from Jaguar to Panther a year later. 150 new features my arse. Expose, File vault and er er er
I can see NO reason to pay another 79 only a year after Panther. Ask for more, when you have a big update.
I won't buy this one.
K
...and here's why: After this last semester of dealing with linux and windows in the house, cheap x86 hardware, school, and work, I HAVE HAD IT!
i will be buying Apples for both me and my girlfriend and an older dualproc Sun server to chain SCSI drives off of.
I HAVE HAD IT WITH SHIT NOT WORKING OUT OF THE BOX, FIRST TIME! i am not dealing with Windows nor linux for any of our serious design work anymore. i know this a massive linux crowd here, and honestly, i really love linux for my firewall and server stuff and my run Gentoo on the Sun (doubt it though...gentoo-sparc is nice, but Solaris 9/10 it ain't).
i don't have the time to fuck about with things anymore. i have to be able to plug it in, turn it on, and let people get to work. i say more power to Apple and they can have some of my cash too. You take the power of *nix (yes, i know what is under the Apple hood, i'm speaking general here) and put a slick, smooth, beautiful, easy-to-use GUI on top, have Adobe compile the must-have apps for it and i'll buy. Apple has done this. Now i will buy. And no, i don't have loads of cash laying around, i'm going to have to scrape to do this, but you know what? It's worth it.
I wonder if this one will be even faster than Panther. I'm running OS X on a G3/400 iMac at home -- it's a little over five years old at this point. Every release of OS X is faster than the one before.
Looking forward to it. I'm going to WWDC again this year -- hopefully attendees will get free copies like they did for Panther last year.
--saint
As soon as I heard about Exposé, I knew I was going to get Panther... even though I already had Jaguar. I've now bought five separate versions of OS X (Public Beta, 10.0, 10.1, 10.2, 10.3), and I'm tired of paying for these menial upgrades. Unless there is something truly, ridiculously amazing about "Tiger" I'm not going to pay for it. I'll wait for "Lion" or "Ocelot" or "Leopard" or whatever comes next.
And, yes, I'm just making those names up.
----------
I'm sick and tired of being responsible for the preservation of the universe and its outlying suburbs.
The big question I'm waiting to answer is whether this will be an incremental update or a major update. Panther added some nice new functionality Fast User Switching, Expose (which I don't use nearly as much as I thought I would the first time I saw it), and better networking support. It was a tough call but I believe it was worth the upgrade, fast user switching alone has made my life a lot easier.
What's left, quite a lot actually. The Finder for one thing could use a lot of enhancements. Forgoing the whole brush metal fiasco, I care little about, there is the whole underlying functionality. Why is it that the OS can't update the window's contents without being pushed to do it. This is something that is fundamentally critical to an operating system. Additionally browsing folders across a network with a large number of files in it is painfully slow, and I'm talking my 100MB network at home.
Lastly I would like to see a decent integrated development environment. XCode is a nice upgrade from previous tools but I'd still like to be able to work on the GUI and on code at the same time. CASE tools have come a long way, but Apple's tools still have a very antiquated feel about them.
Sir, there is a dragon outside with an armful of armor. He's inquiring if we offer free refills.
Panther added longevity to my old G4 400mhz machine. It feels relatively fast. I'm looking forward to the next upgrade. 129 bucks is well worth it for the considerable upgrades and improvments that occur with each 10.x release.
Yes! I listen to NYC Speedcore and do math at 3AM. I suggest you try it too.
Come on, you're not even trying. A decent, powerful, extensible Finder replacement (cf PathFinder)? A more flexible dock for us power users (DragThing is invaluable, but there's no way to replace the Dock itself for things like notifications, icon updates, minimized windows)? Ability to "check out" home directories from a server? Polishing more of the rough edges off Xcode and the other bundled apps? More consistent UI (eliminate -- or make universal -- the metal abomination)? A universal metadata layer so that everyone can -- for example -- easily and simply access iPhoto and iTunes attributes on files? A Cocoa component architecture for sharing third-party Cocoa views? Garbage collection for Cocoa? Support for PDF annotations in Preview?
I agree. Expose alone was worth the cost of upgrading because it's enhanced my productivity.
I'm in the hole of the broadband donut.
Could somebody please tell me whether they've pam_ified LoginWindow on OS X after 1.28? What's the point of including pam in your system, linking ssh and the rest of them against it, but not linking LoginWindow (the main login screen on OSX) to pam, thus making it useless for centralizing authentication.
pam_smb works a treat on OSX, I can authenticate ssh logins to our NT domain, but the actual local login window on OSX takes not a blind bit of notice of pam, making it not-so-useful.
