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Apple Unveils Extra Leopard-isms To Developers

Posted by Hemos on Mon Oct 30, 2006 11:35 AM
from the look-what's-coming dept.
Businesses Programming Apple IT Technology
devilsecret writes to point out that some of the new Apple capabilities for developers on Leopard have been unveiled. The most interesting parts appear to be the opening of more of iLife to other programs, and the inclusion of Ruby on Rails.
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  • Anyone think Apple jumped on the RoR bandwagon a little too soon? The whole "movement" has lost a lot of steam and it doesn't appear to be the silver bullet everyone originally thought it was. Also, is this just part of the developer suite, or is RoR support somehow built in to the OEM OS?

    • Re:RoR bandwagon? (Score:5, Insightful)

      by nine-times (778537) <nine.times@gmail.com> on Monday October 30 2006, @11:49AM (#16643417) Homepage
      Anyone think Apple jumped on the RoR bandwagon a little too soon? The whole "movement" has lost a lot of steam and it doesn't appear to be the silver bullet everyone originally thought it was.

      Wouldn't that mean they jumped on the bandwagon a little too late?

      Anyway, RoR isn't the solution to all programming problems, but it seems to have enough steam that it's going to stick around. OSX comes with Apache, and it's not hard to get PHP, MySQL, or whatever else installed. There's a ruby interpreter in the OS already, and a lot of the prominent people in the RoR community are OSX users.

      I can't RTFA to know what they've actually done, but why wouldn't they support RoR? In spite of not finding the meaning of life, solving world hunger, or finding hot women for me, it's a pretty good tool. Something can be useful without solving every single problem, you know.

      • Re: (Score:3, Informative)

        by larkost (79011)
        A couple of notes:

        RoR is simply going to be included. Nothing more at the moment on that count. Apple already has a easy-to-use database solution for Objective-C applications in CoreData (though I wish they would make it multi-user/computer capable).

        And PHP is already included in the OS, you just have to turn it on. This is somewhat good from a security standpoint, but I wish they would put in a button to turn it on (next to the one to turn on Apache).
    • Anyone think Apple jumped on the RoR bandwagon a little too soon? The whole "movement" has lost a lot of steam and it doesn't appear to be the silver bullet everyone originally thought it was.

      So, did they jump on too soon, or too late?
    • Anyone think Apple jumped on the RoR bandwagon a little too soon? The whole "movement" has lost a lot of steam and it doesn't appear to be the silver bullet everyone originally thought it was. Also, is this just part of the developer suite, or is RoR support somehow built in to the OEM OS?

      Do you have concrete links and facts to support your observation? I'm working (for a few months now) on a slightly RoR-like extension to PHP5 (and later), and I've also noticed some weaknesses of RoR which I'm trying to av

      • Re:RoR bandwagon? (Score:5, Funny)

        by mblase (200735) on Monday October 30 2006, @12:00PM (#16643551)
        Do you have concrete links and facts to support your observation?

        This is Slashdot. What do YOU think?
        • Do you have concrete links and facts to support your observation?

          This is Slashdot. What do YOU think?

          Sure. If he's anything like me, he probably just doesn't remember what they were. He could find them with Google, but doesn't feel like it and suggests you go Google it for yourself.
    • It might not be all things to all web developers and its far more of a paradigm shift than a casual glance at the syntax would have you believe. As a Java developer I expected to jump into Rails and be competent almost instantly. The reality was that there was a very steep learning curve when you wanted to stretch the framework away from a SOA portal or yet another blog, but IMHO it was well worth it. There are many things in Rails that make you start to wonder why J2EE wasn't designed in a similar vain.
      • Sorry, but requiring integer surrogate keys and failing to support composite keys is not "good practice", it's a design limitation of ActiveRecord.

        There are many things in Rails that make you start to wonder why J2EE wasn't designed in a similar vain.

        Because J2EE was designed for people that demanded things like clustering and distributed transactions. I'm not saying J2EE's initial iterations weren't a complete clusterfuck, but they did have different design goals.

        I have an app that requires submitting con
      • Now if it only had a decent high-performance cross-platform engine beneath the hood...
      • ``There are many things in Rails that make you start to wonder why J2EE wasn't designed in a similar vain.''

        I think part of the answer may be that Java and Ruby are very different languages. Java is fairly static, rigid and verbose, with lots of redundancy in the code. Programs are typically designed top-down, along language features, so that the program is made to fit the language.

