Mac OS X 10.4 "Tiger" reaches final candidate stage - Page 2

"Displays on machines with nVidia GeForce video cards (like the 17" iMac G4) may occasionally fail to wake from sleep."

http://www.cafemacs.com/#t572

No, not at all, only that apps that use the new technologies will never work on the older systems.


Because testing all the old upper-level code on the new base would be a NIGHTMARE. I can't imagine the logistics involved, nor can I imagine the support nightmares that would come with it.


A few very well might, but I can't imagine that Apple would ever be able to recoup the loss from the testing alone from those few. Simply not economically worth the technical trouble.

Sorry, no idea how that addresses what I said. For instance, how do 10.3.x updates address giving users access to apps requiring core-video, or standardise support and security updates across 10.1/10.2/10.3/10.4?

Yup

get used to "Requires OS X 10.4 and above". Also I expect to see Apple make a concerted attempt to move most users to Tiger. I wouldn't be suprised to see deals and special bundles. The rest of the stubborn folks will begin to be left behind.

As Kickaha says...Tiger is a MASSIVE change. I'm still amazed that some people cannot see how vast this update is. Damn near everything has been tweaked. The negative is that apps will have to be updated but let's be honest. Plenty of developers have the updates ready. Tiger has only been available to many for what 9 months. Any developer that is seriously behind should be flogged.

Tiger is the OS that we can use for the next 3 years with just a few tweaks in the process. This is where Apple has wanted to be IMO. Tiger is the foundation for the apps they want to see on the platform.

Yup, this is just the start of something huge. Everything up until now (10.0 through 10.3) has just been a teaser, IMO.

I expect 10.5 will serve up a raft of technologies aimed right at the end user, built on the dev techs we're going to see in 10.4. Should be interesting.

Yes that would be an awful idea. Instead of that, I mean use 10.4, but just switch off some of the great user-features that Tiger offers so that the "lite" version, as much as possible, helps Apple and application developers get what they need, while giving the user as little extra as possible so they'll still buy the full blown version.

The idea is to satisfy 2 goals
1. get people upgrading to Tiger as per usual, AND
2. get the people who won't pay to upgrade, to have an alternative so there is a single OS base to develop for.

Hell, I'll be upgrading. I certainly wish I could say that for some other people I know.

Correct me if I'm wrong, but isn't much of the information in this article protected by non-disclosure agreements? Aren't you blatantly publishing stolen trade secrets?

Well, except that by doing that (stripping out all the 10.4 APIs), you're essentially forcing developers to target the old APIs *anyway* to get some of the market, so you're not gaining anything.

People will upgrade when they see a reason to, and not a second sooner. If 10.4 and the upcoming apps don't do it, nothing will.

How so? The article clearly states that nothing is sure, and that it's only speculation based on some peoples words. Surely rumours are allowed in AppleLand are they not? Oh, wait...

Of course rumors and speculation are 'allowed' in AppleLand. Leaking information on unannounced products (regardless of the company), however, is not.

What leaked information do you see on the thread??? As far as I know, everything talked about in this thread is information you can obtain from Apple themselves by simply going to their website and looking at their own descriptions of the new OS...

I don't see the leak???

Does this mean I have to go through a Adobe CS update, FCP Pro, DVD Studio Pro, and MS Office 2004, etc. updates so they will work under Tiger?

Eric

Almost certainly, no, but you will have to update to get any new features... of which you can expect many.

Google announced GMail on April 1st.

I take it that you see no way of making a 10.4 that doesn't have all the bells and whistles, yet still runs newer 10.4 applications. Ahh well!

It was just a thought :-)

I didn't mean that there were any leaks in this thread (because there aren't). I was referring to rumors in general.

Nope, the old apps will work, but the updates will optimize the apps for things like core*, and maybe add app-specific dashboard and spotlight plugins for example

yeah, and remember how everyone on the internet thought it was a huge-ass hoax? releasing stuff on april 1st can be a difficult sell job. at least tiger has lots of build-up, so people now it's legit. gmail came out of nowhere with a ridiculous amount of storage space compared to its competitors -- it was so "too good to be true" that everyone, well, assumed it was, and april 1st helped that undercurrent of disbelief.

i believe, if i may be so bold, he was simply replying to your comment which seemed to focus on compatibility with CURRENT apps as being a critical feature. therefore, the latest issue of panther should satisfy those needs if they are foremost on your checklist, and until new hardware actually starts shipping with tiger by default, the consumer does assume a little bit of responsibility right now to know ahead of time whether somethign will seriously break... or not be surprised if it does.