That is the Word right there, my brother! My last straw was when I got my wife a laptop for her grad school work, decided I'd put Linux + OO.org on it for her. She likes her music, and listens to headphones while she works. Long story short, I found out that in order to get Linux to work with the laptop's (proprietary) soundcard, I would have had to recompile the freaking kernel.
Uh-uh. No thank'ee. I ain't got neither the desire nor the time for that shit. I just want something that freaking WORKS.
So I installed WinXP on the laptop, and got myself a G5 last year. Happy I am.
OMFG, add FTP write support in the Finder to that list. I'd be willing to upgrade for that alone (if iLife '04 came with it). I thought Panther would have it; I wept (silently to myself). If they are supporting SAMBA, etc., in the Finder, full FTP support should ALREADY BE THERE.
Apple has had a chance to updates its OS every year because they haven't had to worry about security in their OS. I'm sure Microsoft could have done the same thing, if they had a secure OS. I honestly won't mind paying for this updates (If I have to I will but I'm getting my iBook close to when Tiger will be released).
People will tend to show loyalty to a [computer|operating system|productivity package|device|office chair], until they don't want to any more. When something breaks, they'll either persevere and stick it out through the problem (replacing the troublesome part if need be) or, as is often the story, they've had it with this POS and will jump ship as soon as they have the money and find something which they think will be more reliable.
It's not unique to Apple switchers, either. Sometimes people get fed up and go to Windows. Or they get fed up with both and move to Linux. Or they get sick of Linux and move back to what burned them least the last time. It's called turnover, people. Microsoft could give away puppies. Apple could give away chocolate-covered gold ingots on a stick. Michael Dell himself could give each and every loyal (and willing) customer a BJ. Turnover may approach, but will never equal, zero.
Computer companies can try to lock in customers using whatever proprietary mechanisms they want, but if users still struggle enough against those locks (cough*LONGHORN*cough), they will still jump ship and cut their considerable losses -- a process not unlike an animal gnawing off its own leg to escape a trap. The best defense against customers leaving is to create a product that will least likely drive the customer away in the first place. That means quality control, reliability, and user experience.
That would seem to be Apple, but sooner or later everybody gets fed up with something.
You cannot truly appreciate Dilbert until you read it in the original Klingon.
Yeah, I'm replying to my own post. My previous one was trollish, and I thought I should clarify.
/.ers think it's cool, but when Microsoft does it, they complain" meme. The facts are that a) Microsoft is a convicted monopoly, and Apple isn't, and b) more importantly, Apple does it better than Microsoft. Microsoft embeds lousy software in a lousy OS, releases lousy service packs, and talks about "innovation" when all they create is bloat. Apple embeds good software in a good OS, releases upgrades that really do improve the software and OS even further, and continues to be the driving force in innovation for the whole PC industry.
/. who are smart enough to recognize that. People don't hate Microsoft because it's Microsoft. They hate it because its products and business practices suck.
I'm really sick of the "When Apple does it,
I'm not saying this is a permanent state of affairs. Companies can and do change. If you'd asked me twenty years ago, I'd have said that IBM would never be anything other than "Big Blue", a giant corporation sucking the life out of the industry by trading on name recognition to crush smaller companies that were doing all the real innovation. These days, IBM are the good guys. It may be that Microsoft will go through a similar change, and in twenty years they'll be an ally to small developers and desktop users, while Apple (or, more likely, some company we've barely even heard of in 2004) will be the giant evil force that's holding back the whole industry.
But right now: Microsoft is a bad corporation with bad products, Apple is a great corporation with great products, and there are a lot of people on
The correlation between ignorance of statistics and using "correlation is not causation" as an argument is close to 1.
They ought to suck up the price of the upgrade and roll it into their .Mac subscriptions. Make it cheaper to get .Mac + the upgrade vs. just the upgrade alone.
I am a recent convert and I am *utterly* pleased with 10.3. With that being said, there are a couple things I'd like to see improved/fixed:
1. Give me the option to have my quoted text in Mail.app appear at the top of my cursor when replying to an email. Few types of miscreant are worse than top-posters, and Apple doesn't need to be aiding and abetting.
2. Speed. I'll take OS X over Linux/X11 or XP any day of the week, but I'd love to see XP's responsiveness in the Tiger GUI. Again, I prefer the stability to the speed, but having both would be rich.
