Apple Announces Tiger Release Date

GatorMarc writes "Well, it's official. Tiger will be released into the wild on April 29th with more than 200 new features, including Spotlight, Dashboard, Automator, VoiceOver, Safari RSS, Core Audio, and Core Image." Additional commentary available on ThinkSecret and MacWorld.

Comments

I use x86 PC myself...

[amliebsch]

But congratulations to Apple for what sounds like it will be another quality release. I personally don't plan on switching any time soon, but it pleases me to see some strong competition re-entering this marketplace. While I doubt this is the end of Microsoft, it certainly means they will have to get off their asses. The complacency of the last five years is over.

Re:Crap

[GizmoToy]

If by last night you mean April 12th (after midnight), then you'll be able to get it for $10 shipping and handling. Otherwise, you're gonna have to call and talk them out of it. In fact, I'd probably call today and let them know. Who knows, you only missed the announcement by a day, maybe they'll give you a discount, or just send it for $10.

I've been waiting to purchase a mini until the announcement since I knew if you ordered beforehand you won't get a free upgrade. Off to the Apple store I go...

Apple envy

[CCelebornn]

The more I see of MacOS X and the more features they put in there, the more I realise just how slow devopment on the Windows platform is. Think of the progression thats been made from Apple, then compare that to Windows. The last great leap was done with Windows 2000 IMO: but even then for the desktop users there was nothing really knew.

Spotlight, Dashboard & Automator all look like great additions. I know there are perhaps Windows alternatives, but can any of them claim to be as slick as Apples?

I'm a Windows user, but as time goes on the thought of an mac mini just to give the OS a try becomes more and more tempting.

Core Data

[stang7423]

Am I the only one excited about the core data technology? In every write up of Tiger I have seen so far have not mentioned this new technology.

I mean come on. It gives you save, undo and redo functionality for free, no extra coding. Plus if you make good use of cocoa bindings in interface builder you could build a complete simple application with out writing a single line of code manually. That is pretty freaking sweet.

Maybe its just the geek in me but I think its cool. Plus you can save in multiple different file formats, binary, xml, or sqllite.

More Here: http://developer.apple.com/macosx/tiger/coredata.h tml

Re:Core Data

[brainnolo]

Core Data was the missing piece in the puzzle.

If you adopt the MVC (Model-View-Controller) style you can see that the first piece has been Interface Builder, which eliminated the need to write code for the View in an excellent way.

In 10.3 Cocoa Bindings (accessible via Interface Builder as well) eliminated the need to write code for the controller functions for the values setters/getters through they Key-Value technology (obviously you still need to write the parts that do some actions).

With Core Data now you do not even need to write anymore a BIG part of the Model, the data containers. This makes you able to limit in most cases your coding work to the actual elaboration of data, avoiding the storing/retrieving part which is the most boring, and as Apple demonstrated, can be generalized in most cases.

Re:64-bit doesn't include graphics!

[As Seen On TV]

You're missing something massively important. The reason why we chose not to release 64-bit versions of the UI frameworks is that they run much slower than the 32-bit versions.

User interface code is really pretty messy when you get right down to it. You're doing a lot of abstraction, moving a lot of pointers and integers around. On exactly the same G5-based computer, a 64-bit UI is going to run considerably slower than a 32-bit UI because of cache exhaustion. Because you're using pointers that are twice as big as you need them to be, you can only fit half as many of them in the various caches that are there to speed up your computer's performance. That effectively cuts your caches in half.

So we had two choices: Either waste a ton of developer time releasing 64-bit-clean versions of the UI frameworks and then tell our developers not to use them, or just don't ship them at all.

Believe me, the Final Cut Pro and Shake teams were pissed off about this. Their expectation was that they'd be able to release 64-bit versions of their applications by NAB. But a 64-bit version of FCP with 64-bit Pro Kit is less interactive than the 32-bit version on the same hardware, for very marginal gains in actual utility. FCP is already very good at making use of up to 2 GB of RAM when dealing with hundreds of gigabytes of data on disk; adding 64-bit support would have helped few and hindered many.

Re:do programmers deserve to get paid?

[pyros]

Why not pony up $650 and buy 5 individual copies then? By buying the family pack, you are "depriving" Apple employees of $450 that they would have made if you paid for each license individually.

Because they know that as humans, people will feel cheated for not getting a volume discount and having to have 5 identical CDs and just pirate instead. Apple is simply increasing the profit margin on a box with 1 CD by putting more licenses in it (probably just costs extra ink) and customers get to know they're doing the legal thing and getting a good deal to boot.

Re:Dashboard

[rampant mac]

"Dashboard? Innovative? Its just a copy of the many other widget platforms that have been available for quite a few years now. Calling dashboard innovative is like calling Internet Explorer 1 groundbreaking. If anything it continues Apple's tradition of taking the ideas of successful mac shareware apps and including a copy of the app free in the os ala MS."

I tend to agree that it's not innovative, nor revolutionary. It is evolutionary, because it's a 21st century update of Desktop Accessories, which precluded Konfabulator by about 20 years.