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Had a go of the latest Leopard build
- Thread starter Ironduke
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I think the best stuff will come when 3rd party devs take advantage of that Core Animation goodness 🙂
notsofatjames
macrumors 6502a
as much as you may not see the difference, the under the hood changes have to be included too. I've been using leopard for a month as my primary OS, and i find it much more efficient and even more stable than i found tiger. I think its a worthy upgrade.
The big thing for me in a few weeks will be the hopefully-stable final Safari3, I know this will also come on 10.4, but I'll probably be upgrading asap to Leopard...
phillipjfry
macrumors 6502a
I will just be excited to finally use a 64bit OS for my 64bit hardware. I see alot of other users (PC and Mac) that have 64bit hardware, but the OS isn't built to use it's full potential. It's about time if you ask me 🙂
I hear you guys maybe I was expecting too much, I do like the new features in Preview, Coverview is just daft eye candy in the finder for me.
its just the little things like say you connect to a NAS drive, then put your macbook to sleep, when you wake up the macbook does it refresh the connection to the NAS?
nope🙄
also I had to manually enter my nas ip in to find it, you think macos by now would have a nice little wizard
its just the little things like say you connect to a NAS drive, then put your macbook to sleep, when you wake up the macbook does it refresh the connection to the NAS?
nope🙄
also I had to manually enter my nas ip in to find it, you think macos by now would have a nice little wizard
From a developer's point of view, Leopard is probably the largest upgrade to OS X yet. And let's not forget all the fundamental, low-level improvements Apple has made.
Sun Baked
macrumors G5
Which will lock them into 10.5 as the minimum system requirement for many features.
Developers will step up to adopt a lot of the stuff in 10.4 with their next updates, and maybe kill off the older OS users.
Though some developers may see the need to step over Tiger and go to Leopard.
squeeks
macrumors 68040
it was only delayed because apple saw the need to pull programers off of it to work on iphone, because they knew they would be making a LOT more money on iphone than on some silly OS upgrade
vista was not rushed by any means, they did a good 3-4 months of PUBLIC beta testing, something apple should look into🙄 there will still be issues however, but Vista wasent nearly as flawed as XP was when it first came out, everyone just always forgets that...
~David
macrumors regular
I was part of the private beta from start to finish and I still have to say it was rushed. I'm currently testing SP1, and it's a HUGE improvment. They could have included most of the fixes found in SP1 in RTM if they had just delayed it a little more.
Anyways, I won't push the thread off-topic. I know Leopard was delayed because the lack of developpers, but they could have just as easilly kept on schedule with a lack of developpers which would have resulted in a, well, "crappier" release.
So I'm happy they chose to delay it rather than trying to rush with fewer developpers.
That's BS! There hasn't been a more important update for developers than 10.4 since 10.0. Then all major API's were (finally) finalized after being a moving target for three whole operating system revisions. The kernel has also gotten modularized interfaces so that you hadn't to link your apps against specific kernel revisions anymore.
There isn't anything close for developers going from 10.4 to 10.5! And it's not a bug - it's a feature. Thank god the thing isn't messing up your stuff with every revision anymore.
From a professional developers standpoint Core Animation is no big deal. For example, neither the Microsoft nor the Adobe product range will probably make much use (if at all) of this. It's rather a very convenient tool for amateur developers to show off some eye candy. Animating get's easier, not necessarily better performing.
A bigger deal is the UI finally going 64 bit. This won't help performance but make programming a lot easier since you don't have to separate the 32 bit UI code from the rest of the program anymore. On the other hand every serious programmer separates the UI from logic and data anyway (MVC pattern) which lessens that advantage for the pros a little. From experience I can tell that regular UI graphics doesn't benefit from 64 bit arithmetic in any way. Data needs twice as much memory and bandwith but numbers are usually much smaller than the 32 bit limit (4294967295) for either color information or room coordinates (3D rendering). So 64 bit is usually pointless here performance wise when you could do the same in 32 bit space consuming half the bandwith.
rpp3po, if so little has changed under the hood, how do you explain the speed increase?
This is a legitimate question, I do respect your opinion, you do sound like someone who knows what he is talking about.
This is a legitimate question, I do respect your opinion, you do sound like someone who knows what he is talking about.
I respectfully disagree. Leopard brings us Objective-C 2.0, garbage collection, 64-bit APIs/frameworks, a major refurb of Xcode, a complete rewrite of Interface Builder, Xray, DTrace, Dashcode, the scripting bridge, PyObjC, RubyCocoa, and RoR. It's damn near developer heaven right out of the box. Heck, the Xcode/IB improvements alone are far more extensive than in any prior OS X release that I can remember.
