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Mac OS X 10.5 Leopard - Still Waiting
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If theTV is any indication on how "great" OS X Leopard will be, I think we're all going to be very disappointed. Steve Jobs has a great way of talking things up ("top secret features" ??? ) for marketing, but I'm not expecting the next best thing.
Steve is a man with a vision. When Apple released the first iPod it was just a MP3 player. Nobody had ever thought about the big picture and why the iPod was invented. The same can happen with the
TV.Steve is a man with a vision. When Apple released the first iPod it was just a MP3 player. Nobody had ever thought about the big picture and why the iPod was invented. The same can happen with the
Agreed... Though I am not a marketing expert, from what I can tell the AppleTV as it stands at the moment does not make good marketing sense. Why did they add digital audio out and WHY DO THEY ALLOW 720p content if there IS NO 720p content? Unless, of course, they are going to put 720p content on iTunes.
If they get all the studios on iTunes, at 720p... and do not raise prices... well, let's just say that AppleTV is about 20+x as useful as it is now (which I still think it is useful, but more of a niche product - ie, like the AirPort Express)
In case you don't know, the Apple TV has already been "hacked" to play XviD content. No word on whether it can play 720p XviD.
It's rare to see a software product that isn't delayed by at least a few months. I'm not saying it's a good thing, but it doesn't make a company incompetent. Microsoft missed their target date by years.I do find it slightly amusing that when M$ delayed it's operating system they are branded "incompetent" and laughed at.
When Apple does it, people say "I hope they take their time and get it right".....
Exactly my sentiments. Some people do seem to think it should have come out on Wednesday, midnight.
We should request that the thread title be changed.
The first question i can't answer (NDA/source-protection). (Yeah, I know it's easy to hide after NDA and source-protection, but it's a fact.)
The second one: "I'm certain about this!"
PS:I was going to send this private to you but it's not possible.
I believe, it means. "Still waiting" for information, top secrets features and a shipping date. It can be misleading to think, hmm, "Still waiting" for it to ship.
If you were under an NDA, you wouldn't be able to confirm that you were to start with. Thats how a lot of NDAs work, and I doubt that Apple would be any different, considering how seriously they take their secrecy.
Bigger Picture
Cheer up johnee. These are just growing pains you are feeling (nothing more, nothing less). Which is a combination of understandable, healthy and good.
I suggest that Apple is sitting pretty: exactly where they want to be in the grand scheme of things. While there are certainly more clues as time passes, most readers here (myself included) have relatively little idea what that 'grand scheme' actually is or will be. Which is part of the fun of these forums, right? I mean, this is fun, yes?
Dropping 'computer' form the name does not mean their dropping 'computer' from the equation. Quite the contrary. Don't be fooled by those (whom I am fairly certain have never worked for Apple) who would like you/us to believe that Apple is loosing focus on said 'computer.' While I too do not work for Apple, I do understand the concept of innovation. And no innovation happens if Apple focuses on what they had focused on for the first 25 years. And no innovation means no Apple. And no Apple means... ugh, I don't even want to think about what that might mean. Innovation requires guts, forward thinking and a constant drive to elevate (in this case, simplify) the user experience. And that is exactly what Apple is, and has always been, doing.
Sure, there are several new areas of focus in Apple that weren't there 10 years ago (again, innovation). But guess what? They have more people in place to address these new avenues. It's not like the same X amount of people that were focused on operating systems are now ALSO focusing on iPhones, iPods, TVs, etc. Nope, there are entirely new teams of qualified people addressing 'new business.' This is a good thing for Apple and, in the end, a good thing for the user.
The crux of the biscuit has (and always will be) the OS. It is the central, linking element between computer, phones, TVs, toasters, etc. The lines between computers and home entertainment is blurring everyday. Apple's OS is their distinguishing advantage over MS and any other players out there. And in time, we will see a changing of the guard.
In my mind, Apple's strategy is both calculated and brilliant, if not their only option (ha!). MS clearly has a lock on the office. And with most people spending more time in an office environment than a home environment, that would seem like a solid position. And it is. But also consider at least 1/2 (my personal social observation) of those very same people HATE their jobs and office environments and you can begin to see an opportunity. There needs to be a ying to that yang and Apple could very well be that ying.
{Recap: office and, subconsciously, MS associated with bad. Why not home and Apple associated with good?
