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Mac OS X "Tiger" Enters Final Candidate Stage
Orangez writes "Apppleinsider.com reports that 'Tiger' reaches the final candidate stage. 'With massive software projects such as Tiger, Apple will sometimes seed several final candidate builds before one is declared gold master...'" The final release has widely been speculated to be in the next month or two.
I'd like to see them ship this sooner rather than later. People are excited about this release and we'd like to get our hands on it to become familiar with it.
I hope this release sticks around for a few years and Apple chooses to update it rather than come up with some new cat name and ask people to pay for it. I doubt that, however, since OS updates seems to be a major cash cow for Apple.
They are inadvertently (or purposefully) creating a situation where people are running 10.1, 10.2, 10.3, and now 10.4...makes it very tough for developers. We can't assume that everyone has the money to upgrade their OS all the time (and yes, I know they should).
Ubuntu is an African word meaning 'I can't configure Debian'
Does anyone know what Apple typically does for new systems? I bought my G4 Powerbook about a month ago and curious if I will have to pay the full rate for the upgrade. I recall in the past there have been special discounts/freebies for new owners.
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Any word on how it's expected to run on older hardware: meaning, any G4 from the last 4 or 5 years?
Every newer OS X has run better than the previous version on these machines from my experience, and from what I've heard others say. Realistically, how long can that go on though until newer versions start to overwhelm older hardware?
Anyone with their hands on a pre-release version of Tiger have any insight into this?
quiquid id est, timeo puellas et oscula dantes.
*yawn*
The Mac Mini (in its default/cheapest config) is perfectly good for surfing the web, checking mail and playing music and DVDs. And it's affordable. I know because I had mine pre-ordered and have been using it ever since it arrived.
Apple's OS software tends to get faster with every release, so you can be sure that Tiger will work fine on a Mac Mini. In fact we have it running on a Mini at work.
If you want a Mac, buy one instead of your next PC. If you really dislike the Mini, iBooks are cheap on E-bay.
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Well, the difference between Linux 2.4 and Linux 2.6 is huge. It's the same as in your example: x is the MAJOR version, y is the point release.
On the other tentacle, this is a case of comparing apples (uh oh) to oranges: OS X is a whole OS, Linux is just the kernel. We should be rather comparing Tiger to, let's say, Debian Woody or Debian Sarge.
The creatures outside looked from Alt-Right to Antifa; but already it was impossible to say which was which.
I'm waiting on Tiger so I can buy a Mac mini to use as a test server. Thing is, Apple has historically released OS X updates on the 24th of the month, and that falls on a Sunday. If no major issues in the FC, perhaps it will ship on Fri the 22.
"The objective of securing the safety of Americans from crime and terror has been achieved." -- John Ashcroft
Its far more than a point release
.Mac account. This seems absurd to me, especially considering that I and I'd imagine many others, would just want this functionality to sync my data between my Mac's and not a .Mac account. I don't have a .Mac account and I don't want one.
I read in a local PC centric computer mag, that the new sync function requires a
Can someone put my mind to rest on this? This is the biggest feature I am eagerly waiting for. I was going to just use rsync and some scripting, but if Apple has done this, then I imagine it will be much more polished than what I can whip up without a decent effort that results in something which lacks quirks.
War crimes, torture, lies, illegal spying... Would someone give Bush a blowjob, already, so he can be impeached?
Wow.
Sorry, but for most people CoreImage and CoreVideo is going to be utterly useless. Apple still ships shit, shit, shit video processors on the iBook, Mac Mini and only the latest generation Powerbooks, PMs and iMac have the much-needed Pixel Shader on their GPUs. I'd guess probably 10-20% of the Mac userbase uses a Powerbook latest revision, PM G5, or iMac G5. The iBook was Apple's best selling Mac a few months back and I'm sure that the Mac Mini will replace it.
So are you honestly going to tell me developers are going to bother developing with features that only 10-20% of their already small userbase can use?
Personally I don't see any one feature that Tiger has that I really want. Hopefully it'll be a lot more polished and have some nice performance increases, but the vast majoirty of stuff in Tiger is totally useless to me: I don't need spotlight since I organise my stuff well, I don't use Safari for anything more than basic browsing (I have a perfectly good RSS client already, thanks), I won't be using automator, quicktime or benefiting majorly from the new 'searchable' system preferences.
The only thing I'm really looking forward to is the new version of Mail, but it's not something I would spend $140 on -- I'll be getting it free though.
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A friend of mine works for Apple and he is running in his powerbook a one year-old beta version of Tiger. I was never interested in Macinstosh but since I seen him working on it I was amazed with the productivity one can achieve on that system. And that is an year-old beta! I imagine the RC must be great!
You got to try it!
I don't know anything about whether iSync will require .mac in 10.4, sorry. But I did want to bring a piece of sync software to your attention: Unison. http://www.cis.upenn.edu/~bcpierce/unison/
It works wonderfully well. It's a little cleverer than rsync in that it will do bi-directional updates (ie syncing) and also merges conflicts if it is able.
