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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 woulda got first post but Bittorrent is using all my bandwidth downloading OS X Tiger Final Canidate.
sgarringer@gmail.com
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'
Its far more than a point release . The fact it adds many new features to the OS it is far more of an upgrade than most. . ;)
The new search tech is fully integrated
The new G5 optimised code in the kernel is implemented iirc
The Dashboard looks very cool
A reworking of many of the key areas of the functionality of the OS
Read the article and read any review of the tiger betas out there to find out for yourself why this is more than a mere update.
The only things certain in war are Propaganda and Death. You can never be sure which is which though
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.
For the love of God!!! Its not a point release. Man, just because Linux goes by that way of point releases doesn't mean OS X does. 10.x is not points but a full independent version, 10.x.y is a point release.
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Rumurs are that it will be presented this Friday (april 1st) and that it will be "unleashed" on April 15. Is it logistically possibly that right now it's not even "gold master" and that 2 weeks later millions of discs are pressed and packaged?
So I believe the 15th as release date is very improbable (by Zarquon), maybe June 6th at WWDC?
Apple OS XI "west highland terrier"
The only things certain in war are Propaganda and Death. You can never be sure which is which though
The fact that it's a a point release is basically just semantics. Apple sort of painted themselves into a corner with the name OSX. It's sort of the 10th version of the Mac OS, but the X was to make it sound cooler and sort of clever, but what comes after? OS XI? That looks weird. And a little too close to XP. So they've gone with 10.whatever, and used 10.x.x for what'd normally be considered a point release. 10.4 has been a long time coming, and it's got plenty of big changes over 10.3, such that a bigger name change wouldn't be that surprising, if apple could come up with a better name for it. That's probably why they've been making the big cat code names more official. Jaguar, Panther, Tiger...
If you want, you can complain that Apple's devaluing the normal versioning numbering system, but I don't think they'll care much if you do.
One time I threw a brick at a duck.
No, this is nothing new.
Yes, the version number seems to indicate it's not a new version but only an update. You have to simply ignore the leading "10.". It ain't that hard.
Yes, this is actually like Microsoft charging you for XP (NT5.1) after you already bought Win2000 (NT5.0) or NT4.0 or NT3.51 - the leading "10." is like the leading "NT" from Microsoft.
Yes, this is old news, but the issue comes up every time Apple releases a new version of OS X.
You're clearly being facetious, but not everyone will pick up on that. Thus, a point of explanation:
It's a mere point release, but that's an artifact of marketing. The number and magnitude of changes under the hood is incredible, with huge advances in developer productivity through tools like CoreData, CoreImage, and CoreVideo. The rendering subsystem has been worked over to the point where some operations are hundreds or thousands of times faster than they used to be, and the system takes advantage of modern GPUs to offload even more processing (formerly it was just compositing, not it's a whole lot more). Add to that new versions of Safari, Quicktime that's build on CoreAudio, and a ton of other neat stuff (Automator). You get a lot for your $140.
And remember, the 2.6 kernel was just a point release!
*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.
Follow me
Looks like there will be a 10.3.9 update soon, interestingly enough.
Typically, there's a 30 or 60 day (I forget which) period, that if you've purchased new equipment you can get the new OS either for free or the cost of shipping, something like that. I know I got Jaguar for less than $25 when it came out, because I had just purchased a laptop before its release.
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 worked as a Mac Genius when Jaguar came out, and there was an official cut-off date about 5 weeks before the official release. If you purchased a mac between then and the release date, you got the free upgrade. Not the stand-alone OS install, mind you, but the "drop in" upgrade discs that they toss in the boxes of new macs at the store that don't have the OS preloaded. They do have a little give around these dates if you whine enough (hope I'm not violating my NDA...=)
You CAN install the OS from scratch (you aren't forced to do one of those nasty upgrades), but you MUST have the previous OS installed for the discs to work. Which you do, so don't worry. It just means if you ever need to reinstall your OS in the event of a disaster, you'll have to install 10.3 first, then do the format-(or archive)-and-install with 10.4.
With the first link, the chain is forged.
All this talk about "point releases" is just semantics. I know most Slashdotters aren't zoologists, but all significant OS X upgrades are SPECIES updates.
