Mac OS X 10.4 "Tiger" Preview at WWDC 935
hype7 writes "Apple just announced that it will kick off WWDC 2004 with a preview of the next iteration of Apple's operating system, Mac OS X, in a Steve Jobs keynote. This version of Mac OS X, 10.4, has been code named 'Tiger.' As usual, Apple is being incredibly tight lipped about what's going to be added; there hasn't even been that much speculation of new features on the rumor sites. WWDC is scheduled to begin on the 28th of June."
And as usual... (Score:2, Interesting)
Troll Posts asside, Apple seems stupid here... (Score:0, Interesting)
Personally, I'd be very pissed off if I had shelled out for a previous upgrade. Maybe my memory is off here, but it seems like these upgrades are as bad as Windows, only with less substantial sounding version number changes.
But I thought Micro$oft was the money grabbing SOB (Score:1, Interesting)
I love my iBook, I love my Cube, but come on!
I can understand why Apple wanted to move forward quickly from the 10 to 10.1 and then to 10.2. These were all big leaps forward to add simple features back in that were missing.
But I can't see why we needed the jump from Jaguar to Panther a year later. 150 new features my arse. Expose, File vault and er er er
I can see NO reason to pay another 79 only a year after Panther. Ask for more, when you have a big update.
I won't buy this one.
K
Glad to hear it... (Score:4, Interesting)
i will be buying Apples for both me and my girlfriend and an older dualproc Sun server to chain SCSI drives off of.
I HAVE HAD IT WITH SHIT NOT WORKING OUT OF THE BOX, FIRST TIME! i am not dealing with Windows nor linux for any of our serious design work anymore. i know this a massive linux crowd here, and honestly, i really love linux for my firewall and server stuff and my run Gentoo on the Sun (doubt it though...gentoo-sparc is nice, but Solaris 9/10 it ain't).
i don't have the time to fuck about with things anymore. i have to be able to plug it in, turn it on, and let people get to work. i say more power to Apple and they can have some of my cash too. You take the power of *nix (yes, i know what is under the Apple hood, i'm speaking general here) and put a slick, smooth, beautiful, easy-to-use GUI on top, have Adobe compile the must-have apps for it and i'll buy. Apple has done this. Now i will buy. And no, i don't have loads of cash laying around, i'm going to have to scrape to do this, but you know what? It's worth it.
Speed. (Score:2, Interesting)
Looking forward to it. I'm going to WWDC again this year -- hopefully attendees will get free copies like they did for Panther last year.
--saint
10.3 is good for me (Score:2, Interesting)
And, yes, I'm just making those names up.
Incremental or Major... (Score:5, Interesting)
What's left, quite a lot actually. The Finder for one thing could use a lot of enhancements. Forgoing the whole brush metal fiasco, I care little about, there is the whole underlying functionality. Why is it that the OS can't update the window's contents without being pushed to do it. This is something that is fundamentally critical to an operating system. Additionally browsing folders across a network with a large number of files in it is painfully slow, and I'm talking my 100MB network at home.
Lastly I would like to see a decent integrated development environment. XCode is a nice upgrade from previous tools but I'd still like to be able to work on the GUI and on code at the same time. CASE tools have come a long way, but Apple's tools still have a very antiquated feel about them.
Panther added longevity to my old machine (Score:2, Interesting)
Re:Glad to hear it... (Score:5, Interesting)
However, UNIX is my bread and butter and I prefer a UNIX environment. Bam! Apple walks onto the scene with perhaps the best GUI (imho) on top of a UNIX environment. I'm in love.
Warning: This post may contain gratuitous expletives. If you are offended by such material, please do not continue reading this post. Thanks.
Re:What's improved? (Score:5, Interesting)
Re:A.W.E.S.O.,M - O Says 'lame article' (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:Glad to hear it... (Score:5, Interesting)
Please tell me they've pamified LoginWindow (Score:3, Interesting)
pam_smb [csn.ul.ie] works a treat on OSX, I can authenticate ssh logins to our NT domain, but the actual local login window on OSX takes not a blind bit of notice of pam, making it not-so-useful.
Preach on, Brothah Karl! (Score:3, Interesting)
Uh-uh. No thank'ee. I ain't got neither the desire nor the time for that shit. I just want something that freaking WORKS.
So I installed WinXP on the laptop, and got myself a G5 last year. Happy I am.