        Ruby is almost the opposite: it's very dynamic, very succinct, and there's virtually no redundancy in the code. Programs can be
    • Anyone think Apple jumped on the RoR bandwagon a little too soon? The whole "movement" has lost a lot of steam and it doesn't appear to be the silver bullet everyone originally thought it was.

      Normally, I demand facts and evidence to back up assertions, but because you wrote it so eloquently and described something shiny, I think I'm going to let it slide this time and simply believe everything you say.

      • Re: (Score:3, Funny)

        by Fred_A (10934)
        But since they name all they releases after large cats, they had to go "RoR!"

        Ehm. Ok, I know the way out...

  • slashdotted already? (Score:5, Informative)

    by qw0ntum (831414) on Monday October 30 2006, @11:43AM (#16643331) Journal
    Here's the link to Apple's page describing the developer features: http://developer.apple.com/leopard/overview/index. html [apple.com]

  • Some working links: (Score:3, Informative)

    by mblase (200735) on Monday October 30 2006, @11:51AM (#16643439)
    VNUnet article [vnunet.com]
    Apple Insider post [appleinsider.com]
    Apple's Developer Overview site [apple.com]
  • These development tools look great. Particularly Interface Builder and XRAY. I've never used Mac development tools, so it's possible that looks can be deceiving ... but seeing this really makes me wish that MS would start to push their IDE forward rather than adding minor enhancements with each .NET release.

    • Re:I wish MS would come out with something like th (Score:5, Interesting)

      by soft_guy (534437) on Monday October 30 2006, @12:01PM (#16643573)
      I use both XCode and Visual Studio. I much prefer XCode and Interface Builder. There are also a lot of other very nice tools that Apple bundles for free. They are nicer to use than what Microsoft gives you, plus there are a lot of things that you get for free on Apple that you would have to buy third party on Windows such as the coverage tool (gcov) and the profiler (Shark). So, yes, Apple's tools ARE as nice as they appear to be.

      Unfortunately, today I have to use Visual Studio and I'm trying to figure out how to get my program to run in a Release build. It runs OK in Debug, but for whatever reason I'm getting an error dialog about not having a manifest file to load the C++ runtime DLL (?). I wish I could use XCode to write Windows apps. Or alternatively that our Windows users would just all buy Macs.
  • Ruby on Rails was announced back in August [rubyonrails.org], and I (et al) added details about the rest of the dev overview to Wikipedia 5 days ago [wikipedia.org]. Personally, I thought the most interesting new part was Mandatory Access Control.

  • Why do people pay for this stuff? (Score:3, Interesting)

    by Channard (693317) on Monday October 30 2006, @12:17PM (#16643821) Journal
    Maybe I'm missing the point here, but why would anyone pay the asking price of just under a hundred quid for a minor revision? No, this isn't intented to be flamebait - I'm a new Mac Mini owner myself and it's getting way more use than my PC. But I can't understand how Apple can charge for what is a pretty damn small upgrade. There were some major major differences between XP and 2000, and I can understand Microsoft paying for these. I can also understand Apple charging for the jump from 9.x to 10.x. But from 10.4 to 10.5? What am I missing here?
    • Uh, the changes in leopard are pretty huge. I'd pay a hundred bucks alone for something like Time Machine, not even counting the huge additions in developer tools and whatnot. I gladly forked out the cash for tiger, and the add-ons like spotlight, which made my life a whole lot easier. Plus, leopard will be truly 64-bit capable, from top to bottom, so that's a huge change. No, not all people will see enough value to upgrade, but then again Apple isn't a software company now is it? I personally will be
        • That download DOES include the PPC and Intel versions of Firefox 2. I don't quite know why the Mac version is triple the size of the Windows or Linux version, it should be at most double the size and probably a lot less. The way Universal Binaries are supposed to work is that each version of the code shares the same resources (graphics, user interface files, etc) and only the actual compiled code is different.

          For most applications compiled code is quite small when compared to the graphics and other resour
    • In the jump from 10.4 to 10.5 you get:
      You get built in backup and restore software
      You get automatic backup functionality
      You get virtual desktops
      You get built in remote presentation and remote control software
      You get new Widgets plus the ability to turn any webpage into a widget
      You get a new mail program with increased planning functionality
      New group management functionality in Mail and in iCal

      Under the hood you get:
      New animation libraries
      New 64 bit CPU optimizations
      New resolution independent ui

      You pay for this stuff because you find it useful.

