I really don't think Apple wants to license WMV or WMA from Microsoft for the few users that want it.
It's not something that I want, but it's something that most of us need, unfortunately.
I'm hoping that H.264/AAC ultimately win the media format wars and that WMV becomes marginalized (fat chance), but in the meantime there are still plenty of web sites that only support WMV. (The same goes for REAL, although that's all but extinct, and, regrettably Flash for video.) My desire is to see an improved Quicktime player that can play anything.
Did anyone consider that Apple and Microsoft's deals here may go further into this than you think: ie. Take all our software types under licence? Microsoft can be bought with a price, and Apple wants switchers bad with all this stuff... so it might happen.
That strikes me as a subtle way of saying that our current OS is more buggy and crappy than we'd like and we're going to take a year and fix it all.
Sheldon
There's a difference between under-the-hood changes, which might be substantial, and surface changes and feature addition. If you've ever done any programming, you know the difference. If you haven't, well, I can see how you might misunderstand the message in this manner. "Grand Central" and OpenCL are very powerful projects. They'll be treated dismissively by everyone who doesn't understand them. That will be most people, sadly.
But yes, there's always cleanup and toning to be done, and I think we'll all benefit from a design cycle where that's the focus. The nice thing is that Apple CAN do this, because their frameworks are well-designed. I've heard it said by people who know that Apple's frameworks are designed very well but would sometimes benefit from optimization of the code beneath. This was said a lot in the 10.2 days and not nearly so much now--a nice benefit of point releases. But I'm happy to let everyone pause and tighten up the slack. Now is an excellent time to do it, too. Developers are going to come to OS X in much greater numbers, thanks to the iPhone. Let them arrive while the platform isn't TOO much of a moving target.
It will be interesting to see, when the time comes out, what the price of Snow Leopard will be and how many people will go for it. I've got some compute-intensive apps that are gonna love Grand Central and OpenCL. I just hope their developers are as excited as I am.
It's not something that I want, but it's something that most of us need, unfortunately.
I'm hoping that H.264/AAC ultimately win the media format wars and that WMV becomes marginalized (fat chance), but in the meantime there are still plenty of web sites that only support WMV. (The same goes for REAL, although that's all but extinct, and, regrettably Flash for video.) My desire is to see an improved Quicktime player that can play anything.
The real question is this: is QuickTime X a total rewrite or still building on the ancient QuickTime foundation? If it's the latter, I'm totally disappointed. We don't just need new codecs...we need new plumbing.
There's a difference between under-the-hood changes, which might be substantial, and surface changes and feature addition. If you've ever done any programming, you know the difference. If you haven't, well, I can see how you might misunderstand the message in this manner. "Grand Central" and OpenCL are very powerful projects. They'll be treated dismissively by everyone who doesn't understand them. That will be most people, sadly.
But yes, there's always cleanup and toning to be done, and I think we'll all benefit from a design cycle where that's the focus. The nice thing is that Apple CAN do this, because their frameworks are well-designed. I've heard it said by people who know that Apple's frameworks are designed very well but would sometimes benefit from optimization of the code beneath. This was said a lot in the 10.2 days and not nearly so much now--a nice benefit of point releases. But I'm happy to let everyone pause and tighten up the slack. Now is an excellent time to do it, too. Developers are going to come to OS X in much greater numbers, thanks to the iPhone. Let them arrive while the platform isn't TOO much of a moving target.
It will be interesting to see, when the time comes out, what the price of Snow Leopard will be and how many people will go for it. I've got some compute-intensive apps that are gonna love Grand Central and OpenCL. I just hope their developers are as excited as I am.
I agree completely. These are major advancements for OS X and for the Engineering, Pure Sciences, Gaming and more if they so choose to leverage them.
It's not something that I want, but it's something that most of us need, unfortunately.
I'm hoping that H.264/AAC ultimately win the media format wars and that WMV becomes marginalized (fat chance), but in the meantime there are still plenty of web sites that only support WMV. (The same goes for REAL, although that's all but extinct, and, regrettably Flash for video.) My desire is to see an improved Quicktime player that can play anything.