Re:What's improved? (Score:3, Interesting)
OS X vs. Windows (Score:2, Interesting)
Kindness is relative. (Score:2, Interesting)
People will tend to show loyalty to a [computer|operating system|productivity package|device|office chair], until they don't want to any more. When something breaks, they'll either persevere and stick it out through the problem (replacing the troublesome part if need be) or, as is often the story, they've had it with this POS and will jump ship as soon as they have the money and find something which they think will be more reliable.
It's not unique to Apple switchers, either. Sometimes people get fed up and go to Windows. Or they get fed up with both and move to Linux. Or they get sick of Linux and move back to what burned them least the last time. It's called turnover, people. Microsoft could give away puppies. Apple could give away chocolate-covered gold ingots on a stick. Michael Dell himself could give each and every loyal (and willing) customer a BJ. Turnover may approach, but will never equal, zero.
Computer companies can try to lock in customers using whatever proprietary mechanisms they want, but if users still struggle enough against those locks (cough*LONGHORN*cough), they will still jump ship and cut their considerable losses -- a process not unlike an animal gnawing off its own leg to escape a trap. The best defense against customers leaving is to create a product that will least likely drive the customer away in the first place. That means quality control, reliability, and user experience.
That would seem to be Apple, but sooner or later everybody gets fed up with something.
Re:Funny. (Score:4, Interesting)
I'm really sick of the "When Apple does it,
I'm not saying this is a permanent state of affairs. Companies can and do change. If you'd asked me twenty years ago, I'd have said that IBM would never be anything other than "Big Blue", a giant corporation sucking the life out of the industry by trading on name recognition to crush smaller companies that were doing all the real innovation. These days, IBM are the good guys. It may be that Microsoft will go through a similar change, and in twenty years they'll be an ally to small developers and desktop users, while Apple (or, more likely, some company we've barely even heard of in 2004) will be the giant evil force that's holding back the whole industry.
But right now: Microsoft is a bad corporation with bad products, Apple is a great corporation with great products, and there are a lot of people on
.Mac and OS X Upgrades (Score:5, Interesting)
Things I'd like to see... (Score:5, Interesting)
1. Give me the option to have my quoted text in Mail.app appear at the top of my cursor when replying to an email. Few types of miscreant are worse than top-posters, and Apple doesn't need to be aiding and abetting.
2. Speed. I'll take OS X over Linux/X11 or XP any day of the week, but I'd love to see XP's responsiveness in the Tiger GUI. Again, I prefer the stability to the speed, but having both would be rich.
3. As mentioned, SMB interoperability can use some tweaking in the areas of both speed and ease of use.
4. This is sacrilegious, but the Finder still isn't there for me. I *hate* the spacing of the icons in icon view (they are like 3 feet apart), and the viewing of directories and files simply isn't as intuitive to me as it is in XP. Pathfinder does a much better job, in my opinion.
Re:Well, they ARE a business, after all (Score:1, Interesting)
Re:But I thought Micro$oft was the money grabbing (Score:1, Interesting)
What about hoping that 10.4 is the setup and a dual 3GHz will be the big announcement?
Re:Preach on, Brothah Karl! (Score:5, Interesting)
I'm piping up just so all the Linux heads can see that we're out there. Before you complain, know that I have no problem compiling the Kernel, I have a couple of Linux boxes running web sites in my home server closet and a very active postfix mail server servicing a bunch of different purposes and etc.
I'm no expert, but then again, I don't want to be. My 13 year old daughter has an iMac and an iPod and she loves them. I'm a convert. My next "main box" will be an iMac or a G5 or something, especially now that I'm getting into the digital video thing.
In any event, thank you Apple for saving me from Config File Hell. I'm sick of editing obscure, unique, hidden freaking config files, recompiling this and that and all the rest of the headaches associated with using Linux. I want the security and performance of *nix, with the ease of Windows. That means, OS X.
O'Reilly (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:Glad to hear it... (Score:2, Interesting)
Hey me too! ;-)
The company I worked for last year closed up shop and moved to Ann Arbor, MI. They started selling off old equipment to the employees. I picked a Compaq Armada 1700 (a laptop) for pretty cheap and thought I set up a wireless network at home. Checked the websites to see which hardware was supported. Went with some LinkSys stuff. The card just didn't really work with the laptop. I was using RH9 and Fedora, which both recognized the card and loaded the driver. A couple minutes in and the network is hosed.
I'm a long time mac and unix user with various flavors of OSs in my house. So I really didn't switch when I got an iBook. The only problem I experienced was that I had to enter the WEP key because the airport software would forgot it on reboot. Seemed to be a problem for networks that don't broadcast their SSID. An update for the software was out within a week and solved my problem.