Jumping over to Family Canidae from Family Felidae, would you upgrade from a Chihuahua that shits on your keyboard to a Golden Retriever that fetches beer and Hot Pockets? I sure would.
That's about the difference that Tiger is going to be over 10.0 (Cheetah).
It seems to me that Apple are doing versioning right.
The way it should work is x.y.z
z: Bug fixes
y: New features
x: Backwards compatibility break
Since 10.4 appears to have new features, but not break backwards compatibility, it's the right version.
If Linus and Apple with their Tiger release got together and released an OS would you have a Liger, only like, the best OS ever? Gosh.
However don't expect all the bells and whistles with only 32 Mb of video ram.
I have a Mini with a 20" Cinema Display and expose is already choppy (Courtesy of the 1600*1050 display).
I've read Tiger will require 64 Mb of Video Ram for all the cool "Core Video" features.
Does anybody know if they managed to get these features working on the Mini? Apple would be shotting itself in the foot if a 2005 machine could not run their 2005 OS
Artificial intelligence is no match for natural stupidity
11.0 Halle Berry
11.1 Eartha Kitt
11.2 Julie Newmar
11.3 Nastassja Kinski...
meow!
I like microcars
I mean, if you stick with Microsoft you'll only have to pay for a new OS every 7-10 years or so!
It seems to me that Apple are doing versioning right.
The way it should work is x.y.z
z: Bug fixes
y: New features
x: Backwards compatibility break
Does that mean Windows XP should really be called Windows 3.15.8734?
Well, people refer to OS X as "Oh, sex", so adding the I on the end would make it "Oh, sexy!"
I don't know about 10.4 (and if I did know I wouldn't be allowed to say) but I'm guessing that it's not that much different to the way iSync works now in 10.3.
You can sync between one Mac, your phones, iPods, Palms, etc. without requiring a .Mac subscription. However for Mac to Mac syncing you do need .Mac
However, if you have access to your own server somewhere, it is possible to fake it to look like .Mac Here are some instructions on how to do that.
Note: I haven't actually tried it myself (yet)
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
z: Bug fixes
y: New features
x: Backwards compatibility break
Does that mean Windows XP should really be called Windows 3.15.8734?
You probably want to drop the z value a bit
- It's sad that this has to be said in every single Tiger thread, but Core Image/Video will not refuse to work on older Macs. It has an AltiVec fallback path that is slower than the GPU path but produces the same results.
- The real importance of CI/V is not how cool it looks applying Photoshop filters to movie trailers; it's having an advanced image and video transformation infrastructure built into the OS and available to all developers. Apple is clearly planning for the future here, and the real benefits of CI/V will not be felt until months after Tiger ships and apps start appearing that were designed taking blur/distortion/etc for granted. That 10-20% is only going to grow in the future.
"If I don't want it, it's utterly worthless" is one of the most persistent and insidious memes on Slashdot. Please don't succumb to it.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).
He did. You're looking at an overflow.
Attention deficit disorder is a complicated issue, spanning several major... HEY LET'S GO RIDE BIKES!
Just keep in mind that buying a Mac Mini doesn't give you a license to put Tiger on your iBook. Not that anyone's stopping you, but if you don't care about proper licensing you might as well just pirate it in the first place. :-)
It's hard to be religious when certain people are never incinerated by bolts of lightning.
Pay your $599 license fee, you slack-off bastards!
I, for one, welcome our new Antichrist overlord.
From what I hear, every release of OS X get *faster*, allowing older hardware to run the new OS better than it could it's previous OS.
I would think Micro$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?
If you think about it, it's almost like a concession to Windows's application model.
Wait! Wait! Hear me out.
On Windows, every app gets its own menu bar. Essentially, every app lives in its own self-contained window. I find this very irritating for 90% of applications (SQL Server, I'm looking at you). On the Mac, by contrast, every app gets essentially full control of its space, including the system's one menu bar, when the app in particular is focused. This, I like.
90% of the time.
But what about apps that really are one window apps. This isn't like iTunes, or iPhoto, because these apps have menu bars, and separate palettes. I mean, apps like Stickies, or a calculator. Furthermore, why do I need the calculator sitting in the Dock, when it's just one window, that I don't need to see most of the time?
Enter Dashboard. Basically, it groups all of these one-window-apps into one place, and lets that particular area come and go as easily as Expose does. Your one-window-apps live in one giant container app, which is then treated like any other multi-window application.