And yes, we've all heard about VLC, thank you.
REAL is all but extinct in part because Apple doesn't support it in Quicktime. Flash video is still growing, but not nearly as fast as it would have been had it not been for Apple's reluctance to support it in the new Quicktime and on the iPhone.
I think leaving WMV out of Quicktime will help do the same. It may be painful now, but the world will really be a better place when open standards like H.264 are ubiquitous, and that only happens when big companies stand up and refuse to support the proprietary formats.
Better to lobby web sites who don't offer standard video than ask Apple to pay for licenses to proprietary formats.
That strikes me as a subtle way of saying that our current OS is more buggy and crappy than we'd like and we're going to take a year and fix it all.
Sheldon
Sounds good to me. Leopard has most of the features I need. Now I just need to see more polishing.
Quote:
Originally Posted by Dlux
I'm hoping that QT will support more media formats natively, especially WMV without a plug-in. Not that I like those other formats, but having to juggle 3rd-party shims and incompatibilities after various upgrades gets a little old. Perian is a great effort, but ultimately it should be rendered unnecessary if Apple picked up the ball.
(To hell with Exchange support - work on WMV so we can see the rest of the media files floating around.)
I think in the scheme of things Exchange support is more crucial to people than playing back WMV (with Flip4Mac does fine on my Mac)
Quote:
Originally Posted by kim kap sol
The real question is this: is QuickTime X a total rewrite or still building on the ancient QuickTime foundation? If it's the latter, I'm totally disappointed. We don't just need new codecs...we need new plumbing.
Legacy Quicktime 32-bit has pretty much been deprecated. My guess is that Quicktime X is the further evolution of QTKit and will be the defacto 64-bit media API.
3) Will we really have to wait a year for a JavaScript engine that's in nightly webkit builds?
4) Will anyone upgrade if there are no new features?
If the focus is on performance, stability and security, then I wouldn't hold my breath for PPC support, since it will be getting close to 4 years since the Intel transition started. Also, PPC will get updates until 10.7 is released, because Apple typically supports the last two OS releases. So, i would expect Leopard might be the last PPC full OS.
As far as upgrading, I definitely will upgrade if there is serious performance and stability gains to be had. If they can jettison all this legacy support, they should be able to really deliver a serious killer OS--legacy support is what makes Windows so performance-lame, and also affects Mac users with support spread out through two platforms. In addition, this seems targeted to take advantage of 64-bit technology and multi-core technology, present in most new hardware, but something few can benefit from today.
I do think this should be a less expensive upgrade though.
Look at what Apple has been doing with names as of the last few years. Apple Computer is now just Apple. iTunes Music Store is now iTunes Store. PowerBooks have been renamed MacBooks. Now, their .Mac service has been changed to MobileMe, and banners at MWDC said "OS X for Mac" and "OSX for iPhone".
I wouldn't be surprised to see Snow Leopard as the beginning of a transition to provide Apple's OS to operate on non-Apple hardware.
Or perhaps there is more than they are telling us...
No no no! Apple has not been fulfilling any of our expectations for years now. What did we get with the $129 Leopard upgrade? Spaces? TimeMachine? New bugs? Adobe Incompatibility? Keychain problems?
How about with Leopard Server? Downtime? AppleTalk Bugs? Mail Bugs? Freezes?
So this is the BIG iPhone update eh? 3G and GPS? Wow! They should be embarrassed to dedicate a whole event for this update. What happened to voice dialing, or video capturing, spoken directions from Google Maps. How about some Mac stuff, maybe something that their customers need like the forsaken mid-tower, yeah I know we'll get bug fixes for Leopard in 12 months instead.
ARRRGH! They build-up so much anticipation and deliver so little. I mean 3G and GPS should've been in the first gen iPhone.
The Snow Leopard concept is good as the releases have been getting buggier of late; an overhaul sounds like a good idea. But I do wonder about giving it the 10.6 update # though. It doesn't sound like Snow Leopard warrants a full number change.
I'm happy if they stop adding MORE stuff... to be honest, I already feel 10.5 has a lot (too much) crap. A lot is fluff and I struggle every damn time I have to explain to a switcher all there is to use.. they go into overload.
