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Apple Seeds Snow Leopard 10A190 (Mac OX 10.6) to Developers
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Due to the initial imbalance of Carbon being bolted on to OS X and immature in the early releases of the OS, as well as bad OS 9 carry-over habits that Carbon applications used to exhibit, users began to believe that Cocoa was an inherently superior application architecture. Carbon improved substantially over the course of the major releases of OS X, and many things that are commonly done in software often have to be coded in Carbon (even in Cocoa apps) because there's functionality missing from the Cocoa framework that's present in Carbon. That may not be an entirely spot on explanation, but it should be roughly right.
People have been clamoring for a Cocoa Finder almost from day one. While the OS X Finder has improved over the years, some people still dislike it. Some of those who do (still hate it) happen to think that switching the code base to Cocoa would magically solve the problems the Finder has. That simply isn't true. A Mac developer stated not too long ago that one can make just as good an app or just as poor an app in either environment. Some people think Cocoa apps are faster, while others believe the opposite. So it's mixed. However, Apple recently let developers know that it decided not to go ahead with its Carbon 64-bit plans, which had a major impact on Adobe development schedule and hit some very hard. A Cocoa Finder would presumably be 64-bit, which could yield speed improvements due to register starvation in x86 32-bit mode. Whether or not some of the long standing UI issues are ever dealt with remains to be seen; I wouldn't bet we'll see major progress on that front.
Mmm .. you couldn't get Vista to run on a 2 year old machine that was custom built?
Could it be that the custom-build wasn't that great to begin with?
Seen lots of machines older than that running Vista without a problem.
How do i get the seed? I have an ADC account, but I didn't receive the email as my email address broke. How can I get that email resent? Or can i download it from the ADC site, although it doesn't seem to be there. Any ideas?
I really, really hope that Apple gets their act together and also does something about usability in the Finder whilst they are working on it. While I am generally very satisfied with the user experience in OSX, the Finder really drives me nuts...
On a different note: I am amazed at the perceived state of the release. There appears to be a LOT of open ends that need to be tied together before one even can think of doing serious beta-level testing. If they are going to release soon I would very much stay away from Snow Leopard until things have settled down.
Good Point
I'm saving up for my 1st Mac... would Snow Leopard make a real difference on previous generation plastic MacBooks? I love the new Aluminium ones but they are too expensive in South Africa (up 25%
due to recent $ strength)
I'm saving up for my 1st Mac... would Snow Leopard make a real difference on previous generation plastic MacBooks? I love the new Aluminium ones but they are too expensive in South Africa (up 25%
due to recent $ strength)
I'm saving up for my 1st Mac... would Snow Leopard make a real difference on previous generation plastic MacBooks? I love the new Aluminium ones but they are too expensive in South Africa (up 25%
As they are multi-core and many had 64 bit processors, then the answer is yes.
Quicktime performance also looks to be dramatically improved important if you listen to music or watch movies.
Solution to Whiners
Ok, how about this? Apple just releases a separate install for PPC owners that is Leopard with all the latest patches and the few extra features. It will not be optimized as much as the Intel version but it will be Snow Leopard (PowerPC Edition). This will keep the real Snow Leopard Intel pure and keep the people that are happy that are still using the older machines.
Problem solved.
Ok, how about this? Apple just releases a separate install for PPC owners that is Leopard with all the latest patches and the few extra features. It will not be optimized as much as the Intel version but it will be Snow Leopard (PowerPC Edition). This will keep the real Snow Leopard Intel pure and keep the people that are happy that are still using the older machines.
Problem solved.
Unworkable really. Some of the new features would require significant work to port to PowerPC.
Tiger
its pretty exciting the new snow leopard OS..
I'm currently on my ibook running Tiger and it runs beautifully. I dont even think i'd want to upgrade to leopard. But i'm getting a new macbook pro soon - so i would be really happy that its gonna be super fast, and there are gonna be software updates to make it even faster in a year.