I work on two macs and with unison I am pretty much able to work on either one without having to worry about which one is up to date.
I have .mac too and that does a nice job of syncing iCal and Address Book and my Safari bookmarks. But I think Unison would probably do a pretty decent job of that too, although I have not tested that out.
I bought my first mac (a 15" PowerBook 1.25 GHz) as soon as they were announced. As I recall, it was only about 4-6 weeks later that 10.3 was released. I called Apple and asked about using my 'OS Upgrade certificates" to be told "we currently are not running any promotions with those."
{rant mode on}
I was very upset to think that they would not offer me the option to upgrade at a discounted rate so soon after I bought a top-of-the-line notebook. I've never dropped $3K on a PC before, and it was shocking.
I subsequently contacted customer relations, the apple store, the apple on line store, and even though I was polite and respectful, I got nowhere.
Today my PowerBook sits running 10.2 and I'm counting the days until I can get the 10.4 discs. A couple of months ago, I was at an Apple store, and told my tale of woe to the employees there while they were demo-ing iLife '05 for me.
I was wowed by iLife '05, and proceeded to buy a copy. I was really frustrated when I got home and it would not install!
Now, before you ding me by saying 'it clearly says 10.3 on the box' remember that I was not dealing with Linux where you'd better check compatibility VERY closely. I was in a high touch sales situation where I expected that the sales team would tell me that the software would not work.
On top of that, I have a PC that is less that 18 months old. I bought the top of the line OS from the vendor, and applications from that same vendor won't run on it? Ridiculous! Even Microsoft doesn't act that way.
I've got apps on Linux that have not been recompiled in 6 years. They run just fine in spite of hardware, kernel, and distribution changes.
The idea that Apple would leave me stranded, and offer me no options other than to drop an additional $129 on 10.3 which will be obsoleted VERY soon seems outrageous!
Oh, and I can't return iLife '05 because I broke the seal on the box. Gotta love Apple's support. I loved the way that during my 90 days of free customer support they told me "we don't support network printing." High touch, and extremely helpful - NOT...
In spite of that, I still love the PowerBook
{rant mode off}
But Herr Heisenberg, how does the electron know when I'm looking?
You are obviously not a developer
Agreed. Still, I'm grateful it's finally here.
They are not done. CoreData is just being introduced as is SpotLight, CoreImage and CoreVideo. QuickTime is just now being integrated with the Quartz display engine. There are still lots of things to add and make better.
I for one am looking forward to Lion or whatever the next cat's name will be.
It is.
It is.
New widgets and OS features can make you more productive. Just ask some Mac users about Exposé
Andreas
I am most looking forward to having JDK5 (or JDK1.5) support. I have put off using the new Java language extensions for production code because I do a lot of development work using OS X. JDK5 support alone is worth the upgrade price to me.
I am also interested in playing with Searchlight.
Mac OS X isn't revolutionary. It really is the synthesis of everything that we all wanted in an OS back in the late 1980s. If you take the better features of early Macintosh, Amiga, and all those competing projects that were attempting add a GUI to Unix, and mung them all together and then work out most of the kinks, you end up with Mac OS X.
;)
That sounds more KDE to me! And that's why I prefer KDE to any other non-OS X UI!
Seriously, the OS X UI and Cocoa frameworks are much cleaner and better thought-out than a munged hodgepodge of paradigms. Apple's value proposition is related to not just the technical underpinnings but the thoughtfulness of design and attention to end users. Apple sweats the interface details.
And the real question now is. . . Where do we go from here? After achieving the OS that everybody wanted 15+ years ago, now Apple's OS team suddenly find themselves without a goal. They've resorted to tacking on a hodgepodge of minor trinkets and calling it a major upgrade. It must be hard to step back and admit that they're done with this OS, and that continually adding new features to it may no longer be the right approach.
I'm not gonna try to push Tiger as a huge innovation, I have sympathy for your point here. However, to a certain extent, if maintaining OS X on the cutting edge (which may be a relatively slow crawl at times, if you're waiting for enough hardware to drive the really revolutionary stuff like voice recog or more miniaturization or whatnot) means putting up with continuous point releases to keep engineers working, that's fine with me. The US gov't does this to a degree with companies like Electric Boat: they don't _need_ new ships all the time, but they need to maintain the ability to build them, and they can't afford to let the skilled people become unavailable. If keeping a solid core of engineers at Apple paid and happy means the occasional softball release, so be it.
And honestly, I don't think Tiger's a softball release. For me, Panther was, and for any particular Macista a particular OSX release may be. But Tiger's got interesting stuff at the framework level, and who knows how useful Spotlight and Dashboard stuff will be?