Even for myself, I use maybe half the goodies that OS X offers and I've been usin' Macs since 84!
It'd be nice if they would finally, once and for all, fix certain really basic stupid things like easier mixed environment file sharing (LAN between Mac/Win/Nix), and maybe after 15 years actualy have the damn green 'expand' button do something USEFUL. I hate warning new users "DONT TOUCH THE GREEN BUTTON!" Every damn app does very very wonky shit when you touch it...
Sounds good to me. Leopard has most of the features I need. Now I just need to see more polishing.
I think in the scheme of things Exchange support is more crucial to people than playing back WMV (with Flip4Mac does fine on my Mac)
Legacy Quicktime 32-bit has pretty much been deprecated. My guess is that Quicktime X is the further evolution of QTKit and will be the defacto 64-bit media API.
Seeing as how QuickTime is Windows and OS X I'd expect QuickTime X to be Cocoa on both platforms allowing not an open but a closed Yellow Box environment for Apple that allows them to streamline QTKit for QuickTime, iTunes and Safari.
WebKit for Windows has several options outside of Apple.
I'm happy if they stop adding MORE stuff... to be honest, I already feel 10.5 has a lot (too much) crap. A lot is fluff and I struggle every damn time I have to explain to a switcher all there is to use.. they go into overload.
Even for myself, I use maybe half the goodies that OS X offers and I've been usin' Macs since 84!
It'd be nice if they would finally, once and for all, fix certain really basic stupid things like easier mixed environment file sharing (LAN between Mac/Win/Nix), and maybe after 15 years actualy have the damn green 'expand' button do something USEFUL. I hate warning new users "DONT TOUCH THE GREEN BUTTON!" Every damn app does very very wonky shit when you touch it...
People that are waiting for OS 11 will be forever disappointed.
There will not be a day where you see a huge revolutionary change marked by a name change. It's silly to believe that Apple will come out with OS 11 and it will be 3D or some nonsense like that. Apple knows that radical change pisses people off.
Mac OS X has a great foundation...and will continue to smoothly evolve to add different, new concepts (as opposed to change radically). Mac OS X is modular enough to do this. If Mac OS went to 11, it would be in name only...and chances are the change between 11 and X would be minimal.
3) Will we really have to wait a year for a JavaScript engine that's in nightly webkit builds?
4) Will anyone upgrade if there are no new features?
1. Hopefully not. I hope they don't waste resources to support a computer nobody should have anymore.
2. The same as always
3. Yes
4. Yes there are new features. If they deliver, higher performance and stability are itself very very good features. If performance increases by 30% (and they are promising more) then that is worth way more than the price of the software since one would spend at least $500 extra in hardware to get that.
Look at what Apple has been doing with names as of the last few years. Apple Computer is now just Apple. iTunes Music Store is now iTunes Store. PowerBooks have been renamed MacBooks. Now, their .Mac service has been changed to MobileMe, and banners at MWDC said "OS X for Mac" and "OSX for iPhone".
I wouldn't be surprised to see Snow Leopard as the beginning of a transition to provide Apple's OS to operate on non-Apple hardware.
Not going to happen because the money is in both hardware and software. Not one or the other. I don't think there is any doubt about that.
It will happen. Perhaps later than sooner, but it will happen.
Apple's current profits are in hardware. However, Steve himself noted how Apple is a software company in the event with Gates and Mossberg. Plus, there's that recent purchase of that PPC company...
Also, I see motivation for such a cross-platform move to compete with Linux. I know, I know: Linux is a long way off from prime-time when it comes to large adoption and ease of use. Still, it's hard to argue with FREE. --Almost as hard as arguing with EASY.
Apple is gearing-up to become a software company. Its stock will be $400 a share when this happens.
Maybe I'm missing something, but the way I read the announcement, Snow Leopard is of no relevance to current Mac owners, unless you have a 4- or 8-core Mac Pro with some extreme high-end video card with more processing power than an iMac.