To add some on topic content: I most likely buy the family pack of the update for $200 and install it on the 3 macs in my house.
Re:Accessibility Improvements (Score:5, Interesting)
A Word From A Sysadmin (Score:5, Interesting)
I work as a system administrator for a small non-profit. I have enough work and dealing with configuration of yet another Linux box is not something that I would like to do on my free time. Do not get me wrong, I love what I do for living; however, I do not want to do my work at work and at home.
When I switched to Mac OS X I was fairly pleased with the fact that I could work from home on a system with a stable GUI that hasn't crashed on me in more than one and a half years. I can do all my work on a system that does not require a lot of maintenace; that increses my productivity. I am impressed by the quality of Xcode and how much you can do with it without installing a ton of new things. I can do OpengL programming, write user interfaces and do all sorts of things out of the box -- install Xcode and you're a done! Did I mention well-integrated Java support?
With that in mind, I am looking forward to the new version of the operating system that I love to use. However, I hope that Apple incudes more than new icons and new GUI features in 10.4. Here is my small wish list:
Update CVS to the most recent version.
Add better group and user management. For example, make sure that every user is a member of 'staff' and the admin user is a member of 'staff' and 'wheel.' It would be cool if UNIX inclined people could have a set of advanced options when it comes to user creation.
Fix passwd. I would like to use it in order to change my passwords; it is faster for me that way. I am sure that this command can be updated to change my KeyChain password.
Add more fonts.
Add tabbed sessions for Terminal. I know that there is iTerm, but it choked on me way too many times. I like Terminal better.
Add virtual desktops as a part of the window manager.
Provide a stable front end to firewall that supports both TCP and UDP rules. Currently, only TCP traffic can be managed.
Well, I guess that is it for 10.4.
fine for clients, but... (Score:2, Interesting)
We have two Xserves and a G4 tower running Server 10.2.8... They have been tweaked for our workflow (which involves a mix of open and comercial software), and I haven't the time/energy to worry about an appropriate upgrade strategy yet (IT department of 1). I've just recently made sense of the workflow and gotten most of the cruft out or documented... and now I'm expected to upgrade (not from Crapple, but my fanboy boss...)?
I wish they (Apple) would change their naming conventions and release schedules to reflect the drastic difference between client machine needs and improvements and needs of server software... I hate upgrading production servers (Apple has been a little on the cavalier side when it comes to "their" config files) but I am willing to do it every two to three years, and have few qualms about various hotfixes and security patches they release.
But every year? Isn't that a bit much?
grump grump grump
[NOTE: There is no specific mention of Mac OS X Tiger Server, but they've been releasing Server a few months after client since 10.1 came out. So there.]
Re:Glad to hear it... (Score:2, Interesting)
Concern (Score:3, Interesting)
Just my concern,
Geoffeg
Re:Glad to hear it... (Score:3, Interesting)
I still run a couple of Linux boxes, and still enjoy tinkering with Linux.
As Neal Stephenson said, though, some days you just want to go to Disneyland. My spankin' new G5 lets me do that.
AND I'm able to run all my favorite tools (gcc, mySQP, Apache, PHP....) right out of the box.
Rich Unixy Goodness in a Candy-Coated Shell (tm). What's not to like?
Yes, it was expensive, but this is BY FAR the most pleasant personal computing environment I've ever owned.
Note that this is coming someone who hated pre-OS X Macs, so I'm not a Mac fanatic (although that may well change
Yup... Why I did this YEARS ago... (Score:2, Interesting)
I would be cursing and he would be happy. I would be cranky and he would be... well you get the drift. Finally I said "yeah, it is a nice machine, but it costs so much!"
He said, "Buy one and you will never complain about the cost again."
So I did. And guess what? I stopped worrying so much about "Why does this no longer work?". I just worked.
Today I have five (including the iBook). And NOW I can spend the time to install things because I WANT to, not because the piece of dreck won't work like I want it to without it.
OpenGL shading language support? (Score:3, Interesting)
Tiger wishlist (Score:5, Interesting)
I want
There's more, but I can't remember all of it right now.
Re:A Word From A Sysadmin (Score:4, Interesting)
Screen is a poor-ass replacement for real tabbed terminal sessions. Any terminal worth its salt will give you keypress options for changing tabs.
Re:individual cat names?? Re:Cat Got Your Tounge? (Score:3, Interesting)
"Will it be released or not?"
Wishlist Ideas (Score:3, Interesting)
In response:
I can think of two dozen more off-hand.
Re:Preach on, Brothah Karl! (Score:5, Interesting)
You found out wrong. Drivers don't have to be part of the kernel. They can also be loaded as modules. You don't have to recompile your kernel.