It doesnt make a lot of sense that the drivers etc arnt there with the product release they were made for. But it will be good to know when my machine needs a new lease of life i can just update the OS. It does seem to me that if they bring it out in Jan they should give the new macbook users an update for free. Maybe not if it does take longer to develop. Though - it looks like apple arnt concentrating on full products - they do hardware, they do software, they don't do both together. I thought thats what apple were supposed to be good for? nevermind lol
-A.W
its pretty exciting the new snow leopard OS..
I'm currently on my ibook running Tiger and it runs beautifully. I dont even think i'd want to upgrade to leopard. But i'm getting a new macbook pro soon - so i would be really happy that its gonna be super fast, and there are gonna be software updates to make it even faster in a year.
It doesnt make a lot of sense that the drivers etc arnt there with the product release they were made for. But it will be good to know when my machine needs a new lease of life i can just update the OS. It does seem to me that if they bring it out in Jan they should give the new macbook users an update for free. Maybe not if it does take longer to develop. Though - it looks like apple arnt concentrating on full products - they do hardware, they do software, they don't do both together. I thought thats what apple were supposed to be good for? nevermind lol
-A.W
Unfortunately there is never a solution to whiners.
Some people will always find a reason to find the cup half empty.
If you haven't realised this yet, you will do soon.
I've been encoding h.264 camcorder videos all weekend long with lots of time wasted...
Any increase in encoding speeds would be very helpful - I've seen processor usage at 100% for both cores when encoding more than one video at a time (quicktime), Having the video card lend a helping hand would be quite nice!
Any increase in encoding speeds would be very helpful - I've seen processor usage at 100% for both cores when encoding more than one video at a time (quicktime), Having the video card lend a helping hand would be quite nice!
I have the second-to-last iMac G5, and this is exactly what I am waiting for. And I really hope I can get it late next year. 10.6 will be a given by then, I just hope the quad-core Clarksfields are.
i have a year old machine that was bought on vista and is sick for instance i have to play with the startup options every time i start it to get the interent to work i now have to live with this machine until i save for a mac
I completely disagree. With possibly 1 or 2 exceptions out of a dozen Leopard PowerPC installations, I've not seen ANY Leopard installations that made that Mac operate faster or smoother. Every Leopard installation has slowed the machine down considerably compared to Tiger. The 1 or 2 exceptions I've seen were basically bare bones stock installations w/ few apps. It seems once you install/add all your old apps and files or if you upgrade a Tiger installation that already has all your apps and files, Leopard just BOGS DOWN on PowerPC Macs and is a terrible resource hog. Like I said, thats like a dozen installations so I think I know what I'm talking about. Obviously, for the average user, with more bare bones installations, this might not be the case, but keep in mind, Powermac G4s and G5s were designed for POWER USERS, not bare bones use. The fact that Leopard runs buggy and slowly in such power user situations is troubling for a $3000-$4000 machine. And if you don't believe Leopard is slower than Tiger, create a Tiger partition and compare. I think you'll find I'm correct. People tend to forget after Tiger is gone and they've gotten used to a new operating system.
And one more point.... Apple STILL hasn't added back the ability to simply open a folder from the dock, a feature going back to the earliest versions of OSX that was removed in Leopard for all of the new fancy dock features. Sure, I like those options and features, but the lack of ability to simply just set a folder to open as a folder in the dock shows an astounding lack of respect for how users have interacted with the Mac operating system for so many years and shows how unpolished Leopard still is.
Do you have one of the paying ADC memberships (Select or Premier) or the free one? You need a Select/Premier membership to get the seeds. Select is $500/yr, Premium is I think $3500/yr, but also includes for hardware discounts, tickets to WWDC, etc.
Yeah, your experience seems the opposite of my experience.. Other than my relatives still happily using PPC Leopard systems as main machines.. I used my dual G5 PM for months under leopard doing an absolute tonne of stuff, EyeTV+Photoshop+Safari+iTunes+whatever+whatever.. I have an apps folder with around 200 apps - including some that have background processes.. (CleanApp, EyeTV, EyeConnect, Bookdog, etc), and other than the initial teething problems i certainly felt like it was considerably faster and more efficient than Tiger. I never noticed any slowdown.. Quicktime encoding got considerably more reliable, as pre-leopard I used to get KPs making h.264 for some reason. (don't ask me!)