3. As mentioned, SMB interoperability can use some tweaking in the areas of both speed and ease of use.
4. This is sacrilegious, but the Finder still isn't there for me. I *hate* the spacing of the icons in icon view (they are like 3 feet apart), and the viewing of directories and files simply isn't as intuitive to me as it is in XP. Pathfinder does a much better job, in my opinion.
dmiessler.com -- grep understanding knowledge
What everyone on /. would say if it were a Microsoft product was that they rushed to get the product out the door, and then made people pay to get bug fixes. So 10.2 is faster than 10.1? That means that they didn't take the time to make 10.1 fast. And now they want YOU to pay because they released their sub-par code before it was ready for prime-time.
Am I the only one hoping for full 64bit libraries that will allow one process to access more than 4GB of memory?
What about hoping that 10.4 is the setup and a dual 3GHz will be the big announcement?
So here's a question: Why is it that while the OSes are named for large cats, the O'Reilly books on things Mac-related all feature dogs on the covers?
Hey - Accessibility isn't just about the blind. I actually use the screen reader for a lot of purposes. For example, I am curently using the screen reader to help me audit a bunch of data files. The computer reads, "1000 mhz 10 db, 1250 mhz 15db..." and I check everything on paper while it's talking. The spoken interface is also great for when I'm using my bluetooth mouse from WAAY across the room (i.e. watching a DVD) and I need to know what time it is.
"One touch of Darwin makes the whole world kin." George Bernard Shaw
I work as a system administrator for a small non-profit. I have enough work and dealing with configuration of yet another Linux box is not something that I would like to do on my free time. Do not get me wrong, I love what I do for living; however, I do not want to do my work at work and at home.
When I switched to Mac OS X I was fairly pleased with the fact that I could work from home on a system with a stable GUI that hasn't crashed on me in more than one and a half years. I can do all my work on a system that does not require a lot of maintenace; that increses my productivity. I am impressed by the quality of Xcode and how much you can do with it without installing a ton of new things. I can do OpengL programming, write user interfaces and do all sorts of things out of the box -- install Xcode and you're a done! Did I mention well-integrated Java support?
With that in mind, I am looking forward to the new version of the operating system that I love to use. However, I hope that Apple incudes more than new icons and new GUI features in 10.4. Here is my small wish list:
Update CVS to the most recent version.
Add better group and user management. For example, make sure that every user is a member of 'staff' and the admin user is a member of 'staff' and 'wheel.' It would be cool if UNIX inclined people could have a set of advanced options when it comes to user creation.
Fix passwd. I would like to use it in order to change my passwords; it is faster for me that way. I am sure that this command can be updated to change my KeyChain password.
Add more fonts.
Add tabbed sessions for Terminal. I know that there is iTerm, but it choked on me way too many times. I like Terminal better.
Add virtual desktops as a part of the window manager.
Provide a stable front end to firewall that supports both TCP and UDP rules. Currently, only TCP traffic can be managed.
Well, I guess that is it for 10.4.
Yeargh. Our CEO pointed this out to me today, and couldn't understand why I burst into tears.
We have two Xserves and a G4 tower running Server 10.2.8... They have been tweaked for our workflow (which involves a mix of open and comercial software), and I haven't the time/energy to worry about an appropriate upgrade strategy yet (IT department of 1). I've just recently made sense of the workflow and gotten most of the cruft out or documented... and now I'm expected to upgrade (not from Crapple, but my fanboy boss...)?
I wish they (Apple) would change their naming conventions and release schedules to reflect the drastic difference between client machine needs and improvements and needs of server software... I hate upgrading production servers (Apple has been a little on the cavalier side when it comes to "their" config files) but I am willing to do it every two to three years, and have few qualms about various hotfixes and security patches they release.
But every year? Isn't that a bit much?
grump grump grump
[NOTE: There is no specific mention of Mac OS X Tiger Server, but they've been releasing Server a few months after client since 10.1 came out. So there.]
QA implies some kind of quality to begin with.
My concern is that apple will keep this pace up but run out of steam. Soon they'll start adding tons of bloat to the OS just to keep up on releasing new features. Will Apple eventually slow down and start working more on speed, reliability and security instead of trying to do the radical release every year thing?
Just my concern,
Geoffeg
Many years ago (mid 90's) a friend I worked with (in a building full of PC's) would be humming along on his lone Mac. This was back in the pre-OS X days.
