Apple to Unveil New Leopard OS in August

Max Fomitchev writes "Looks like Apple is going to reveal its new cool and fast Mac OS code-named 'Leopard' in the upcoming World Developer's Conference in August. Good news for Apple! And terrible news for Microsoft. If 'Leopard' is really what it claims to be, i.e. fast and efficient, in sharp contrast to slow and resource hungry Windows Vista, we certainly would see Apple's remarkable market share gain next year."

Comments

More Speculation

[eldavojohn]

There's not a lot of meat to this article other than "here comes Leopard!" This tech blog seems to state the obvious and then say perhaps five times ... so I'll throw down some speculation as this article points out.

Way back in the day, Apple code named their boxes by color. From the aforementioned article:

Red Box (for those that don't remember), was said to be a compatibility environment where Windows apps ran on the Macintosh but did so within a separate Windows installation. Apple doesn't have to reverse engineer the Windows API (like WINE) to get this functionality and theoretically upset Microsoft. Rather, it could simply be based on a standard copy of Windows. Red Box would override Windows native interface when run on OS X and would incorporate OS X's Aqua user Interface in the place of the Windows UI. The software would then make the two environments (Mac and Windows) functionally seamless with one another. Unlike a virtual environment, the end result would be full compatibility while retaining both visual as well as functional usability for the Mac user.

So we can speculate that Leopard might not only be fast but also encourage a partitioned Windows installation using boot camp so that it can reference everything within Windows and run Windows apps flawlessly without having to reboot or (more importantly) reverse engineer Windows.

Again, this is just speculation, I've been expecting them to put 'red box' functionality in a release of OS X soon.

Re:More Speculation

[jcr]

If Apple reverse engineered the Windows API, Microsoft would probably make "improvements" to it out of spite, to cause things to break when run on the Mac's reverse-engineered API.

Actually, I'd say that implementing Win32 on Mac OS X would be a way that Apple could screw Microsoft, but good. A second implementation would freeze it: "Why aren't you using the normal win32? I want to use your app on my Mac!"

It would create considerable pressure on developers to ensure that their apps needed nothing more than whatever snapshot of the Win32 API Apple had decided to implement. WINE is trying to track MS's changes, but if Apple turns Win32 into another penalty-box environment like Classic or X11.

That being said, I don't see it happening.

-jcr

Re:More Speculation

[Anonymous Coward]

"It certainly makes a lot more sense for them to just use a Windows installation."

I have to post anonymously on this one...

But speaking to a well known Oh-Ess Ecks programmer, I asked him about the possibility of Wine noting that he would be the one to ask. He is very collegial with Microsoft and I've hung with him and one of M$'s top programmers as they have both bitched and moaned about the other's OSs (and the Microsoft guy actually made a few points I never thought about before that were on the money...I program Windows for a living but own a niche Mac support company that grew out of a mailing list I use to moderate...I can almost give up the Windows programming these days as my organization is starting to look like it needs centralized day to day leadership, but beyond that, I could care less what OS anyone else uses. I know how to use both and my Vaio is as much a part of me as my new Intelbook).

Getting to the point, talking to the guy and asking him about the possibility of using my Windows skills to port applications using WINE but with a translated front end on the Mac side. Pretty much, simply run the APIs of the apps I have created or have access to, and create new native front ends. Best of both worlds I thought (sorta like when I would create C++ backends and use VB to build the front end on the PC and Hypercard for the Mac -- I got pretty proficient at making certain DLLs could be recompiled as a XCMD simply by dropping it in the right compiler and letting the headers decide what to do with it).

His response was one of the most direct responses I've ever gotten about future plans without him saying anything. Claimed to have looked into WINE, had it running internally (this was a year back, when I was still planning on having to use an X86 emulator to do most of the work as I didn't think the Intel switchover was going to happen so quickly) and he said that while it was a good product, they weren't going to use 'compromised' APIs to do this. When asked if they had any plans to license or develop any of their own non-compromised APIs, he responded that there was no plans to license anything. It was a pretty strongly worded statement, especially when looking into the point by point claims and what was missing from my original query. And considering the last statement I received in this manner was positively prophetic looking back upon the email.