My G5 is/was a real workhorse machine running whatever OsX I threw at it - Photoshop CS3 is always loaded. Also, I always did upgrade installs so i never had this legendary super-snappy "clean" leopard install on PPC hardware before the apps are put on.. They were there right from the beginning and it worked fast right from the beginning. (apart from the .0 blue screen craziness.) .. So, yeah.. Bizarre. I don't think apple are intentionally hobbling the PPC to look bad next to intel, as in my experience they still work fine..
Don't you even see the difference in Finder windows opening/closing?
Even drive access time seems slower in Leopard on most of my PowerPC Macs.
Tiger wins hands down on the snappyness factor in my opinion. I'm not saying Leopard is terrible, but it certainly is more of a resource hog. I sometimes wish I could turn off Spotlight from indexing at inappropriate times when I connect a Firewire drive. It just bogs the system down.
It's not like I just made this stuff up in my head. I'm only commenting on Apple's public comments about Snow Leopard...
Apple has made it publicly clear Snow Leopard is about stability and performance enhancements, not a host of new features or UI changes. It's NOT a new animal on the surface, and barely is even in name. My points are that many of these "under the hood" changes (BUG FIXES, COCOA, 64bit) are things that could be ported to PowerPC and I'd be shocked if Apple didn't even already have a PowerPC build of Snow Leopard already.
Maybe BUG FIX is too strong a term, but it's hardly far from the truth from public comments. The WWDC people dispute this but then say they can't say anything.
Then one of them posts NDA info anyway in the forum. Go figure.
Finally, I've probably used an Apple computer since before you were born, so I'm hardly a troll.
I can be a harsh critic, but I'm certainly not switching to VISTA any time soon.
As for this debate about tiger and Leopard on PPC, I do miss Tiger, I think it was the best/most stable incarnation. That said, I have had no OS issues (that I can remember or am aware of). The only issue I have is with Entourage crashing all the time (in the background) - that never happened until Leo. So, I really don't have issues with either. I have a huge app list of pro apps (CS3, Aperture, Lightroom, Paint X, Bryce, Quark, Power CADD, and many other smaller apps) And this was an upgrade not a clean install; apps spread across 2 HDD's and a 3rd HDD as a disk image. So I feel this would be a good challenge for the OS to KPanic or lock or whatever. Honestly, I cannot remember seeing a KP since my old Beige 266.
Although I do use Time Machine with an external, I have never actually used it (yet thankfully). Ultimately, I think Leo has more bells and whistles really. I also remember there being some substantial improvements of some kind - I just can't remember them right now.
Ultimately, I will be obliged to sit on Leo for awhile longer thru the first few incarnations of SLeo. Sure, I will bitch a little about being left behind by the OS but that's only because the power of the machine would still be applicable with SLeo. It's not like my machine is too weak or that much of a laggard to handle, but because the rewrote the architeture.... I know this points been driven into the ground and people are sick of hearing it.
Imagine it this way: You buy a Ferrari that runs on gas and drive for a few years. Suddenly the news comes out that all new Ferrari's run on a specific Ferrari Diesel fuel. Sure you can still drive it and it remains the beauty you originally bought and loved, but as gas stations disappear (devs and updates) You'll eventually be left with powerful machine and no fuel. Ok, that's an inexact analogy with lots of holes... but it's sort of my feeling here.
For that/those person(s) who dislike the finder, have you tried Pathfinder?
http://www.cocoatech.com/
I play around with it every so often and really enjoy it. You have to give it time, but if you really dislike Finder, you might be up for it.
YES to that. I have Menumeters running and my "Used Ram" is currently 1455 mb!!! I have safari open with 7 tabs, finder and ichat. My free Ram says 3143 available.
I did notice that... never noticed an issue with the finder.
I had a pretty sweet deal on a G5 iMac a little while ago and decided to give it to my parents. I put Leopard on it despite only having 512 megs of RAM and was extremely surprised to find performance to be pretty much identical to Tiger. I didn't even bother upgrading the RAM (although 512 is very low I admit). I've read a few complaints here and there like "Leopard made my G4/G5 slower than Tiger!" but this experience makes me wonder..