Hmmm...}
We can all agree that trying to take the office from MS is futile. They're way too established, way too many factors involved for that approach. But the home is wide open. Like the wild west, everyone is scrambling to secure a piece of the pie. And Apple are positioning themselves to be what MS is to the office. Say what you will about the iPod but it represents Apple's clear and intentional move to slowly, systematically, one by one, eventually take down the dominance of MS. And how smart... focus on an individual basis, get an individual user hooked on your product (iPod). Then grow that to their home experience (iLife, iMacs, etc.). Once that takes hold and people become accustomed to Apple's greatest asset (integration, based largely on the OS), they will then expect/demand the same in their office environments.
Yes. It's a theory with (obviously) several incredibly debatable points. Just reminding some that there may be bigger ideas at play here than what he daily, seemingly minuscule 'rumors' might suggest.
Bigger picture.
Cheer up johnee. These are just growing pains you are feeling (nothing more, nothing less). Which is a combination of understandable, healthy and good.
I suggest that Apple is sitting pretty: exactly where they want to be in the grand scheme of things. While there are certainly more clues as time passes, most readers here (myself included) have relatively little idea what that 'grand scheme' actually is or will be. Which is part of the fun of these forums, right? I mean, this is fun, yes?
Dropping 'computer' form the name does not mean their dropping 'computer' from the equation. Quite the contrary. Don't be fooled by those (whom I am fairly certain have never worked for Apple) who would like you/us to believe that Apple is loosing focus on said 'computer.' While I too do not work for Apple, I do understand the concept of innovation. And no innovation happens if Apple focuses on what they had focused on for the first 25 years. And no innovation means no Apple. And no Apple means... ugh, I don't even want to think about what that might mean. Innovation requires guts, forward thinking and a constant drive to elevate (in this case, simplify) the user experience. And that is exactly what Apple is, and has always been, doing.
Sure, there are several new areas of focus in Apple that weren't there 10 years ago (again, innovation). But guess what? They have more people in place to address these new avenues. It's not like the same X amount of people that were focused on operating systems are now ALSO focusing on iPhones, iPods,
TVs, etc. Nope, there are entirely new teams of qualified people addressing 'new business.' This is a good thing for Apple and, in the end, a good thing for the user.The crux of the biscuit has (and always will be) the OS. It is the central, linking element between computer, phones, TVs, toasters, etc. The lines between computers and home entertainment is blurring everyday. Apple's OS is their distinguishing advantage over MS and any other players out there. And in time, we will see a changing of the guard.
In my mind, Apple's strategy is both calculated and brilliant, if not their only option (ha!). MS clearly has a lock on the office. And with most people spending more time in an office environment than a home environment, that would seem like a solid position. And it is. But also consider at least 1/2 (my personal social observation) of those very same people HATE their jobs and office environments and you can begin to see an opportunity. There needs to be a ying to that yang and Apple could very well be that ying.
{Recap: office and, subconsciously, MS associated with bad. Why not home and Apple associated with good?
Hmmm...}
We can all agree that trying to take the office from MS is futile. They're way too established, way too many factors involved for that approach. But the home is wide open. Like the wild west, everyone is scrambling to secure a piece of the pie. And Apple are positioning themselves to be what MS is to the office. Say what you will about the iPod but it represents Apple's clear and intentional move to slowly, systematically, one by one, eventually take down the dominance of MS. And how smart... focus on an individual basis, get an individual user hooked on your product (iPod). Then grow that to their home experience (iLife, iMacs, etc.). Once that takes hold and people become accustomed to Apple's greatest asset (integration, based largely on the OS), they will then expect/demand the same in their office environments.
Yes. It's a theory with (obviously) several incredibly debatable points. Just reminding some that there may be bigger ideas at play here than what he daily, seemingly minuscule 'rumors' might suggest.
Bigger picture.
wait so you're telling me i'm wrong because of a game your beta testing, then you tell me not to compare a game/application to an OS release. why not hover over this word -> contradiction <- with your mouse, while holding down the apple and control key.
I'm not under an Apple NDA! My source is under Apple NDA!
Believe me, I know as a betatester, how NDA's work. Not one NDA is the same, they are all different.
I'm under other NDA's from other companys. Which I'm not going to tell you guys about. That would be stupid! It's the same like shooting in my own foot. It's hard enough working under different aliases and not loosing my work as a tester! Just for keeping you guys informed how things work.
Maybe it's better I'm just keeping my mouth in the future!
It's about you claiming that you can hold a release! If it's not blessed by you, they (managment and others) will not release it. That's bullsh*t!