so, for instance, there are no apps right now requiring core video or spotlight, etc. and if you want new apps that do, you'll be signing on for the upgrade to tiger. also, as we have seen over the past year or so, apple has been issuing security updates outside the ".x.y" releases for everyone's safety. well, except those still clinging to os X.0 or X.1, but honestly, i think there ae fewer users of those updates than classic these days.

personally, i'd hate to see apple try to split up their os offerings into the seventeen-headed monstrosity that windows keeps doing to increase their profits (of course, ms also doesn't do it to maintain compatibility... it's more of just a trick to get you to spend something... ANYthing... on another windows upgrade).

i will be interested to see if classic can still be run under tiger. one would assume that, if it's running now, there'd be no reason to break it. certainly finding a classic install cd is becoming almost impossible to find these days, and apple would rather it fade like a bad dream or a broken relationship, and i wouldn't be surprised if they give tiger a classic-ectomy.

Why do people seem to think Tiger will "break" their apps...?

It will not "break" anything... it will run them all the same as they run in Panther now UNLESS an application update or upgrade utilizes features ONLY AVAILABLE in Tiger... and then just THAT update will require Tiger.

Think "backwards compatable" (yes, there are always exceptions). But your PShop CS will work just fine... but if the UPCOMING CS2 release utilizes features ONLY AVAILABLE in Tiger... core image or offloading some functions to the GPU... then you will need tiger to USE those features or get the benefit... but it will STILL WORK in Panther.

Tiger is not a ploy to get you all to "upgrade-all-your-apps"... that'd piss everyone off and not many people would buy the new OS when they found out. You'll be fine.

the only time a major OS update on any platform will break stuff, there is a huge change involved like going from that crap Mac/OS codebase to the 5.5BSD base in OSX or from windows 9x kernal to nt5.1-based stuff in XP.

minor updates, like point releses (jag->panther or win NT4->2000 or XP) or old-to-new version updates (os8->os9 or win 95->98 ) do not break many things at all, breaking things is not in a vendors interest at all.

When an update is to break things, the vendors make a way for stuff to work, emmulation i n windows or Classic in the Mac OSX enviornment

Your shit will work, let not your heart be troubled.

I would assume most good developers will not be coding to 10.4 specifically. If they use Core Video (big if), that would either be for features disabled for 10.3 users, or 10.3 users will use the app's old code (which most apps who'll use Core Video already have the old code), which let's the processor do everything.

Keep in mind that's how CoreVideo works on macs without the requisite video cards. The CPU will be doing all the work. CoreVideo is just a set of libraries that, if you have the correct video card, can offset some of the work onto the video card. Just like what Quartz Extreme does (but don't make the bad link that since some effects that use QE don't work at all on computers without a good video card, that CoreVideo works the same way).

Oh, and trying to standardize the underlying OS actually can cause support problems, because Apple's been basically changing the underlying Unix in conjunction with OS X. Trying to upgrade the underlying Unix without changing the OS X layer would probably cause more problems then it would solve, and updating OS X to the latest Unix changes just is a lot more work, just to get where they are now.

And after all that, there'd have to be a benefit to Apple, which would seem minimal (having to update only one core for all systems for the occassional set of security updates). And if Apple puts in all the code to support, as your example states, CoreVideo apps, then there's less impetus on the users to update to 10.4 (sorry, Searchlight/spotlight/whatever and dashboard aren't 'killer' features that people are going to drool over and buy regardless of other stuff).

The Core* APIs will only be available in Tiger so you couldn't just port the code to 10.3 or below without actually writing the Core* routine functionality that you'd be executing with a function call in Tiger. These libraries that you speak of won't exist in 10.3 so whether the GPU does the work or not if you tried to call these functions in 10.3 your program will bomb.

For programs like Photoshop this wouldn't be a problem since they already have their own crop/rotate/blur/etc. routines. For people like me who might use the Core* functionality to spice up my programs in Tiger it would be a total bear to recreate that functionality so my program would run the same in Panther or below. This is probably why you'll see many programs come out that only run in Tiger.

Apple explains that on http://developer.apple.com/macosx/tiger/64bit.html

you'll have to forgive some of us "old timers," who remember the days when every new issuance of classic conflicted with extensions and control panels from 3rd parties that blew all of our apps to hell.

once bitten, twice shy, you understand.