Nope. I spent about a month researching this, and had several people tell me that even though it shouldn't be this way, it was. It's a Toshiba laptop with a combo sound/video card. I tried 6 separate distros, including Mandrake, Gentoo, Slackware, and Red Hat. The video card worked fine, just not the sound part. This was a little over a year ago, but things probably haven't changed that much since then.
Your complaint is that there is no pre-built binary for your sound-card. This is not a fault of Linux. It is either the fault of the distribution for not including the driver (if the source is available) or the fault of the manufacturer for not supporting Linux.
Don't care WHOSE fault it is, just that the problem exists. Every single time I've tried Linux I've wound up having to dink with crap that I have absolutely no love for dinking with. I want something that works out of the box. Linux has NEVER footed the bill insofar as that consideration is concerned.
You forgot LaunchBar... (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:Yeah! (Score:2, Interesting)
I honestly may just know nothing about the Apple development APIs, but as a normal Mac user, this seems sleazy: I can't upgrade browsers until I buy a new OS!
So you do effectively have to upgrade OSes to get most of the software updates offered by Apple. In my opinion, you should never produce break an API unless you have a major version change. In the case of Apple, it is unreasonable to require an OS upgrade to upgrade a web browser; if the APIs/behavior really changed that much, they should not have done it in a minor (10.x) update of the OS.
International Versions (Score:4, Interesting)
Re:Glad to hear it... (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:O'Reilly (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:A Word From A Sysadmin (Score:3, Interesting)
Including Subversion would be nice too.
Add better group and user management. For example, make sure that every user is a member of 'staff' and the admin user is a member of 'staff' and 'wheel.' It would be cool if UNIX inclined people could have a set of advanced options when it comes to user creation.
Agreed, on the first part. There's always the netinfo manager for the second.
Fix passwd. I would like to use it in order to change my passwords; it is faster for me that way. I am sure that this command can be updated to change my KeyChain password.
This one caught me recently as well. At the very least it would be nice if it warned me that it hadn't updated my keychain password...
Add more fonts.
I think you must be using a different OS X to me. Mine came with more fonts than I can ever imagine using, including some very nice ones.
Add tabbed sessions for Terminal. I know that there is iTerm, but it choked on me way too many times. I like Terminal better.
I would have agreed, but the command-` shortcut and exposé have eliminated that need for me. Bye the way, there are a couple of things I've found about exposé that aren't in the documentation. First, you can navigate between zoomed out windows with the keyboard, which is nice if you're in a terminal and don't want to touch the mouse. Second (and this one is gratuitous eye-candy) if you invoke exposé from the keyboard, and hold down shift, it runs really slowly, so you can see where each window comes from. This can be useful if you've got a load of windows open and want to find a particular one, but mainly it just looks pretty.
Add virtual desktops as a part of the window manager.
Never going to happen. Read any UI book (including the Apple Human Interface Guidelines), and it will tell you that modes are bad idea. Virtual desktops are about the most extreme form of mode you can get.
Provide a stable front end to firewall that supports both TCP and UDP rules. Currently, only TCP traffic can be managed.
My guess is that this is to prevent people accidentally closing ports used by Rendezvous.
Re:A Word From A Sysadmin (Score:1, Interesting)
Obsession with Codenames (Score:3, Interesting)
During the exile of Steve Jobs, Apple had many more projects under development than were being released. Apple started talking about projects in their R&D department (like WildCard) before they were made into a product (like Hypercard) and before these names were run by legal and marketing. This certainly fit in the Scully|Spindler|Amelio philosophy of letting the world see and smell what you have baking even if they can't actually taste it yet. It was during this time that the general public was exposed to the anticipation and delight of a good codename can inspire.
After Steve Jobs returned, Apple's internal kitchens were closed. But they still used codenames to talk about future products. They started by naming runs of things similarly. Operating Systems were named after types of music (Allegro, Sonata, Rhapsody). When the huge division developed between Mac OS 9 and X, codenames changed to be various versions of twilight for Classic Mac OS (starlight, moonlight, etc.) and various big cats for Mac OS X (Cheetah, Puma). About the time that Puma was getting ready for release people started to specualte what was next (Jaguar and then ?).
Because of this public scruity, Apple has taken what was just a sassy internal form of communication ("The Ric Ford Release", "7-up", etc) and turned it into a term that had to have legal and marketing approval. People were now looking at what the codenames meant. At this point, now that the terms are carefully scrutinized before the public ever hears them, they don't mean anything other than a tarted-up pointer to a project. Reading anything into them today merely gives insight into the marketing (and maybe legal) department rather than engineering.