I don't think we need to get our panties in a bunch over having to upgrade to Snow Leopard for our current machines, but it does give a tantalizing idea of what regular Macs are going to be a year from now, when they ship with it!
Comments
I really don't think Apple wants to license WMV or WMA from Microsoft for the few users that want it.
It's not something that I want, but it's something that most of us need, unfortunately.
I'm hoping that H.264/AAC ultimately win the media format wars and that WMV becomes marginalized (fat chance), but in the meantime there are still plenty of web sites that only support WMV. (The same goes for REAL, although that's all but extinct, and, regrettably Flash for video.) My desire is to see an improved Quicktime player that can play anything.
And yes, we've all heard about VLC, thank you.
That strikes me as a subtle way of saying that our current OS is more buggy and crappy than we'd like and we're going to take a year and fix it all.
Sheldon
There's a difference between under-the-hood changes, which might be substantial, and surface changes and feature addition. If you've ever done any programming, you know the difference. If you haven't, well, I can see how you might misunderstand the message in this manner. "Grand Central" and OpenCL are very powerful projects. They'll be treated dismissively by everyone who doesn't understand them. That will be most people, sadly.
But yes, there's always cleanup and toning to be done, and I think we'll all benefit from a design cycle where that's the focus. The nice thing is that Apple CAN do this, because their frameworks are well-designed. I've heard it said by people who know that Apple's frameworks are designed very well but would sometimes benefit from optimization of the code beneath. This was said a lot in the 10.2 days and not nearly so much now--a nice benefit of point releases. But I'm happy to let everyone pause and tighten up the slack. Now is an excellent time to do it, too. Developers are going to come to OS X in much greater numbers, thanks to the iPhone. Let them arrive while the platform isn't TOO much of a moving target.
It will be interesting to see, when the time comes out, what the price of Snow Leopard will be and how many people will go for it. I've got some compute-intensive apps that are gonna love Grand Central and OpenCL. I just hope their developers are as excited as I am.
It's not something that I want, but it's something that most of us need, unfortunately.
I'm hoping that H.264/AAC ultimately win the media format wars and that WMV becomes marginalized (fat chance), but in the meantime there are still plenty of web sites that only support WMV. (The same goes for REAL, although that's all but extinct, and, regrettably Flash for video.) My desire is to see an improved Quicktime player that can play anything.
And yes, we've all heard about VLC, thank you.
Get flip4mac.
There's a difference between under-the-hood changes, which might be substantial, and surface changes and feature addition. If you've ever done any programming, you know the difference. If you haven't, well, I can see how you might misunderstand the message in this manner. "Grand Central" and OpenCL are very powerful projects. They'll be treated dismissively by everyone who doesn't understand them. That will be most people, sadly.
But yes, there's always cleanup and toning to be done, and I think we'll all benefit from a design cycle where that's the focus. The nice thing is that Apple CAN do this, because their frameworks are well-designed. I've heard it said by people who know that Apple's frameworks are designed very well but would sometimes benefit from optimization of the code beneath. This was said a lot in the 10.2 days and not nearly so much now--a nice benefit of point releases. But I'm happy to let everyone pause and tighten up the slack. Now is an excellent time to do it, too. Developers are going to come to OS X in much greater numbers, thanks to the iPhone. Let them arrive while the platform isn't TOO much of a moving target.
It will be interesting to see, when the time comes out, what the price of Snow Leopard will be and how many people will go for it. I've got some compute-intensive apps that are gonna love Grand Central and OpenCL. I just hope their developers are as excited as I am.
I agree completely. These are major advancements for OS X and for the Engineering, Pure Sciences, Gaming and more if they so choose to leverage them.
It's not something that I want, but it's something that most of us need, unfortunately.
I'm hoping that H.264/AAC ultimately win the media format wars and that WMV becomes marginalized (fat chance), but in the meantime there are still plenty of web sites that only support WMV. (The same goes for REAL, although that's all but extinct, and, regrettably Flash for video.) My desire is to see an improved Quicktime player that can play anything.
And yes, we've all heard about VLC, thank you.
