Snow Leopard

#1 Thanks for the heads up Tyler. I think Snow Leopard is not such a bad name. I'm thinking they wanted to show how close it is to Leopard, and it certainly gives the first impression of being a smaller update - makes me be less afraid of upgrading I guess.

The speed increase and the use of GPUs for general purpose tasks is really interesting and exciting. I still need to find the will to update to 10.5 though. :) There's just so much stuff, plus BootCamp - I'm worried about my Windows dev environment.

#2 Not just speed, there's other good stuffs:
1) Finder finally rewritten in cocoa. Hopefully along the way they'll take out some of the pathological single-thread-finder-locks-if-you-breathe-too-hard-on-it junk.
2) Space. Masses of stuff has internally been moved into common libraries. iMovie, iPhoto, iTunes, etc, are all getting skinnied down a lot in terms of sheer disk usage.
2a) Space2. No ppc means binaries are half the size. BEGONE, FOUL CROSS PLATFORM 120M DEBUG BINARIES
3) Putting two graphics chips into a laptop "one for performance, one for battery life"? Sure, maybe. But at what point *isn't* it obvious that there's a tie-in to OpenCL that no-one knows about yet? Now *that's* a some serious nerd potential.

On the downside:
1) That apple felt the iPhone NDA was even remotely acceptable for any period of time is, I think, a concern. What if they pull something similar with OpenCL, or at least Apple-specific OpenCL extensions? What if there's a new version of CoreAudio that you're not allowed to use in any project where the source is ever made available [open-source, torque, unrealengine...]? I like to think it's unlikely, but then I wouldn't have thought it likely Apple would be so braindamaged about iphone developers either.
2) No PPC might be a PITA for end users, but realistically developers almost always have to support a previous version of OSX when you target a new version. You gotta support Tiger if you release now; in a year when you release for Snow Leopard, you should probably still support 10.5.


My overall feeling is that Snow Leopard will be awesome, but the iPhone NDA ordeal really put the fear into me of what Apple can do when they're being dumb. I'm actually leaning towards my next laptop not being mac, because of it.

I'm not particularly sorry to see PPC go for end users, although I do like having a PPC for some development. Like other forms of cross-platform development, I've actually had occasional deeper bugs exposed via endian unhappiness that may not have manifested until much more unpleasant situations later.

Gary (-;

#3 The NDA I suspect was only because of it being a "smartphone" - these types of devices used to have a bunch of EULAs and licences to click through before they deign to let you see the API. Apple finally caught up with the modern way of doing things again when they lifted the NDA. All desktop OS X development is pretty open, so I have no fear that Apple will mess this up.

It should also be mentioned that OpenCL is *not* a graphics library, but a general purpose language like CUDA. We already have OpenGL talking to the same circuits for graphics. The new Macbooks have also been found faster at decoding H.264 media, so perhaps there are some neat new secrets in the latest QuickTime right now.

I think PPC users are still using those old systems because they're just one version behind (OK, maybe some still stick to 10.3). When 10.6 is out, they'll be several years behind, and have no excuse to clutch their dinky old Macs and hold back evolution. I already find enough software being released as 10.5 only, with a 10.4 release from several versions back if you're really lucky.

I dunno what we will see in filesize reduction, but I think I saved around a gigabyte on my system. It is more like 30% than 50% in savings currently, but one thing people might not know is that there are THREE current architectures on OS X.

The three are PPC (deprecated, blech, yuk, eww!), i386 (32-bit) and x86_64 (the future NOW!). Binaries are only a portion of the entire app bundle, but when you're supporting THREE processor families, it starts to eat into your harddrive space. SSDs are still horrendously expensive beyond 32GB, so every byte counts.

Apple need to put 64-bit porting guides in a prominent place on ADC and help people make the transition. I'm still not too steady on making my programs compile for x86_64. I want to see a "64-bit now" campaign, basically :)

#4 @Garry

You are very off on alot of the info. There IS a rumor that 10.6 will use only Cocoa and no Carbon, but you need to remember that it is a rumor. Although I would be much happier if it was pure Cocoa.

Intel only is another rumor, look at this, because it shows that it could be untrue.

I don't know what the iPhone's NDA is like, but from what I heard, you are right, Apple can do horrible things when they are acting dumb.

#5 OpenCL lets us use the GPU power as a CPU... That would be very useful, especially since most GPUs can't really run to their full potential on the graphical side.

#6 GPUs are very focused on certain types of operations, though. It's mainly useful for math. Physics would be the main use in games.

#7 Well... With OpenCL it will probably let the GPU use much more then before... That's good, because Macs haven't seem to run very high-tech graphics.