Apple Leopard ’secrets’ revealed
p2pnet.net News:- An operating system said to be a version of Apple’s upcoming Mac OS X 10.5 Leopard O/S handed out to Mac developers last week has appeared online, says PC Pro.
“APPLE.MAC.OSX.LEOPARD.V10.5.WWDC.PREVIEW-OSX appeared on ftp servers towards the end of last week, before showing up on several BitTorrent sites,” it says, going on:
“Several blogs have begun posting details of the next version of OS X that were not revealed by Apple CEO Steve Jobs last week, although the ‘top secret’ new features that Jobs is keeping under wraps appear safe for now.”
Phew!!!! That’s a relief.
Meanwhile, “the build released to attendees at the conference includes a huge number of ground-breaking changes to the underlying technology in Mac OS X and the APIs exposed to developers,” says AeroXperience, listing what it says are exclusive details of some of the API improvements to Leopard, for example:
Complete 64-Bit support for Intel and PowerPC through all frameworks excluding QuickTime C, QuickDraw, Sound Manager, Code Fragment Manager, Language Analysis Manager and QuickTime Musical Instruments. These modules are deprecated and one should use the modern equivalents instead.
Leopard will feature resolution-independent user interface and there are several functions to get the current scaling factor and apply it to pixel measurements. It is a good idea to use vector controls and buttons (PDF will work fine) or to have multiple sized resources, similar to Mac OS X icon design, so you can scale to the nearest size for the required resolution.
Address Book adds support for sharing accounts, allowing an application to restrict content according to user.
Automator includes a new user interface and allows things such as action recording, workflow variables and embedding workflows in other applications.
Time Machine has an API that allows developers to exclude unimportant files from a backup set which improves backup performance and reduces space needed for a backup.
Also See:
PC Pro – Leopard leaks onto the Net, August 14, 2006
AeroXperience – Mac OS X v10.5 “Leopard” Developer Improvements, August 9, 206
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August 14th, 2006 at 6:23 pm
Mac OSX is a BSD UNIX. There are LOADS of development tools, from shell programming on up. Plenty of 8-10 hours a day hackers have ’switched’ not just from Windows but from Linux and other (uglier) UNIXes because of this. If you get an intel Mac you can boot Windows on it too, and run Visual Studio or whatever. I would imagine that a programmer would see the advantage of being able to develop on (or for) different operating systems, at different levels of granularity. Think flexibility. Seems like a no brainer to me.
June 17th, 2007 at 10:12 am