Take for example the codename Merlot. According to different people this was a codename for Mac OS X v 10.2.x+, v 10.3, and now 10.4. What does it mean? People have speculated endlessly. It's not the name of a cat so it must be a change in direction for Apple, right? Maybe it's the name of a secret technology or UI enhancement that Apple just keeps delaying because it's not quite ready, maybe? Forget the speculation on the term Merlot. It may have been a codename and in fact may still be a codename, but it doesn't mean anything anymore.
While Apple's codenames used to be clever, sassy, inside jokes in many cases, today that aspect of Apple culture has been stopped because of too much public scrutiny. You don't get trademarks on real codenames, yet Tiger and some other cat names have already been registered for Apple. Though at one time these were clever bits of insight on Apple's internal thinking, today they are meaningless marketing labels.
Don't forget the Carl Sagan story! (Score:3, Interesting)
IIRC, the first-gen Power Macs were internally codenamed "PDM" (6100), "Carl Sagan" (7100), and "Cold Fusion" (8100). Carl Sagan got wind of this via a MacWEEK article about the forthcoming machines, and promptly complained that Apple was using his name to promote their products without his consent-- a rather nebulous accusation since it was an internal codename never intended to be made public. Some say Sagan was also miffed about having his name included with two scientific frauds, Piltdown Man and cold fusion. I don't recall if lawyers came into play at this point, but they definitely did when Apple changed the 7100's codename to "BHA," widely rumored to stand for "Butt-Head Astronomer."
Sagan sued and lost, [idiot-dog.com] but the 7100's codename was again changed to "LAW," rumored to stand for "Lawyers Are Wimps."
What about virtual desktops? (Score:2, Interesting)
Quartz Extreme (Score:4, Interesting)
For those that aren't familiar with it, Quartz Extreme, which was introduced in 10.2, uses OpenGL to "composite" your screen image. In other words, all application windows are bitmaps on your graphics card, and your graphics card puts them together to make the overlapping windows that you see.
In 10.2, the result was a 30% speed improvement for many operations, because the CPU no longer needed to spend as much time redrawing the screen. Eye candy like soft drop shadows on every window and on the mouse cursor, the Genie effect, and Dock magnification got a lot faster and smoother.
In 10.3, they added Expose and Fast User Switching (with a cool rotating animation) - neither of which would have been realistic without Quartz Extreme. Thanks to Quartz Extreme, my 733 MHz G4 had no problem Expose-ing 18 windows instantly, perfectly smoothly, including continuing to play a QuickTime movie while rearranging the windows! (Hint: hold down Shift while you press your Expose shortcut to watch it in slow motion!)
So anyway, in 10.4 I expect to see some major new OS feature that takes advantage of Quartz Extreme. Just think: they have the ability to instantly make any window partially transparent, rotate any window in 3-D, warp the whole desktop under the mouse, you name it - so I think there's a good chance they've come up with a clever new way to exploit this. Anyone could implement Expose on any OS - but without Quartz Extreme you couldn't possibly make it so fast and so smooth.
Tiger features (Score:2, Interesting)
As long as you have your application package to install, it doesn't matter on what OS you install it; Windows XP, Linux or Mac OS X. Most installations require the user to follow 'some installation steps' anyway, and the more interesting options usually take a bit longer.
You will end up with more than one platform on your desk anyway, so you can take advantage of some more options than just being locked on one OS - remember, an OS is not a belief system, it's a means to an end. While Windows XP may not be as stable as Mac OS X, the choice of specialized software products is excellent and makes up for a lot; and while Linux may not be as simple to set up, it's free, it runs on cheap hardware and for the most part it is very stable. OS X is a very stable GUI for a powerful system and has a lot of recent, very hip applications and a very useful file browser (Finder). Even on OS X, you will also spend some more time installing your X11-packages, sometimes manually, sometimes using Fink, at which point you're doing the same you'd be doing on Linux. I don't know whether it's a big difference whether you run Mozilla on Windows, Linux or Mac.
If Apple had a 64-bit OS now, the G5 could easily be on the road to becoming the 'iPod mini' of the entry-level workstations. If they wait for too long until the unleash the full power of the G5, we will eventually have switched to some Hewlett Packard RISC workstations - and I am sure that Sun will drop prices on their workstations a bit, too.
So: I believe that Tiger will be fully 64-bit. If it is not, it's simply bad business.
Wolf.
Re:International Versions (Score:3, Interesting)