OS X 10.4 Tiger build 8A393 Seeded

[tmornini]

I'm no software developer but they're still in A series (8AXXX).

I am a software developer, but I have no direct knowledge of how Apple
designates builds.

It would appear from the structure and history, however, that the first
digit is a major release milestone, i.e. 10.0, 10.1, 10.2, 10.3, 10.4 and
that the numbers date back all the way to NextStep/OpenStep days.

The second position (the letter) would be most likely major integration
points, or internal milestones. I would *guess* that they may be related
to internal development lines (branches) and therefore favor the integration
point viewpoint, but again I have no internal insight.

One reason I favor the branch integration position is that the profusion
of letter revisions is waining as OS X matures. There are likely fewer
discussions internally as to "which way to proceed" which would cause
fewer branches, and fewer integration points.

My $.02

 

[ClarkeB]

PowerBook dual-core G5s with Cell processor and TiVo abilities to ship with Tiger this Tuesday!

 

[wdlove]

June june june!!! please be out by june

We know that it will be out by the end of June. Steve promised twice, will be out 1st half of 2005. I would prefer June myself, the 24th sounds good. In the end all that really matters is that Tiger is the best that it can be, so don't want to see them rush.

 

[BornAgainMac]

I wish there was a "Panther Plus!" free download to try out some of the smaller features of Tiger like Dashboard. The wait is killing me.

 

[bennetsaysargh]

aggregate USB audio streaming should be added. i hope they're going to revamp CoreAudio so i can use multiple USB audio devices. (firewire is expensive!)

 

[jayscheuerle]

Does anyone know the time it usually takes between the last seeded (GM?) build and when commercial packages are on the shelves? It would seem that after a seed, they'd have to wait a bit to see if any remaining major bugs are found before shipping it off to press, but from the moment it gets the big "thumbs up", how long until boxed units are available? 2 week turnaround? More/Less?

 

[Trekkie]

Here here to that - I manage a group of Macs, 6 Windows machines, and a Windows Server 2003. I use the Apple Remote Desktop and Microsofts Remote Desktop Connection and Microsoft kills the Apple product on speed. We almost thought we could run all 6 windows machines on server machine and get the people with the windows machines MAcs and just have them log into the server to run windows because it was soooooooo fast and usable. Its kinda sad when Microsoft products run better on Macs than Mac products do.

you can thank Citrix for that performance increase. Keep in mind you are comparing a 'remote control' software to a 'remote windowing' software. The Microsoft product was designed so that only the mouse/kb/screen redraws are sent over the wire and everything else is done locally, whil ARD does everything over the wire, so it's going to be slower.

 

[BornAgainMac]

you can thank Citrix for that performance increase. Keep in mind you are comparing a 'remote control' software to a 'remote windowing' software. The Microsoft product was designed so that only the mouse/kb/screen redraws are sent over the wire and everything else is done locally, whil ARD does everything over the wire, so it's going to be slower.

That is probably why it is necessary to go to B/W or greyscale mode to help with performance. I am glad I didn't bother upgrading. I'll wait until version 3 to see if they address the performance.

 

[WM.]

This is a misunderstanding. Many people think the A stands for Alpha, the B stands for Beta, etc. In fact the A & B are just hex number representations of the build number.

A is 10, B is 11, C is 12 etc. My guess is that we will see Tiger released late March to early April.

The letters are definitely not hex. The release version of 10.3.8 is 7U16, and U is decidedly not a hexadecimal number...

WM

 

[WM.]

Does anyone know the time it usually takes between the last seeded (GM?) build and when commercial packages are on the shelves? It would seem that after a seed, they'd have to wait a bit to see if any remaining major bugs are found before shipping it off to press, but from the moment it gets the big "thumbs up", how long until boxed units are available? 2 week turnaround? More/Less?

I believe the time between the seeding of 7B85 and the official Panther release (10/24/03) was roughly a month. It was just about in the middle of those two events--in the first week of October--that they announced the ship date as 10/24. Until that happened, we didn't know for sure whether 7B85 was going to be GM or if there was going to be further seeding.

So I guess the answer is that it should be about a month, but maybe they'll be extra careful and take longer, and we won't know whether a given seed is "the" seed until they announce a ship date.

HTH
WM

 

[Sleix]

I wish there was a "Panther Plus!" free download to try out some of the smaller features of Tiger like Dashboard. The wait is killing me.

What they should do is give a $20 time limited issue of Tiger Release Candidates for those regular folk who aren't so lucky to be able to afford the ADC memberships. It'd be similar to what M$ did back in 2001 with WinXP's release.

I mean, think of the response they'd get from diehards with little money and the yearning to be the next on the block (after those rich blowhards who can afford ADC) with a release candidate of Tiger in their machines...I mean, you could limit it to 250,000 or so users, and even give a cheap incentive of say...the first 25,000 will get $20 coupon off their copy of Tiger later on...they'd also get a little more value with a small bug reporting system that could be put in place for those who joined up, so they could remove those little pesky bugs that don't show up until after the release...