      • Re:Why do people pay for this stuff? (Score:4, Informative)

        by NivenHuH (579871) on Monday October 30 2006, @01:14PM (#16644927) Homepage
        You forgot a biggie...

        Now in Leopard, the Objective-C runtime has been updated to include a thoroughly modern and high performance garbage collection system, making memory management a thing of the past.

        Garbage collection is included as part of the Obj-C 2.0 runtime... Say bye bye to most memory leaks.. :) I think this is turned on by default and is an opt-out option for your code.
    • Just because it's out, doesn't mean you have to buy it.

    • here were some major major differences between XP and 2000, and I can understand Microsoft paying for these. I can also understand Apple charging for the jump from 9.x to 10.x. But from 10.4 to 10.5? What am I missing here?

      Apple uses a different numbering scheme than most software manufacturers, at least for the Mac OS X releases.

      You see, the "X" in Mac OS X stands for the number 10. When Apple does a major release they don't want to have to go to Mac OS XI, Mac OS XII, etc. What they do instead is Mac OS

    • Re: (Score:2, Informative)

      by ckelly5 (688986)
      FWIW, I also have to mention that the upgrade from 2000 to XP was also technically a minor revision (2000 is Windows NT 5.0, XP is Windows NT 5.1).
    • Skip it then if you got a problem and wait for Lion.
    • why would anyone pay the asking price of just under a hundred quid for a minor revision?

      I don't know... I don't normally bother upgrading unless I need to, I'm still using Panther at home and the only reason I upgraded from Jaguar was that I bought new hardware.

      There were some major major differences between XP and 2000

      I'm still using 2000 because I've yet to find anything in XP that I actually need. The only thing that I've even missed is Bluetooth support. If they'd put a full Citrix server in there inste
    • There are quite a few things like Time Machine, Spaces, significant upgrades to Mail, iCal, iChat, Dashboard, resolution-independent interfaces, plus a lot of under-the-hood enhancements like 2D Extreme, Core Animation, 64-bit, and so on.

      Go to the OS X page on Apple's site to see most of the announced "user-side" improvements, and here [apple.com] to see the developer stuff. Just simple stuff like the iCal store can mean lot's of nifty little utilities being generated for that system.

      And to reiterate, those are just th
    • Well, say what you like, but OS X is a very good system, and you get a lot of value for your hundred quid. Lots of applications and tools are bundled with the OS or available at the cost of a registration and a download, all of it made for and/or packaged for OS X. Try to get a GNU/Linux or Windows system up to the same level, and see how much that costs you in money and effort. Apple is also a major innovator in the desktop OS sphere, which means some features they offer may not even be available for Windo

    • Maybe I'm missing the point here, but why would anyone pay the asking price of just under a hundred quid for a minor revision?

      Because it's not a minor revision. Maybe you should take a look at some [arstechnica.com] Arstechnica [arstechnica.com] reviews [arstechnica.com] to see how much changes in each OS X release.

      You also have to remember that Apple doesn't reveal their products until just before release, and we've only been given a developer API peek at Leopard. MacWorld '07 will be the big Leopard reveal.

      There were some major major differences between XP

    • Yeah, you are missing something. Release versions have nothing to do with how big a release is in terms of new functionality. Keeping the Major version number the same signifies a level of binary compatibility for the API. If Apple were to radically change the API (like they did between 9.x and 10.x) you would see virtually all binaries breaking. Apple did get around this by providing Carbon as a bridge API but the native Cocoa API and related frameworks would not be backwards compatible to Mac OS 9.x nor w

    • Re: (Score:2, Insightful)

      by lurch_mojoff (867210)

      ...No, this isn't intented to be flamebait - I'm a new Mac Mini owner myself and it's getting way more use than my PC. But I can't understand how Apple can charge for what is a pretty damn small upgrade...

      How is this not a flamebait? First, you bring up a question that has been answered about a jazillion times already - Steve Jobs is in lovez with the number 10 (or in Apple lingo "X") and from now on for Mac OS the major version number is the one after the first decimal point. And second, even if you ac

      • If this is as big a jump as from 2000 to XP, is there likely to be a performance hit as there was with XP? Did OSX 10.4 run slower on Macs than 10.3 did?
        • New versions of Mac OS X have always run faster than their predecessors, because Apple is continually including optimizations. I believe that was also the case with the 10.3 to 10.4 transition, although it was less noticeable speedup than from 10.2 to 10.3.

