Mac OS X 10.4.1 on track for May release
Apple has yet to officially unleash Mac OS X 10.4 "Tiger," but already insiders are abuzz about the first update to the next-generation operating system, code-named "Atlanta."
Scheduled for release sometime next month, the Mac OS X 10.4.1 Update will reportedly tie several loose ends vacated when the Mac maker, on deadline, declared build 8A428 of Mac OS X 10.4 gold master on March 31st.
Almost immediately thereafter, the Mac OS X Update team at Apple began work on Atlanta, which will also include optimizations and deliver support for DVD Studio Pro 4, part of Apple's new $1299 Final Cut Studio video production suite.
Based on recent mumblings, it appears that Apple hopes to ship Final Cut Studio in mid-May, around the 17th. Due to the production suite's dependence on the Tiger update, it's assumed that Mac OS X 10.4.1 will be released around the same time.
Sources close to Apple believe the company will begin distributing pre-release copies of Mac OS X 10.4.1 Update to developers within the next week.
Meanwhile, at 6:00 p.m. this Friday, all 105 Apple retail stores and participating Apple Authorized Resellers will host ?Tiger World Premiere? events to officially usher in Mac OS X 10.4 "Tiger." The events are scheduled to run till midnight.
Scheduled for release sometime next month, the Mac OS X 10.4.1 Update will reportedly tie several loose ends vacated when the Mac maker, on deadline, declared build 8A428 of Mac OS X 10.4 gold master on March 31st.
Almost immediately thereafter, the Mac OS X Update team at Apple began work on Atlanta, which will also include optimizations and deliver support for DVD Studio Pro 4, part of Apple's new $1299 Final Cut Studio video production suite.
Based on recent mumblings, it appears that Apple hopes to ship Final Cut Studio in mid-May, around the 17th. Due to the production suite's dependence on the Tiger update, it's assumed that Mac OS X 10.4.1 will be released around the same time.
Sources close to Apple believe the company will begin distributing pre-release copies of Mac OS X 10.4.1 Update to developers within the next week.
Meanwhile, at 6:00 p.m. this Friday, all 105 Apple retail stores and participating Apple Authorized Resellers will host ?Tiger World Premiere? events to officially usher in Mac OS X 10.4 "Tiger." The events are scheduled to run till midnight.
Comments
I hope they fix my problems with the iDisk synching before 10.4.1....
- Slideshows (the ones you can trigger from the Finder, Spotlight, or Mail) sometimes display a screen full of garbage. Sometimes it works. It's sporatic. There's garbage appearing in several other full screen situations as well, but in most other cases, it only appears for a second and then goes away (such as when you switch to full screen mode in QuickTime, or start a screensaver).
- The Finder has actually managed to get worse. Resizing windows in icon often didn't work correctly in 10.3...this hasn't been fixed. Now there's a problem with resizing list windows too. If you make your columns narrower, the window won't shrink to fit the correct size. You have to drag it to a new size, then click resize again, and then it works...almost. The window is always several pixels wider and taller than it should be. The resize cursor doesn't appear when you hover over the edge of a list header, until you start dragging, so there is no indication whether you're pointing in the right spot.
- Speaking of mouse cursors, there's a problem with the wrong cursor occasionally "sticking" in many applications. There seems to be a big problem in general in determining the correct mouse cursor.
- Drag and drop operations no longer work in several apps -- even ones that have been updated for Tiger compatibility (e.g. DragThing...you can no longer drag and drop an application into the include/exclude list for a dock). In Azureus, you can no longer drop a .torrent file into the window; you must now select them manually with an "open" dialog.
But I don't want to come off too negative. These are just a few flaws in an otherwise great update. There's a lot more to like about it than grit your teeth about:
- As usual the UI has been refined even further; everything looks really nice.
- The iTunes Album Artwork screensaver is really cool, as long as you've added artwork to most of your music. I've got over 7000 songs, and at least 80% of them have artwork, and I like the iTunes screensaver a lot.
- The RSS screensaver is pretty neat too.
- Dashboard is really handy. Chews up a lot of memory though. My one beef about it is that the widgets don't load until the first time you try to use Dashboard, so you'll be sitting there waiting for quite awhile the first time you try to use it. The widgets are very slow to start up (especially when you have a lot of them open), and some of them don't respond for several minutes.
