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.

Comments

Paying again...

[xtracto]

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).

Re:Paying again...

[znu]

But from the release notes I've seen, it looks like 10.2 and 10.3 are more or less identical from an API point of view, at least for the average application.

They're not. There are some pretty big differences, most notably Bindings, which only work on 10.3, and can save developers a huge amount of drudge word implementing a GUI. Thing is, most apps presently on the market predate Bindings, and switching an app over is a lot of work, so the technology hasn't been widely adopted and a lot of apps still work on 10.2.

With Core Data (which basically takes all the drudge work out of data modeling), Tiger is introducing something almost as significant. Maybe more significant for some apps.

If you're writing an new OS X app now, you'd be crazy not to use Core Data and Bindings -- they'll literally save you hundreds of hours.

Maybe large development houses have the luxury of investing all those hours to support older systems, but small operations and one-man projects generally don't. So, expect to see a lot of new apps from the small guys be Tiger-only.

Re:Diminishing Returns

[otis wildflower]

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).