I would be cursing and he would be happy. I would be cranky and he would be... well you get the drift. Finally I said "yeah, it is a nice machine, but it costs so much!"
He said, "Buy one and you will never complain about the cost again."
So I did. And guess what? I stopped worrying so much about "Why does this no longer work?". I just worked.
Today I have five (including the iBook). And NOW I can spend the time to install things because I WANT to, not because the piece of dreck won't work like I want it to without it.
IANAL, but I've seen actors play them on TV
Anyone got the shinny on whether there'll be drivers & compiler for the new shading language? I'd speculate that they'll do so to stay on the leading edge of open standards. Only 3dlabs has a compiler for windows & linux now, and apparently there is some buggy support for ati.
I want
improved Finder I think all Mac OS X users will agree with me better feature parity between Cocoa and Carbon every release improves this for older features, but every release also adds new features to one or the other w/o adding them to both better integration of Cocoa and Carbon Let me put an HIView in an NSWindow (no, the child window workaround is no good, because it doesn't work with keyboard navigation and it causes visual oddities such as disabling controls or taking away key window status.). And let me create custom menus in Cocoa. rpc.quotad I'm setting up an Xserve (w/ 3.5 TB Xserve RAID) running Mac OS X Server to serve files via NFS to some Solaris boxesThere's more, but I can't remember all of it right now.
-- Tim Buchheim
have "Schrodinger" as version 10.8
"Will it be released or not?"
i'd hit it so hard, if you pulled me out you'd be the king of britain [bash.org]
In response:
I can think of two dozen more off-hand.
...the best thing to happen to GUIs in years... a command line on steroids. I can barely stand using computers without it anymore.
---If you can't trust a nerd, who can you trust?
What I want to know is, why do you have to upgrade from Panther to run the most recent version of the Safari web browser? Does a web browser really require the "advanced functionality" offered by Panther? Did the APIs really change that much?
I honestly may just know nothing about the Apple development APIs, but as a normal Mac user, this seems sleazy: I can't upgrade browsers until I buy a new OS!
So you do effectively have to upgrade OSes to get most of the software updates offered by Apple. In my opinion, you should never produce break an API unless you have a major version change. In the case of Apple, it is unreasonable to require an OS upgrade to upgrade a web browser; if the APIs/behavior really changed that much, they should not have done it in a minor (10.x) update of the OS.
I had a look at a French guy's iBook a short while back, and noticed that they didn't bother to translate the App names (a side effect of the fact that a single copy of an OS X app can contain any number of localisations). In French the IM app is still called iChat, which translates as iCat.
I am TheRaven on Soylent News
Apple (Computer, Inc.) has had a thing for codenames even back to the days of the Apple ][e (Diana) and Apple /// (Sara). They were ignored by the general public and simply enabled engineers to communicate about their project without having to have the legal and marketing departments involved.
During the exile of Steve Jobs, Apple had many more projects under development than were being released. Apple started talking about projects in their R&D department (like WildCard) before they were made into a product (like Hypercard) and before these names were run by legal and marketing. This certainly fit in the Scully|Spindler|Amelio philosophy of letting the world see and smell what you have baking even if they can't actually taste it yet. It was during this time that the general public was exposed to the anticipation and delight of a good codename can inspire.
After Steve Jobs returned, Apple's internal kitchens were closed. But they still used codenames to talk about future products. They started by naming runs of things similarly. Operating Systems were named after types of music (Allegro, Sonata, Rhapsody). When the huge division developed between Mac OS 9 and X, codenames changed to be various versions of twilight for Classic Mac OS (starlight, moonlight, etc.) and various big cats for Mac OS X (Cheetah, Puma). About the time that Puma was getting ready for release people started to specualte what was next (Jaguar and then ?).
Because of this public scruity, Apple has taken what was just a sassy internal form of communication ("The Ric Ford Release", "7-up", etc) and turned it into a term that had to have legal and marketing approval. People were now looking at what the codenames meant. At this point, now that the terms are carefully scrutinized before the public ever hears them, they don't mean anything other than a tarted-up pointer to a project. Reading anything into them today merely gives insight into the marketing (and maybe legal) department rather than engineering.
Take for example the codename Merlot. According to different people this was a codename for Mac OS X v 10.2.x+, v 10.3, and now 10.4. What does it mean? People have speculated endlessly. It's not the name of a cat so it must be a change in direction for Apple, right? Maybe it's the name of a secret technology or UI enhancement that Apple just keeps delaying because it's not quite ready, maybe? Forget the speculation on the term Merlot. It may have been a codename and in fact may still be a codename, but it doesn't mean anything anymore.