Here's wishing for Apple to take up on this idea...

 

[The Black Rock]

What they should do is give a $20 time limited issue of Tiger Release Candidates for those regular folk who aren't so lucky to be able to afford the ADC memberships. It'd be similar to what M$ did back in 2001 with WinXP's release.

I mean, think of the response they'd get from diehards with little money and the yearning to be the next on the block (after those rich blowhards who can afford ADC) with a release candidate of Tiger in their machines...I mean, you could limit it to 250,000 or so users, and even give a cheap incentive of say...the first 25,000 will get $20 coupon off their copy of Tiger later on...they'd also get a little more value with a small bug reporting system that could be put in place for those who joined up, so they could remove those little pesky bugs that don't show up until after the release...

Here's wishing for Apple to take up on this idea...

That's an excellent idea. Do you have any idea why something like that isn't already happening?

Tiger will be released somewhere between March and May, and no later. I'm just guessing, but it's sounds reasonable to me.

 

[ryanyogan]

Apple really wants to keep the features on the wraps and only let the dedicated people whom develop big applications for it see them. I guess they like the element of surprise or something..

 

[blackcrayon]

ARD 2 unstable

They have a decent product as far as features, but ARD 2.0 and 2.1 are the most unstable released Apple applications I have ever used. The admin app quits on a whim, installing or copying software fails for no obvious reason, the cursor disappears doing screen sharing or sometimes screen updates cease entirely, etc. Check the Apple Remote Desktop section of Apple's support forums for all of the issues. Let's hope 2.2 is out soon!

 

[wtmcgee]

That's an excellent idea. Do you have any idea why something like that isn't already happening?

Tiger will be released somewhere between March and May, and no later. I'm just guessing, but it's sounds reasonable to me.

I always view the initial release of an OS as that same type of thing.

I usually wait a few weeks to install any new OS, as any major issues that may crop up for me have already been found and hopefully addressed.

 

[rendezvouscp]

That's an excellent idea. Do you have any idea why something like that isn't already happening?

Can you imagine the bad press Apple would get with beta versions of Tiger floating around, if really bad things happened to those users? It would make Apple look very sloppy. For example, the Spotlight issues didn't appear in original developer builds, but have cropped up recently. It just wouldn't be a good idea.

It was, however, a good idea when Mac OS X, as a whole, was beta. People really knew what they were getting into, and Mac OS X was a "baby" (more like a kindergartner...).
-Chase

 

[ASP272]

I am more than happy to wait for perfection. Well, at least as good as it gets. I don't have any G5's anyway, so the 64bit thing is going to be awhile for me. Glad to see progress though.

 

[floatingspirit]

I am more than happy to wait for perfection.

Dudes,

Macs already rock. What could be better?

 

[fossyy]

I'm curently running 10.3.8 on a 12 "powerbook and are keen to get ilife 05 but if tiger is getting close maybe i should wait for tiger and get it with the os for free.

 

[BWhaler]

I'm curently running 10.3.8 on a 12 "powerbook and are keen to get ilife 05 but if tiger is getting close maybe i should wait for tiger and get it with the os for free.

iLife doesn't come with Tiger, so you should buy it now.

 

[hob]

Can you imagine the bad press Apple would get with beta versions of Tiger floating around, if really bad things happened to those users? It would make Apple look very sloppy. For example, the Spotlight issues didn't appear in original developer builds, but have cropped up recently. It just wouldn't be a good idea.

It was, however, a good idea when Mac OS X, as a whole, was beta. People really knew what they were getting into, and Mac OS X was a "baby" (more like a kindergartner...).
-Chase

Yeah, I agree - nice idea, but wholly impractical. Windows OS releases are more like the equivalent of major mac os milestones - so the next time Apple does anything like that should be for OS 11 - and even then, not necessarily so...

Tiger Lite would be a lot of work for a dev team trying to get a full os release out, without having many benefits. The core user base (us) are still going to buy 10.4 regardless...

Hob

 

[wdlove]

Just to keep us off guard, Steve may announce the release date at WWDC. Would allow for the line of releases on the 24th.

 

[daveL]

I believe the time between the seeding of 7B85 and the official Panther release (10/24/03) was roughly a month. It was just about in the middle of those two events--in the first week of October--that they announced the ship date as 10/24. Until that happened, we didn't know for sure whether 7B85 was going to be GM or if there was going to be further seeding.

So I guess the answer is that it should be about a month, but maybe they'll be extra careful and take longer, and we won't know whether a given seed is "the" seed until they announce a ship date.

HTH
WM

7B85 was released to developers on 10/14/03 and to the public on 10/24/03. Looks like 10 days to me.

 

[GodBless]

I hope Mac OS X Tiger comes out for the X86 processors as rumored. This will put everyone's PC to good use.

 

[jsw]

I hope Mac OS X Tiger comes out for the X86 processors as rumored. This will put everyone's PC to good use.

I'd heard that there were requests, but I hadn't heard any rumors that it would actually happen, certainly not for Tiger. Any links to the contrary?