- Spotlight is great. It's going to become a big part of how people use their Mac, especially as more and more apps add plugins to support the metadata in their file formats. It's no replacement for LaunchBar though. It can't find discontiguous letters (so "TX" won't find Text Edit, and "PS" won't find Photoshop). The developers of LaunchBar and QuickSilver have absolutely nothing to worry about. Spotlight is really not the same thing at all (although it does steal their default shortcut, but you can change it back easily). Fortunately, LaunchBar/QuickSilver and Spotlight co-exist very nicely.
- Resizing video in QuickTime is really smooth and impressive, and I've only got a Radeon AGP (32 MB). Some people scoffed that this was one of the "200 new features", saying that Apple was padding the list, but they'll eat their words when they see it for themselves. QuickTime 7 is great all around, actually. The full screen controls are very handy.
Quite a lot of other minor things I liked as well. It's now possible to remove the US input method entirely when you have Kotoeri enabled (for Japanese input). The Romaji mode of Kotoeri is the same layout as the US, with one key difference: there are keyboard shortcuts to switch to hiragana/katakana. In 10.3 you could turn off the US input method, but it would still be in the menu, and if an app mistakenly switched to it (happened sometimes), the Kotoeri shortcuts stopped working.
Tiger has quite a bit more flexibility in date/time formats. It takes longer to set it up the way you want, but you have a lot more control over it. I recommend choosing the US region and customizing it, because some other regions mysteriously don't work in all apps. If you choose Canada, and make the same exact customizations, a bunch of apps will ignore them. So choose US (or another one that doesn't give the warning), and simply set it up however you want. One neat new feature is the ability to select from a bunch of different calendar types. Most of us use Gregorian, but you can now select Buddhist, Japanese, and other calendars. (The Japanese calendar, for example, substitutes the year with a different number based on how long the current emperor has reigned.)
Anyway, that's more than enough out of me for the moment.
Party at MacUpgrades!
Originally posted by Kickaha
This is normal. By the time version X ships, version X + 1 is well on its way to being done. By the time that rolls out, X + 2 is on its way. This is just the nature of the business.
We've been through all of this before, haven't we? I know how it works, but remember that it's not written in stone. If the update is ready enough to be sent to developers within the next week or two, plus other testing and release in May, then Apple could have done it as part of 10.4.
This is just foolishness. The pro apps now need 10.4.1. How silly. The next update most likely won't come for another three months after 4.1. They could have waited a few more weeks.
If you wait to roll in the X+1 changes, and ship, then the X+2 changes are right around the corner now... so why not wait for those?
No matter *what* line in the sand you choose to make, there will always be changes 'almost ready' that someone will slam you for not waiting for. Basically, you have to ignore them. Their opinion can't matter, because if you satisfy them by waiting, you'll just tick off someone else later, ad infinitum.
If you wait until the product is 'done', you'll never ship, period. Likewise, if as a customer you wait until the product is 'done', you'll never buy... but in that case, the only person who loses out is you. A company shipping product doesn't have that luxury.
Apple chose Mar31 as the freeze date for 10.4, for reasons that you and I aren't privy to. I seriously doubt it was at a whim.
The point is: development never stops. Anytime a product ships, the next version of it is already well under way. This is normal, to be expected, and most of all, a good thing. This is also why non-critical bugs caught only after a release tend not to get fixed until 2 releases later... the next release is already planned out, in progress, and hopefully being tested.
Originally posted by Kickaha
Yes, we have been over this before, and it hasn't changed.
If you wait to roll in the X+1 changes, and ship, then the X+2 changes are right around the corner now... so why not wait for those?
No matter *what* line in the sand you choose to make, there will always be changes 'almost ready' that someone will slam you for not waiting for. Basically, you have to ignore them. Their opinion can't matter, because if you satisfy them by waiting, you'll just tick off someone else later, ad infinitum.
If you wait until the product is 'done', you'll never ship, period. Likewise, if as a customer you wait until the product is 'done', you'll never buy... but in that case, the only person who loses out is you. A company shipping product doesn't have that luxury.
Apple chose Mar31 as the freeze date for 10.4, for reasons that you and I aren't privy to. I seriously doubt it was at a whim.
