awoodhouse said:
Couple of questions:
1. Anyone know whether the beta is time-limited?
2. I'm thinking of doing it (have 17" core duo imac w/1GB RAM) as I still have a couple of windows progs...) BUT if leopard supports running xp progs in a virtualized manner that's - to me infinitely preferable. Dual booting is a PITA. Any thoughts on whether this is a myth?
Cheers
- Andrew
Nothing specific, however Apple implies a couple of times on the Boot Camp page that this is a beta of a feature in Leopard. However, can you really call a firmware update and some drivers a feature OF Leopard? They just gave them to us for free and besides, when you're running Windows you are specifically NOT running OS X at the same time. While it has its uses it's also kind of a pain to switch between OSes. I think what we're looking at here is a strong indication that Leopard will support either:
1) Being able to run the two OSes separately but at the same time, so you can switch between them - unlikely
2) Being able to run one OS inside (or at least appear to be inside) the other (possibly switching between the two), with the ability to exchange data a la Virtual PC - drop dead certain.
3) Being able to run Windows Apps in Mac OS X without running Windows itself (and possibly Vice Versa) - man I hope so. It is by far the most useful mode, although perhaps somewhat tricky to implement. But Darwine et al have had decent progress in that regard, and they don't have Apple's vast resources, expertise, and access to the operating system. Look at the current situation - somebody finally managed to hack Windows onto a Mac, and three weeks later Apple has a vastly simpler and superior solution.
That last option has a lot of interesting implications. Presumably they would still look and run like windows apps. But if apple put together some extra windows APIs that let developers modify the appearance of their programs in an apple environment and run more cleanly, with only superficial modifications to their program, the result would be largely indistinguishable from native apps and easy to implement. All those major programs that OS X doesn't have could make their way over rather easily.
This could be counterparted with an API install for windows that lets os x programs run in THAT environment, giving developers the alternative to develop in an Cocoa/Interface Builder/Xcode fashion - which I might add are free and rather convenient - to produce mac-like and/or mac-native programs for windows as well. You could even go farther and do the same with Linux. The lack of equivalent tools from Microsoft could push developers to choose the Apple-friendly route. Exposure to OS X/Apple design philosophies and Human interface guidlines in this manner could only work to Apple's advantage.
Coupled to the sales advantage of all Intel Apples being able to cleanly run all environments, and Apple's marketshare and development community could increase dramatically.