Nothing else
And yes do not compare your work as a betatester, claiming you can hold a release from software, with a release from an Apple OS.
Apple is working very different and the only people that can hold a release are very few! And for sure not a betatester or a external developer
I'm testing more then 6 games and 2 programs for the moment. I'm working for 4 company's. And NO not for Apple! But some testers I know are testing for Apple. It's a small world you know. I wonder why I'm not knowing you
Apple is still a computer company. iPod, Apple TV, iPhone are just specialized computers.Computers are not the core business of Apple anymore
And apart from iPod, they all run Mac OS X in some form or another.i can't begin to imagine the QA overhead required in supporting 4 active branches of leopard (ppc developer, intel developer, ppc "real", intel "real"). from a purely project management point of view that's just not a smart move on apple's part. i want to reiterate i'm not saying that there aren't internal builds at apple, there have to be. i just don't think those internal builds are somehow vastly superior to what developers have in their hands...
you know every OS X release this happens. people start getting their hopes up, whether it's snapiness in 10.0, 10.1 and 10.2, secret unannounced features in 10.3, 10.4 and now 10.5 or imminent release due to a secret build in cupertino 10.4 and 10.5. every time, every single time it turns out to be untrue. rumors and conspiracy theorists talk about build numbers, optimizing code and how the "real" gold master was actually a build that never went to developers and it will be snappier/have more feature/be coming out next week. every time, every single time this has proven wrong. there were no new features in 10.3/10.4; 10.0 10.1 and 10.2 had identical checksum values as the final developer candidate and there were no big post-devbuild increases snapiness.
then these forums turn in to a big bitch session about how people feel ripped off that apple didn't do make it faster, or include some mythical feature that some random blogger said "they saw". i mean you can already see people getting annoyed that leopard isn't out yet based on nothing more than spurious internet speculation.
this time of course jobs stirred the pot with his top secret slide at MWSF, if in this instance they don't deliver at least people will have some justification in being annoyed.
my take is all the "new" features are going to actually be related almost entirely to apple's software lineup: ilife, iwork, final cut, etc... and their new hardware devices
tv and iphone. i think all the apps will have been written to take advantage of core animation, core audio, core video, time machine, 64 bit, etc... the new "features" will be more about integration than things like dashboard. i do think there's an outside chance we'll see a refreshed UI that matches more closely the look of iphone.i would also saythis list of known issues is far from "pretty simple". just some of the more critical bugs to fix:
- upgrades from previous leopard installs don't work
- sometimes users can't backup their system during install
- users may not be able to enable time machine when connection a drive
- dragging files from network to local may fail
- volumes may not show up in the sidebar in some situations
- when adding a shared folder, is may not be created
- some powerbook g4s panic when waking from sleep
the scary thing about that subset of bugs isn't the severity of them it's the usage of the word "may" or "sometimes". if you develop software then you know those are the worst kinds of bugs because it means they don't know why they happen and the steps to reproduce the bug are unknown.
i have no doubt that many of those bugs might already be fixed, it is nearly three weeks since that build was released
It's about you claiming that you can hold a release! If it's not blessed by you, they (managment and others) will not release it. That's bullsh*t!
Nothing else
And yes do not compare your work as a betatester, claiming you can hold a release from software, with a release from an Apple OS.
Apple is working very different and the only people that can hold a release are very few! And for sure not a betatester or a external developer
you are right beta testers cannot hold up a release, however at the close of the beta the top bug reporters usually get invited to the release candidate stage. release candidate testers on the projects i have worked on represent less than 1% of the beta test group and probably 10% of the alpha test group.
in general, i receive a new build fedexed to me two to three times a week. i have an engineer assigned to me and we have twice daily talks to discuss build quality, old bugs, new bugs, etc... part of the process is a ship/don't ship vote. sometimes it's a binary decision, pass/fail, sometimes it's a grading system (a-f or 1-10). they can't ship until the release candidate group says it's ready. there is usually another few days after they get the ok from their release candidate testers before a GM is declared. i believe, but don't know for sure, that internally the engineers, QA, etc... have to give their grades and if they're still not happy after the rc group give it's okay then they keep at it.
does apple do this? i have no idea, but they'd be awfully negligent if they didn't adopt a similar policy.