The point is: development never stops. Anytime a product ships, the next version of it is already well under way. This is normal, to be expected, and most of all, a good thing. This is also why non-critical bugs caught only after a release tend not to get fixed until 2 releases later... the next release is already planned out, in progress, and hopefully being tested.
Kickaha, this is a fun discussion. We're not going anywhere with it, but we all have to have something to do, correct?
Anyway, as I said, it's unlikely that Apple will come out with another update for several months. As this first one is so close, they should have finished it.
Developers are already expressing disappointment that Apple wrapped it up when they did.
Meanwhile, my pre-ordered copy from Amazon as well as my copy of CS2 has not come yet, nor have I recieved e-mail notices from them that they have been shipped.
nothing too spectacular.
I'm hoping not to flame or make any macheads mad, but let's be real here guys...the first panther release was awesome compared to this.
sorry, maybe i'm not seeing everything. :????
sam
Originally posted by sam_dlg
i have 10.4 and it's ok.
nothing too spectacular.
I'm hoping not to flame or make any macheads mad, but let's be real here guys...the first panther release was awesome compared to this.
sorry, maybe i'm not seeing everything. :????
sam
You waited for nearly a year for this to be your first post?
Originally posted by Mr. Me
You waited for nearly a year for this to be your first post?
It's no worse than most posts I've seen here.
Originally posted by sam_dlg
i have 10.4 and it's ok.
nothing too spectacular.
I'm hoping not to flame or make any macheads mad, but let's be real here guys...the first panther release was awesome compared to this.
sorry, maybe i'm not seeing everything. :????
sam
Explain how Panther was "awesome" compared to this? This is your opinion of course. I'm just curious as to what you like the most about Panther.
Originally posted by hmurchison
Explain how Panther was "awesome" compared to this?
Mind you, he talks about the first Panther release, the one that nuked some poor souls firewire drives
Originally posted by melgross
We've been through all of this before, haven't we? I know how it works, but remember that it's not written in stone. If the update is ready enough to be sent to developers within the next week or two, plus other testing and release in May, then Apple could have done it as part of 10.4.
This is just foolishness. The pro apps now need 10.4.1. How silly. The next update most likely won't come for another three months after 4.1. They could have waited a few more weeks.
Most small 3rd party developers can't afford to be ADC members, and they can't update their apps before the final is available which means that no matter what users will see buggy apps and things that break their systems.
Plus developers can't test everything - there will always be bugs found the second regular users install the software.
Take a look at 10.3.9, it went through a pretty long seeding period with many seeds both through ADC and AppleSeed, and two seconds after release, someone found a Java bug, that wasn't found during the test period.
Most small 3rd party developers can't afford to be ADC members
***Cough***** BS ******Cough*****
I can't speak for running a business outside of the US but here in the states it can be a better strategy to sign up for the ADC. That's a business expense that can have portions written off on your taxes. If I was starting a biz around developing ADC and MSDN(if I was cross platform) would be the "first" thing I'd be investing in. This "I can't afford $500 for ADC" is total BS. To all ISV please let me know if this is true so I can dump your product like a sack of bricks. I'm not dealing with fly by night companies that don't invest.
Oh BTW a "small" one product developer like delicious-monster.com will actively consider licensing something like IMBD access in addition to Amazon and those fees run 5 figures annually folks. Can't afford $500 pfffff you don't deserve to be in business.
and of course, I usually don't have much to say. i'm a mac newbie
**********
Please excuse me for my limited mac experience, I'm a windows user, and a windows developer.
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To me panther seemed to add more neat things, and created a new UI.
*****
I hate the fact that it was requiring me to sign up with a .mac account --> that's stupid. even msft doesn't require my email address, home address & telephone # after installing xp.
and about the 200 new features list that apple has on their website?!?!
gimme a break! talk about major padding!
can someone please help me uncover some cool things in tiger?
Please, once again, not trying to start a flame here.
sam
and view the "TOP NEW FEATURES OF TIGER"
and it includes lame "new features" such as:
Safari RSS
iChat
QuickTime 7
gimme a break!!! these should've been updates to the 10.3
* spotlight search is incredible! I'm amazed at it's speed
* dashboard is ok, would like more widgets.
can't wait to use the automator