With Bootcamp and the new emphasis on Parallels and my knowledge of their staff, my best bet is that Apple is planning on leveraging Windows to their own needs, making it usable but a pain. Sort of like how their Bluetooth products refuse to work with the Windows side of the Intelbook and simple features that could have been added were ignored to ensure that you only got exactly what you needed to run Windows solidly in Bootcamp, but not with the trademark Apple Ease of Use.

Re:More Speculation

[NixLuver]

Heh... Entourage uses OWA in the event your Exchange admins block IMAP. So even MICROSOFT won't reverse engineer MAPI for the Mac. Perhaps that's because the Mac versions of office already 'feel' much nicer than their Windows counterparts; Entourage would be a 'hands-down' Outlook killer if it wasn't for the connection issues that it imposes on one. Gotta wonder what kinda politics go on between the Mac development crew at MS and the Windows crew.

Re:Huh? Wanna say that again?

[BasilBrush]

Last I checked Windows Vista is in Beta. So just how does anyone know how it's performance is at this time.

Well one could go with history and note the fact that EVERY new version of Windows has been a lot slower than the predecessor. Meanwhile every version of OS X has been faster than the predecessor.

we not told by the Apple folks that the marketshare was going to boom with the release of 10.0? Then again with 10.2 and so on? And then again when they went to Intel...

If you look at the unit sales of Macs from Apple quarterly reports, you'll see that they is usually significantly larger growth YoY that in the overall PC market. That means growing market share.

Of confirm it by looking at sites browser stats. This one shows Mac userbase doubling in 3 years.
http://www.w3schools.com/browsers/browsers_stats.a sp

in fact the market share has decreased since the release of 10.0...

I can see why you selected your username. But you'd do better if you didn't overreach yourself with your FUD.

I Suspect...

[eno2001]

...that Apple moved to Intel to take advantage of Intel's new virtualization support in hardware. In nearly every case when using a hypervisor on top of such hardware (where there is a ring -1 for the hypervisor) the performance has beat native performance. Or put another way; using a hypervisor for virtualization provides you with virtualization with NO performance hit at all. If anything you get a performance boost. Apple, typically being quite a few steps ahead of the reast of the industry, is very likely going to use this so that you can run Mac OS X Leopard, Windows Vista, and any Linux distro simultaneously with the full performance of running natively. This is the first time in history when you really CAN get something for nothing!!! Not to mention they will likely make it so that you can set up ways to exchange data in a live fashion between VMs. No more incompatibility between OSes ever again. Leave it to Apple to come up with something like this.

Re:Apple's next Mac OS X, Leopard

[GrahamCox]

Unfortunately, most users associate Carbon with all those ported ("carbonized") OS 9 C++ applications written on top of Metrowerks' PowerPlant, so it makes sense Carbon has a bad rap, but the fact is: Carbon is not the issue here. Carbon's fine.

Carbon's fine, until you actually bother to learn Cocoa. The fact is, religion about this aside, Cocoa is just better. As in 10,000% more productive better. The fact that apps also tend to look better is not a reflection of Carbon per se, but it is a reflection of just how much work you have to do in Carbon to makes things come out right. I'd rather spend time on making the app functional rather than endlessly tweaking the widgets. I came from the Toolbox, then Carbon, and now Cocoa, so I know of what I speak.

However, I disagree that PowerPlant is the cause of a lot of problems, because in many ways PP was the Cocoa of its day, Mac-wise (ignoring the fact that Cocoa has existed in some form since 1987, just not on the Mac). Using a framework on top of Carbon is the only sensible way to program with Carbon - anything other than a small app is unmanageable in Carbon if you don't have a framework there. What may be a source of this perception is that between System 8.0 and 10.0, Apple changed a lot about the organisation of the Toolbox/Carbon and PP may have struggled to keep up with that. It was a tough period all round.

I'd like to see the Finder written in Cocoa, because it would likely be a lot more functional since getting functionality together in a Cocoa app just takes much less effort than the same functionality in Carbon. Given that Apple seems to want to throw a Finder together I'm sure it would be a lot more polished in the same timeframe if constructed in Cocoa.