While Apple's codenames used to be clever, sassy, inside jokes in many cases, today that aspect of Apple culture has been stopped because of too much public scrutiny. You don't get trademarks on real codenames, yet Tiger and some other cat names have already been registered for Apple. Though at one time these were clever bits of insight on Apple's internal thinking, today they are meaningless marketing labels.
Let's not forget the Power Mac 7100 incident involving Carl Sagan. Interesting little story for those who've never heard it before.
IIRC, the first-gen Power Macs were internally codenamed "PDM" (6100), "Carl Sagan" (7100), and "Cold Fusion" (8100). Carl Sagan got wind of this via a MacWEEK article about the forthcoming machines, and promptly complained that Apple was using his name to promote their products without his consent-- a rather nebulous accusation since it was an internal codename never intended to be made public. Some say Sagan was also miffed about having his name included with two scientific frauds, Piltdown Man and cold fusion. I don't recall if lawyers came into play at this point, but they definitely did when Apple changed the 7100's codename to "BHA," widely rumored to stand for "Butt-Head Astronomer."
Sagan sued and lost, but the 7100's codename was again changed to "LAW," rumored to stand for "Lawyers Are Wimps."
There is a rumor going on about virtual desktops.
I have no idea what it will be, but I'd be willing to bet that 10.4 "Tiger" includes a new major OS feature that takes advantage of Quartz Extreme.
For those that aren't familiar with it, Quartz Extreme, which was introduced in 10.2, uses OpenGL to "composite" your screen image. In other words, all application windows are bitmaps on your graphics card, and your graphics card puts them together to make the overlapping windows that you see.
In 10.2, the result was a 30% speed improvement for many operations, because the CPU no longer needed to spend as much time redrawing the screen. Eye candy like soft drop shadows on every window and on the mouse cursor, the Genie effect, and Dock magnification got a lot faster and smoother.
In 10.3, they added Expose and Fast User Switching (with a cool rotating animation) - neither of which would have been realistic without Quartz Extreme. Thanks to Quartz Extreme, my 733 MHz G4 had no problem Expose-ing 18 windows instantly, perfectly smoothly, including continuing to play a QuickTime movie while rearranging the windows! (Hint: hold down Shift while you press your Expose shortcut to watch it in slow motion!)
So anyway, in 10.4 I expect to see some major new OS feature that takes advantage of Quartz Extreme. Just think: they have the ability to instantly make any window partially transparent, rotate any window in 3-D, warp the whole desktop under the mouse, you name it - so I think there's a good chance they've come up with a clever new way to exploit this. Anyone could implement Expose on any OS - but without Quartz Extreme you couldn't possibly make it so fast and so smooth.
Apple *must* release a full 64-bit OS so customers can take advantage of the G5's main selling point (the 64-bit processor/s), and the sooner, the better. They should have released that OS including a 64-bit-supporting X11, XCode and some multi-platform-grid-software (such as Pooch or XGrid) in autumn 2003 and their only option is to catch up as soon as possible. That type of technology will be surely at the center of the Tiger update.
As long as you have your application package to install, it doesn't matter on what OS you install it; Windows XP, Linux or Mac OS X. Most installations require the user to follow 'some installation steps' anyway, and the more interesting options usually take a bit longer.
You will end up with more than one platform on your desk anyway, so you can take advantage of some more options than just being locked on one OS - remember, an OS is not a belief system, it's a means to an end. While Windows XP may not be as stable as Mac OS X, the choice of specialized software products is excellent and makes up for a lot; and while Linux may not be as simple to set up, it's free, it runs on cheap hardware and for the most part it is very stable. OS X is a very stable GUI for a powerful system and has a lot of recent, very hip applications and a very useful file browser (Finder). Even on OS X, you will also spend some more time installing your X11-packages, sometimes manually, sometimes using Fink, at which point you're doing the same you'd be doing on Linux. I don't know whether it's a big difference whether you run Mozilla on Windows, Linux or Mac.
If Apple had a 64-bit OS now, the G5 could easily be on the road to becoming the 'iPod mini' of the entry-level workstations. If they wait for too long until the unleash the full power of the G5, we will eventually have switched to some Hewlett Packard RISC workstations - and I am sure that Sun will drop prices on their workstations a bit, too.
So: I believe that Tiger will be fully 64-bit. If it is not, it's simply bad business.
Wolf.