If it was up to me, I would focus on maintenance, bugfixes, security, optimization. . . and de-emphasize the OS as a product. Put the OS back in its proper place, I say! An operating system shouldn't be a featured product, it should be merely a component -- a part of the computer, just like the hard drive, the RAM, the processor, etc. -- that is required for running applications.
Work for Intel then?
Seriously, when it comes to defining the place for an OS, you have to take the user into account. This attitude is great for hardware folks and embedded developers, but for desktop people it's toxic. As an end user, I want someone _else_ to make a lot of these decisions, because I don't want to waste my time on them. Having an 'advanced user' preference pane to offer finer-grained control of things is nice, but it shouldn't be necessary for normals.
The goal should be to provide a stable, efficient foundation for apps to run on, because apps are where your work gets done.
Sounds like a kernel to me, and Darwin does a pretty decent job of this. Cocoa frameworks also contribute, and Apple's OS releases typically contain a ton of interesting framework improvements (like CoreImage and CoreVideo for Tiger for example.. Imagine realtime SGI-like stream filters for video and image effects) that make upgrading worthwhile (and mandatory for the new apps enabled and/or improved by these new optimized libs).
Well, not quite.
CoreData and Bindings do reduce the amount of code you have to write, but they don't reduce the whole exercise to drag-and-drop. Sure, if all you need to do is keep a list of records showing strings, dates, images, etc, that much you can do with no code, but once you have any custom business logic you want to apply in your app, you'll still be writing code.
That being said, writing an app with Cocoa on Tiger will be less work than it's been to date.
-jcr
The only title of honor that a tyrant can grant is "Enemy of the State."
I understand what you're saying, but a few points:
Well TeX is at 3.141592. Donald Knuth is converging the version number to PI. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/TeX/
And Konfabulator also takes up 25-50% of my CPU time! Whee!
I paid for the program. As a paying customer, I wish that they'd spend a little more time streamlining their code, and a little less time whining about how Apple stole their idea.
Why yes, I AM a rocket scientist!
From what I hear, every release of OS X get *faster*, allowing older hardware to run the new OS better than it could it's previous OS.
I would think Micro$oft would want to take a look at this....Of course this would mean people wouldn't have to buy PCs as often...I wonder how Micro$oft's relationship with PC makers compares with Apple making their own hardware...
Something to think about. Any thoughts?
But the point is, its not going to be any slower.
What's great about it (and many of the things Apple has done) is that it uses the fastest available hardware to do the job.
You don't have a GPU that can handle the job, Altivec will do it.
Don't have Altivec, the core of the CPU will do it.
On other systems, either you have to have the hardware "required", or each developer has to handle checking for hardware and writing/optimizing all the code to handle the different configurations.
That's a huge feature IMO. Its not so much doing things that can't be done on "lesser" hardware, its about always using the fastest hardware available for the job.
How soon after a new Mac OS is released does it appear on new Mac inventory? I assume current Mac Minis ship with Mac OS 10.3.8 installed. How soon after Mac OS X 10.4 is shipped will I be able to buy a Mac Mini with Mac OS 10.4 pre-installed?
cpeterso
I hope there are fewer kernel panics with this one. I have a intel linux laptop and a G5 PowerMac. The laptop has never, ever crashed (since 2002). But I've had about 5 inexplicable kernel panics over the past 18 months with OS X 10.3. My office mate has a G5 PowerMac and he's had a similar number of kernel panics over the past 2 years.
I love OS X but it still isn't quite 100% there as far as stability from my experience.
Disclaimer: I am not under any Apple NDA, nor does any of this information come directly from someone under NDA.
There is some new hardware coming out, sometime between "now" and "the end of 2005" (how is that for vague). This new hardware will require extra drivers and code to support some new features. The beta testers have only been able to run Tiger on this hardware, released versions of 10.X don't work much, or at all.
Since releasing Tiger before the hardware is announced means that legions of Mac fanatics will be picking it apart, they will quickly find the code relating to new hardware names. So it is almost a certainty that Apple will release Tiger at the same time they announce the new hardware. The hardware might ship later, but at least it will be announced by the Tiger ship date. Tiger may be announced as much as a month in advance of its ship date, if past announcements are any guide.
So the speculation is centred around which events in Apple's calendar would be good for announcing a new round of hardware upgrades and new models, as well as releasing Tiger. The WWDC has been a favorite target until recently, as it is now approaching rapidly and Tiger is still in beta, MacPsychics are looking further into the summer for good announce dates.
the AC
My money is on the WWDC for a ship date
Hemos is like...sci-fi fans;he thinks technology is cool, but he hasn't bothered to understand the science it's based on
That I don't know. The new macs that came in had Jaguar on them pretty quick, and at the rate Minis are going I'd say a week or two tops. Hell, if you ordered one today you'd probably get one with 10.4, since there's a waiting list. Or, once they're in stock, roll into your local Apple store and ask them for one with 10.4. They can open the box real quick and if the install discs it comes with are 10.4, then you'll know.
With the first link, the chain is forged.