I agree that neither Microsoft nor Adobe will make much use of this API, but I disagree that it's only for amateurs. I think many OS X developers, myself included, will find Core Animation useful for adding richness and polish to their interfaces. With your logic, one could just as easily discount the entire Cocoa API as unprofessional because Microsoft and Adobe products are largely Carbon.
Besides, Core Animation isn't the only new API in Leopard, and many existing APIs have received a great deal of refinement over what was offered in Tiger.
I know all about the Model/View/Controller design pattern. I practice it every day. And I agree that 64-bit applications won't gain much in the View layer. The big win is for Models that need to work with very large (> 4GB) data sets.
In any case, 64-bit computing is on the horizon and I'm pleased Apple is bringing 64-bit capabilities to Leopard. The arguments against this move are the same ones I saw when the industry went from 8 to 16-bits and again from 16 to 32-bits. (Yes, I've been around that long! 😱)
I already see that Leopard does not introduce any new features that interest me. I also understand that Leopard has higher hardware requirements (CPU/Memory) than Tiger. So already I see that I will have to sacrifice speed/memory and perhaps stability to gain nothing.
So can someone who has tried Leopard and Tiger give me a straight answer, what benefits does Leopard offer to the average user?
Does heavy disc usage still render the OS unresponsive for minutes at a time? Has the appearance of the dreaded beach ball become less frequent? Does Safari still crash so often, specially when I try to close it when I have used it for a long time and opened many tabs? Does Finder still crash so often? Has there been any speed improvements whatsoever? Like when OS is starting up or shutting down? Or maybe programs run faster now? Can I configure Front Row to show on my second monitor as default? Is quicktime still as useless as it was before? I am specially thinking of its rather meagre selection of viewable video formats.
What I hate about OS upgrades are that there is often so little like stability and performance that is genuinely improved. Instead you get a bunch of new features and a hell of a lot of bloat so memory and performance requirements for doing the exact same is now twice as much as it was in the previous version.
Time machine is useless to me, I don't have anything needing to be backed up. Coverflow is useless too since I don't have any pdf documents or videos compatible with quicktime. Spaces might be somewhat useful, but with Expose I doubt I am going to need it.
What is left is a faint hope that a new OS will address the performance and stability issues of its predecessor, but that is almost never the case so I am not holding my breath.
So can someone who has tried Leopard and Tiger give me a straight answer, what benefits does Leopard offer to the average user?
Does heavy disc usage still render the OS unresponsive for minutes at a time? Has the appearance of the dreaded beach ball become less frequent? Does Safari still crash so often, specially when I try to close it when I have used it for a long time and opened many tabs? Does Finder still crash so often? Has there been any speed improvements whatsoever? Like when OS is starting up or shutting down? Or maybe programs run faster now? Can I configure Front Row to show on my second monitor as default? Is quicktime still as useless as it was before? I am specially thinking of its rather meagre selection of viewable video formats.
What I hate about OS upgrades are that there is often so little like stability and performance that is genuinely improved. Instead you get a bunch of new features and a hell of a lot of bloat so memory and performance requirements for doing the exact same is now twice as much as it was in the previous version.
Time machine is useless to me, I don't have anything needing to be backed up. Coverflow is useless too since I don't have any pdf documents or videos compatible with quicktime. Spaces might be somewhat useful, but with Expose I doubt I am going to need it.
What is left is a faint hope that a new OS will address the performance and stability issues of its predecessor, but that is almost never the case so I am not holding my breath.
You make it sound as if you could write your model in 64-bit and your interface in 32-bit, simple as that. In reality, the two can't co-exist in a single process, so you'd have to write a background process to run the model in 64-bit and use inter-process communication to update the interface. That's non-trivial.
Also, Cocoa isn't just about "graphics". Foundation contains an awful lot of fundamental stuff which could not be used in 64-bit mode before, and now can.
Amen to that.
It really annoys me when people complain that they can't see enough improvements in Leopard, therefore it must be the case that very little has changed.
irishgrizzly
macrumors 65816
Can anyone link to an example to different examples of Core Animation? Just curious.
Well for a programmer there are always endless possibilities for optimizing your code. Smarter algorithms, optimizing loops and method calls, eliminating needless copy operations, memory management, better utilization of SSE, the GPU, etc.