I don't have a checklist so to speak. No.. actually... after these posts I've started to make one.

My original response in this thread was purely an address to JamesG's concern:
I had simply wondered if Apple could do anything to help developers in that situation. Possibly by getting people who didn't want to pay for an upgrade to have an alternative - I figured instead of 4 OS versions to support, they could have 10.4 and 10.4.lite. That is all I wondered.

This got confused with App compatibility with the following statement:
Only at this point did I ask whether 10.4 would break some apps, which as Kickaha said was not his point at all, apps would be fine. Still the question of compatibility had now been raised and it snowballed a little
I think the original comment was the opposite - that some new apps are going to need 10.4 to run most effectively - so people will be 'encouraged' to upgrade to 10.4 to get the most out of their system.

This method wouldn't work. My question is would any method work? It's why I said just release a 10.4.lite - that way the issues with OSX layer problems disappears.
This is true.

Sure, Apple could disable spotlight etc, and force corevideo to operate as if it had a minimal video card. Users would all be on 10.4.lite or 10.4 - but how many less people would bother upgrading to 10.4? Apple could be shooting itself in the foot.

Personally, I'm upgrading largely for Spotlight and the new mail, but why are others upgrading?

Just like with every previous major OS X upgrade, certain Panther-compatible apps won't necessarily be Tiger-compatible. But backwards compatibility has improved with each release (e.g. more things "broke" between 10.1 and 10.2 than between 10.2 and 10.3).

And, as Brent Simmon's says in DrunkenBlog: Inside Ranchero with Brent and Sheila Simmons:


Seems foolishly daring to do a major OS upgrade without researching whether apps you rely on are compatible with it. Maybe home users can get away with doing that but many businesses can't afford to take such a risk.

As Kickaha wrote, "People will upgrade when they see a reason to, and not a second sooner." Certainly true, although I question the integrity of some of those "reasons". e.g. as Louzer wrote, "(sorry, Searchlight/spotlight/whatever and dashboard aren't 'killer' features that people are going to drool over and buy regardless of other stuff)" -- I wouldn't be so sure about that lest you underestimate drool's influence.

Re: 64-bitness. Much of what's written on public forums about that topic is misinformation or incomplete information that's later misinterpreted. Glad the more recent posts here were pointed in the direction of accuracy.

I'm upgrading for CoreImage, CoreVideo, CoreData, Automator & XCode 2.0 (XCode/IB is worth the price of OS X alone for me). As a plus I get Spotlight, Dashboard, an updated Safari, FreeBSD 5.5 core and QT 7.0. If Tiger is anything like previous OS X upgrades, it'll run faster than Panther as well.

I'm all for Apple releasing new versions of its OS every couple of years, as most vendors do.

I've got an old Mac OS X Server 1.2v3 on a G4 450 that still serves as a NFS server for some archive data.
I've also got an old Alpha running OpenVMS 6.2.

It's only when we want new features, new machines etc that we upgrade. It is a bit annoying that my Mosaic browser for OpenVMS/Motif is only supported on .00000001 percent of websites!

I generally want everyone to use the latest and greatest as time is money! Saying this we still can't afford to replace our dated MS Exchange server with a new one.

Dobby.

Hi Dobby,

Just wondering, how would Mac OS X Server 1.4 run on your G4 450? Obviously it wouldn't be able to do the new tricks, but would it be equivalent functionally? just as fast for admin? just as fast for NFS users? (edit: naturally this is guess work!)

I know it's good to stay with what works, I did the same when upgrading OSes for our shop financial packages. Just wondering what advantages and disadvantages might be (aside from the testing/stability issues).

I can only see positives with an upgrade.
Currently I can't use UTF-8 file names and 10.4 could but we wouldn't yet use them. It would also be faster and I could use more advanced permissioning and indexing. I would also have to pay $500 (or whatever) for a copy of 10.4 Server.
The point is I'm currently not forced to upgrade so why should I if I can't or don't want to afford it.
The problem is the amount of seemingly negative feedback towards Apple for releasing a new OS. Yes its a pain in the wallet and you need to learn a few new tricks. I pay my $500 per year as a developer, so I can see whats comming out and for my 20% hardware discount (not that I can afford to upgrade afer spending the $500 per year!) .
Its like Ford releasing a new model car and the current model owners complaining about not getting a free upgrade or that the latest model is a hybrid and their current models a diesel and doesn't like water in the fuel tank etc.

Dobby.