          I doubt Apple will be able to keep it up forever. I haven't heard anything on what the early builds of 10.5 are like, but (being early builds) it's probably too soon to draw any conclusions from them. Still, eventually they'll run out of things to opti
        • Believe it or not, generally each revision to Mac OS X GAINS speed rather than slows down.

          The engineers at Apple have been tightening up their code with each release, finding new and better ways to do things. With each new release I've been finding my systems gaining reliability and speed. Memory requirements have slowly been climbing but overall CPU usage is steady or even a bit lower.

          On older systems you might not be able to use some of the new technologies in the newer releases but it shouldn't affect
        • Probably not, though it's hard to say without having seen the current builds of Leopard. So far, every new incarnation of OS X has been faster and more usable on the same hardware than its predecessor. 10.4 for example, is just as fast as 10.3, while having stuff like Spotlight and Dashboard going on in the background all the time. I know people who happily run 10.4 on G3 iBooks(!). They don't get all the 3D-accelerated eye-candy, but all the rest works.

          Keep in mind though: Even if there is no performance i
      • ...and the biggest difference to developers, years of whining "Why won't your program work with 10.3?"
  • Has anyone figured out if Quartz 2D Extreme is enabled by default on the Leopard edition? Does it work any better than the Tiger version?

    • Re: (Score:3, Informative)

      by Quila (201335)
      Ars Technica said Quartz 2D Extreme was there and possible to use, just not enabled because it probably hadn't been completely worked out by Apple yet.

      But given fact #1, that Ars said that Q2DE is basically like running your whole desktop as an OpenGL scene, and fact #2, that Leopard will have "resolution-independent interfaces," I'm betting that Q2DE is fully running and implemented in 10.5.
  • People in these discussions keep moaning about how various changes "are only really any good for the developers"... That's kind of dumb. Developers, duh, develop the applications end-users rely on. The under-the-hood changes in Leopard are bound to benefit everyone. Garbage-collection, better debugging, 64 bit, a crazy animation toolkit, etc. (if you don't know how that impacts the user, try this for example: http://www.discoapp.com/ [discoapp.com] . It's a new disc-burning application with one of the most interesting wor

  • Emphasizing the Wrong Features (Score:3, Interesting)

    by 99BottlesOfBeerInMyF (813746) on Monday October 30 2006, @05:38PM (#16650019)
    Ruby on Rails and iLife integration? The former is for 10.5 server (which most people here don't care about) and the latter was announced months ago. I submitted a link to this information four days ago, but with focus on some more important features:
    • OpenGL 2.1
    • Automatically spawning a thread for OpenGL programs that feeds the GPU, allowing those programs that are CPU bound up to two times the performance when using multi-core systems, without any more work on the part of developers.
    • Application signing to determine trust levels
    • Mandatory Access Controls, for sandboxing applications like SELinux does

    It is these last two that are of real interest. Individually they are just adding more security features under the hood, which most people will never notice. In that case it is great, but nothing too new. Together, however, they could be the groundwork for just the type malware/spyware defense some security people have been hoping for for years.

    Imagine a system where all unsigned code runs in a sandbox by default, without access to any files it does not create, the internet, or any important parts of the system. Realistically, people want to run software they don't trust. They will run it. Most people don't understand the idea of multiple users as a security mechanism. It does not make sense to them that you need to create a new user account to sandbox an application and it is painful from a usability standpoint.

    This announcement could be the first indication of the first real, usable desktop that has the benefits of some of the most secure workstations on the planet. Who cares about RoR tools in OS X server?

    • I felt a great disturbance in the Internets, as if millions of voices suddenly cried out in terror and were suddenly silenced.
    • I was more impressed by the short summary and it somewhat made sense. I guess there's a first time for everything!
    • It should be noted that one of the reasons Apple is shipping Ruby on Rails is that Rails was developed on Macs, all the major Rails developers use Macs, and the preferred editor is a Mac application called Textmate.
    • I don't see the problem. If an application is presenting in full screen mode, I would find it useful for it to mark me as "Occupied" or something like that. As for the status message, there is already a link to iTunes to get the song that is currently playing.

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