You can reach tremedous speed improvements by doing this and Apple has shown a very good track record from release to release.
64 bit is really not that much about speed but laying the path for the future where datasets bigger than 4GB per process might become daily reality. It will make the job for programers much easier as the whole memory is one beautiful, flat address space instead of multiple fragments.
The speed increase one may have seen comparing 32 and 64 bit Opterons can be attributed to the dropped legacy support in 64 bit mode, precisely more available registers.
It'd be nice if the garbage collector is already as usable as Java's, after all it's the first revision. And the question remains, if users can expect their developers to code better applications using it.
64 bit is nice if you need it. How many applications can you list, that could definitely take advantage of 64 bit on a desktop?
I can work with Ruby (on Rails) and Python on Tiger already. It's nice that Apple is finally jumping on the train and makes this available in XCode and bridging to ObjC is possible. Sun's DTrace is also nice, but it's not that most of this wouldn't already have existed long before Leopard.
I would make me MUCH happier if Apple finally would get their act together delivering proper Java support, instead of adding candy. The release schedule is lagging years behind the rest of the world and intransparent. After all Java 6 is really great on all platforms for quite some time, except OS-X. If Leopard can deliver Java 6, I hope it's going to be better than the first 1.5 release in Tiger. I'm afraid that Ruby and Python support wont be much better. So sorry if I don't jump on every feature train you offer yelling "yeah!". Proper long term maintenance of these platforms is much more important to me than bleeding edge features. It's on Apple's side to prove this. There is no established track record regarding anything else than ObjC.
That was no "logic" but an example. Tell me one "bigger" application suite besides Apples own that could benefit from Core Animation. I'd agree though that there will be much room for creativity at a smaller scale for multimedia and presentation application developers. I thought that the next Microsoft Office is going to be Cocoa btw..?
Now I respectfully disagree. When going from 8 to 16 everything was still in early stages and both ranges rather clumsy, but 16 to 32 was a revololution the day it was available for everybody. At least on the PC platform. Totally uncomparable to 32/64. The 16-bit memory limit was a total mess - everybody cried for more and multimedia was on the horizon (remember 8-bit sound cards?).
We went from text to images. From there to animated images with sound. From there to 3D stills and later animations. We can't go 4D now. You can cut a cinematic resolution movie today on your Mac. I don't think that we will expand our possibilities at the known pace (I thouht different back then). There's still going to be exponential growth of resource hunger at the data center level, where 64-bit is gorgeous, but not on the desktop. We may see a boost again in 4 years or so when data mining possibilites far beyond spotlight become usable for end users.
There are islands today already. HDR image processing, for example. If you take 16 bit of information per color channel, 32-bit hits its boundaries. So Aperture might really take tremedous advantage of 64 bit some day, also Photoshop if HDR editing ever becomes standard. But displays have years to go there. They can't even display complete 8-bit data today.
So long speech, short sense (German saying): 64 is the way to go for the future, but in 2007's and 2008's improvements just because of this are going to be sparse.
xUKHCx
Administrator emeritus
I am guessing here that you haven't been around for an OS upgrade and are basing this on your experience with windows computer. It is a whole different story this side of the fence. I have only been around for 1 which was Panther to Tiger and I experienced a faster and more stable OS on the same hardware. Leopard will be interesting because although Tiger was written for both PPC and Intel Leopard will be the first that is released knowing full well that it is going straight onto intel and thus a lot of the problems that where bought with the change from PPC to intel should be removed.
From just reading these forums and picking up the little bits of information that the developers are giving out I can see that there is going to be a big increase in performance with Leopard with such things as the network not freezing the mac when a share gets lost for example.
In regards to quicktime perhaps look at perian
gnasher729
Suspended
So you had a go and you couldn't think of anything better than posting on MacRumors in breach of your NDA? Does your employer know about this? If they find out, you will be in big trouble.
What a dumb post. You are unable to participate in this discussion and just make false accusations instead. Read again. Nothing besides Apple's publicly available developer info and general programming experience has been discussed.
pilotError
macrumors 68020
I thought they pulled the developers because they knew Leopard was going to be late. I would have thought that they built the iPhone on the Leopard technology since it was due around the same time, but went into scramble mode when Leopard got pushed out a year.
TBi
macrumors 68030
All versions of OSX ran on both Intel and PPC. The Intel versions were just never released (and never mentioned openly until after the Intel Tiger came out).
Also leopard runs on both PPC and intel.