Anyway. I think it's neat. I'll be buying Tiger as soon as it's available.
concrete5: a cms made for marketing, but strong enough for geeks.
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
Before even cracking a book, I'd probably start out with Apple's own "Getting Started" developer documentation. It's included with Xcode, and the introductory material is clear, fairly concise, and offers a lot of tutorials and code samples so you can easily see the concepts in action (this is particularly helpful if you haven't worked extensively with MVC development before).
If you intend on developing end-user stuff, be sure to check out the Human Interface Guidelines -- Mac users have expectations for how applications should "feel" and Apple has spent a lot of time and money developing and revising the HIG over the years. If it feels like a typical mediocre X11 app, it'll get torn to shreds by rabid users.
As for books...
Aaron Hillegass' Cocoa Programming for Mac OS X is an excellent primer and my personal favorite. It's not cheap at US$44.99, but well worth it. The first few chapters are essentially a Cliffs Notes version of Apple's free introductory material, and from there the book tackles a little bit of everything -- Objective-C basics, bindings, custom views, localization... you name it.
O'Reilly's Learning Cocoa (aka Learning Cocoa with Objective-C in its second edition) by James Duncan Davidson isn't horrible, but isn't the best. It also isn't as up-to-date as the Hillegass book, but they'll both be dated pretty shortly with Tiger coming out in the next few months (or a couple weeks, if you believe the rumor sites).
Once you get out of the starting gate, there aren't a whole lot of applicable books (but Cocoa and Objective-C are fairly easy to pick up). This isn't necessarily a bad thing, as Apple's mailing lists are a great resource and the developer and API documentation is quite good in most areas.
"wouldnt it be nice it they made OSX for a x86"
...
But they do, they just don't sell it.
In an interview last year, an Apple executive confirmed that an x86 port of OSX, aka Marklar does exist in Apple's labs and that they are keeping it on par with PPC development.
Before the release of the G5, Steve Jobs said in another interview that they do not plan to move to x86 but that they like to keep their options open.
If you take these two statements and add one and one together, it should become obvious that they have no intent to change their business model from making and selling "hardware including software" to "software including hardware" or even "software only". In other words, Marklar is just an insurance policy against unpredictable disaster scenarios where Apple would be forced to move to another CPU and as a result, Apple have a stronger negotiating position with IBM.
Consequently, for as long as IBM do a good job on fostering PPC, for as long as PPC is competitive, Apple have very little reason to move.
And should they ever decide to move, or should they decide to offer OSX on x86 in addition to PPC, their business model will almost certainly remain the same, meaning OSX will continue to be made to run on Apple hardware only, regardless of CPU compatibility.
So, you would then see an x86 Mac with exactly the same treats as today, from OpenFirmware to Apple's own motherboard designs, not compatible with other x86 hardware. In fact, such an x86 Mac might even have a custom x86 CPU, made only for Apple, ie bolted on AltiVec compatible SIMD. Without specific hacks, OSX would not run on other x86 machines. Likewise, Windows would probably not run on such an x86 Mac without some extra software from Microsoft, eg. Virtual PC or Mac/x86. Such an arrangement would also likely have Microsoft continue MS-Office development for the Mac - even more reason for Apple to choose such a path if they ever were to go x86.
So, whether or not Apple will release OSX on x86, if you want OSX on non-Apple x86 hardware, you will almost certainly have to rig your own.
Mind you, you can do this within limits already today. Darwin, the core of OSX, is available for x86 and it's a free download
http://www.opendarwin.org/en/downloads
You can get GNUstep and run it on top of Darwin x86
http://www.gnustep.org
GNUstep is the GNU implementation of OPENSTEP, the foundation on which Cocoa is build. In addition, GNUstep has some, but not all of the things Apple has added, so you get Cocoa compatibility within limits. This is as close as you can get OSX on x86 today. It's free, but it requires a little more effort than an OSX installation on a Mac. And if you want the OSX eye candy, you will also need to do a bit of DIY. If you do, consider becoming a contributor to the GNUstep project.
Thus, it comes down to paying a little extra for convenience or save some money and put in some work. You can't have it both ways. Remember, there ain't no such thing as a free lunch.
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