It was not something so unexpected. NeXTSTEP (which they acquired as the basis for Mac OS X) shipped for 4 different architectures (m68k, hppa, sparc, x86), OPENSTEP shipped for 3 (m68k, sparc, x86) and it was known that the stuff also ran in the labs on PowerPC and m88k and possibly MIPS and Alpha. Then 'universal' binaries were called 'fat' binaries.
Rhapsody (Mac OS X precursor) *shipped* both for Macs and Intel machines.
Most of the hard stuff (making a lot of things architecture-independent, think for example byte-order in an architecture little-endian of big-endian) had already been done by NeXT in 1993-1994. Something Microsoft was apparantly never able to do. The HP PA-RISC architecture even came with a switch to turn the hardware from big-endian to little-endian just so that Windows NT and offspring would run on it.
I'm still using a 7600 and an 8600. I was going to buy a Macbook Pro. I was all set to pick up the phone to a dealer and buy it but when I went to the bathroom I took the sunday paper with me and happen to read my horoscope.
It said that any major financial purchases will be cause for internal conflict. My curiosity piqued, I researched online. I found out mercury was in retrograde....that had an effect on electronic devices not working. Then I read that something to do with finances was going to make me sit up and take notice.... then later that night I find out the stock market dropped 400 points. I never really paid attention to horoscopes but this weirded me out and I didn't buy it. I didn't want to tempt fate and get a lemon.
So now it makes sense to wait for the next Macbook Pro upgrade because its due soon. I'm going to get it whether or not they're tied in with leopard.
As far as I'm concerned, this leopard is just another update to OSX. As long as my applications and devices work, I'm happy. Whatever it is these OS's do, I'm sure they do a million things that I haven't the slightest idea that they even do them. Oh well....
It said that any major financial purchases will be cause for internal conflict. My curiosity piqued, I researched online. I found out mercury was in retrograde....that had an effect on electronic devices not working. Then I read that something to do with finances was going to make me sit up and take notice.... then later that night I find out the stock market dropped 400 points. I never really paid attention to horoscopes but this weirded me out and I didn't buy it. I didn't want to tempt fate and get a lemon.
So now it makes sense to wait for the next Macbook Pro upgrade because its due soon. I'm going to get it whether or not they're tied in with leopard.
As far as I'm concerned, this leopard is just another update to OSX. As long as my applications and devices work, I'm happy. Whatever it is these OS's do, I'm sure they do a million things that I haven't the slightest idea that they even do them. Oh well....
We are working with "Mantis" (bug tracker). We have a personal FTP-server @ high speed and we always have a team of engineers, artists and others. Most of us have a chance testing a RC
The only "persons" deciding when software is ready to be released, in my experiance, is the company self. Even not a select group of loyal and skilled testers.
And yes, I'm working/testing for big names.
If we need to test Multiplayer, we just use iChat and Mail to organise us.
No Fedex here
GM ,RC and beta's are seeded true FTP. Much faster...I do know that those are the worst kind of bugs TO FIND. However, they are not the worst kind of bugs TO FIX. To find these kind of bugs requires watching where things could be going wrong, or, optionally, to simply go back to a version where the bug did not exist and then see what has changed (if you have a source control management system). Sometimes, the latter is too complicated, though.
However, once you have FOUND the bug, it is often nowhere near as difficult to fix, unless fixing the bug requires architecture changes or (uh-oh) rewriting many components.
Consider that, perhaps, if Apple already knows about the bugs, they already know what is causing them... so fixing them may take a relatively short amount of time.
As for specific bugs on that list:
Previous Leopard installs - since the users who will be buying the REAL Leopard won't have a previous install, this won't matter. Previous tiger installs would.
Backup system - There is a reason, probably relatively simple (not accounting for something in the original system)
Dragging files over network - if they watch it fail, they could probably find out exactly what is going on there. The most likely reason this would break, anyway, is if they changed networking code or Finder's drag-and-drop code
volumes may not show up in the sidebar in some situations - the "some situations" makes it sound like Apple knows what kind of situations. If Apple can make it happen in their own labs, then they can see why it isn't showing up.
some powerbook g4s panic when waking from sleep - this could potentially be difficult for them to solve. But, during panics, crash logs are created, so they will have SOME clue of what is going on.
But the point, is not that it will be easy to solve these bugs, but that the bugs are most likely not (for Apple) deciding the release date. Apple probably has bugs and completion of the product under control, and no delays should be needed FOR CODING REASONS. However, they may delay for marketing, etc.
Also, you mentioned that having so many branches could make it difficult for Apple? Perhaps that's why it has been three weeks since the last update to the $500 build...