Apple's Snow Leopard still evolving, developers say

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  • Reply 81 of 86
    hmurchisonhmurchison Posts: 12,419member
    Quote:
    Originally Posted by kim kap sol View Post


    I would hope a large portion of the QT foundation will be rewritten. The rewrite alone with today's technologies and today's frameworks would make QT more "streamlined" and "optimized". But is it being rewritten? Or is it being patched up and marketed as a bleeding-edge media platform?



    I hope Apple doesn't blow it...switching the version number from QT7 to QTX better mean that we're going to see something that will blow our socks' off.



    It's confusing but I think I've got the gist of it.



    With Tiger came Quicktime 7 which was in essence the rewrite that you request.



    Apple wishes to isolate Cocoa developers from Carbon API and thus QTkit was born and interface in Cocoa to aid developers in leveraging QT7's features without knowing Carbon.



    In Snow Leopard Apple is going to be bringing in Quicktime X which appears to be a playback only protocol. So as crazy as it sounds your OS will have two flavors of Quicktime running concurrently. QT7 for legacy support and encoding prowess and QTX for modern codec playback. The developer simply writes to QTkit and QT parcels out the job to the appropriate Quicktime version.



    Thus if I'm only looking to playback media it's probably going to QTX if I'm looking to encode some media it's probably going to QT7.



    It appears like they are simply pulling Quicktime apart and optimizing one version for playback and the other for recording.
  • Reply 82 of 86
    melgrossmelgross Posts: 33,510member
    Quote:
    Originally Posted by kim kap sol View Post


    OpenCL and Grand Central are fairly clearly explained by Apple.



    QuickTime X, however, worries me a lot. There's supposedly no sign of it in the dev seeds and nobody knows what Apple meant with this gibberish:







    Does it mean we'll see H.264/AVC acceleration seen in recent MacBooks? Does it mean QuickTime X will use OpenCL? Does the "streamline" bit mean QuickTime X will finally ditch System 7-era code and QuickTime 1 codecs for "backward compatibility with postage-stamp 5-FPS movies that nobody watches anyway"? Or does "streamline" mean With QuickTime finally take vastly less than 80 megs? Or does it mean it will shed it's godawful "PRO" features and Apple's QT team will finally stop nickel and diming its customers?



    What is this "media technology" that was "pioneered in OS X iPhone"...sounds AMAZING! But is it?



    For all we know, QuickTime X could simply be H.264/AVC acceleration and with some legacy code stripped out of QuickTime...not something worthy of large version change.



    I would hope a large portion of the QT foundation will be rewritten. The rewrite alone with today's technologies and today's frameworks would make QT more "streamlined" and "optimized". But is it being rewritten? Or is it being patched up and marketed as a bleeding-edge media platform?



    I hope Apple doesn't blow it...switching the version number from QT7 to QTX better mean that we're going to see something that will blow our socks' off.



    It doesn't say much, does it?



    It's just sounding like an Ad for a product.
  • Reply 83 of 86
    melgrossmelgross Posts: 33,510member
    Quote:
    Originally Posted by hmurchison View Post


    It's confusing but I think I've got the gist of it.



    With Tiger came Quicktime 7 which was in essence the rewrite that you request.



    Apple wishes to isolate Cocoa developers from Carbon API and thus QTkit was born and interface in Cocoa to aid developers in leveraging QT7's features without knowing Carbon.



    In Snow Leopard Apple is going to be bringing in Quicktime X which appears to be a playback only protocol. So as crazy as it sounds your OS will have two flavors of Quicktime running concurrently. QT7 for legacy support and encoding prowess and QTX for modern codec playback. The developer simply writes to QTkit and QT parcels out the job to the appropriate Quicktime version.



    Thus if I'm only looking to playback media it's probably going to QTX if I'm looking to encode some media it's probably going to QT7.



    It appears like they are simply pulling Quicktime apart and optimizing one version for playback and the other for recording.



    If QT7 is mainly there for legacy support, then it seems as though it wouldn't be as efficient as it should be going forward.
  • Reply 84 of 86
    Quote:
    Originally Posted by melgross View Post


    It doesn't say much, does it?



    It's just sounding like an Ad for a product.



    Ok...ok...the sarcasm is so thick I could cut it with a knife.



    I know it's just an ad. And I know most people that read the info about Snow Leopard on Apple's website aren't really interested in knowing what makes Snow Leopard tick.



    I'm just saying that it's the only info about QT X that's currently available (unless developers have gotten some insight on what QT X is all about).



    Let's just say that a Q1 release of Snow Leopard is impossible at this point. Even a Q2 release seems highly unlikely. I wouldn't expect Snow Leopard anytime before July or August 2009 judging by how much is still ad-speak and hardly anyone knows what QuickTime X is except perhaps the QuickTime team.
  • Reply 85 of 86
    melgrossmelgross Posts: 33,510member
    Quote:
    Originally Posted by kim kap sol View Post


    Ok...ok...the sarcasm is so thick I could cut it with a knife.



    I know it's just an ad. And I know most people that read the info about Snow Leopard on Apple's website aren't really interested in knowing what makes Snow Leopard tick.



    I'm just saying that it's the only info about QT X that's currently available (unless developers have gotten some insight on what QT X is all about).



    Let's just say that a Q1 release of Snow Leopard is impossible at this point. Even a Q2 release seems highly unlikely. I wouldn't expect Snow Leopard anytime before July or August 2009 judging by how much is still ad-speak and hardly anyone knows what QuickTime X is except perhaps the QuickTime team.



    I wasn't even being sarcastic, though I guess it came off that way. I never read that statement on their site, so I didn't know just where it came from. I thought it was from somewhere in the developer section, but I guess not.



    I also think that the 1st quarter is not possible, and that it's not likely the 2nd is either. I'm still looking for an ADC release though. Hopefully, they are on schedule.
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