REAL is all but extinct in part because Apple doesn't support it in Quicktime. Flash video is still growing, but not nearly as fast as it would have been had it not been for Apple's reluctance to support it in the new Quicktime and on the iPhone.
I think leaving WMV out of Quicktime will help do the same. It may be painful now, but the world will really be a better place when open standards like H.264 are ubiquitous, and that only happens when big companies stand up and refuse to support the proprietary formats.
Better to lobby web sites who don't offer standard video than ask Apple to pay for licenses to proprietary formats.
That strikes me as a subtle way of saying that our current OS is more buggy and crappy than we'd like and we're going to take a year and fix it all.
Sheldon
Sounds good to me. Leopard has most of the features I need. Now I just need to see more polishing.
I'm hoping that QT will support more media formats natively, especially WMV without a plug-in. Not that I like those other formats, but having to juggle 3rd-party shims and incompatibilities after various upgrades gets a little old. Perian is a great effort, but ultimately it should be rendered unnecessary if Apple picked up the ball.
(To hell with Exchange support - work on WMV so we can see the rest of the media files floating around.)
I think in the scheme of things Exchange support is more crucial to people than playing back WMV (with Flip4Mac does fine on my Mac)
The real question is this: is QuickTime X a total rewrite or still building on the ancient QuickTime foundation? If it's the latter, I'm totally disappointed. We don't just need new codecs...we need new plumbing.
Legacy Quicktime 32-bit has pretty much been deprecated. My guess is that Quicktime X is the further evolution of QTKit and will be the defacto 64-bit media API.
But...
1) Will it work on PowerPC Macs?
2) How much will it cost?
3) Will we really have to wait a year for a JavaScript engine that's in nightly webkit builds?
4) Will anyone upgrade if there are no new features?
If the focus is on performance, stability and security, then I wouldn't hold my breath for PPC support, since it will be getting close to 4 years since the Intel transition started. Also, PPC will get updates until 10.7 is released, because Apple typically supports the last two OS releases. So, i would expect Leopard might be the last PPC full OS.
As far as upgrading, I definitely will upgrade if there is serious performance and stability gains to be had. If they can jettison all this legacy support, they should be able to really deliver a serious killer OS--legacy support is what makes Windows so performance-lame, and also affects Mac users with support spread out through two platforms. In addition, this seems targeted to take advantage of 64-bit technology and multi-core technology, present in most new hardware, but something few can benefit from today.
I do think this should be a less expensive upgrade though.
I wouldn't be surprised to see Snow Leopard as the beginning of a transition to provide Apple's OS to operate on non-Apple hardware.
Or perhaps there is more than they are telling us...
No no no! Apple has not been fulfilling any of our expectations for years now. What did we get with the $129 Leopard upgrade? Spaces? TimeMachine? New bugs? Adobe Incompatibility? Keychain problems?
How about with Leopard Server? Downtime? AppleTalk Bugs? Mail Bugs? Freezes?
So this is the BIG iPhone update eh? 3G and GPS? Wow! They should be embarrassed to dedicate a whole event for this update. What happened to voice dialing, or video capturing, spoken directions from Google Maps. How about some Mac stuff, maybe something that their customers need like the forsaken mid-tower, yeah I know we'll get bug fixes for Leopard in 12 months instead.
ARRRGH! They build-up so much anticipation and deliver so little. I mean 3G and GPS should've been in the first gen iPhone.
Could Snow Leopard be the last version of OSX?
I wouldn't be surprised to see Snow Leopard as the beginning of a transition to provide Apple's OS to operate on non-Apple hardware.
Not going to happen because the money is in both hardware and software. Not one or the other. I don't think there is any doubt about that.
Could Snow Leopard be the last version of OSX?
It could be the end of version 10.x
2010-2011 may herald the beginning of OS X 11.0
I'm happy if they stop adding MORE stuff... to be honest, I already feel 10.5 has a lot (too much) crap. A lot is fluff and I struggle every damn time I have to explain to a switcher all there is to use.. they go into overload.
Even for myself, I use maybe half the goodies that OS X offers and I've been usin' Macs since 84!
It'd be nice if they would finally, once and for all, fix certain really basic stupid things like easier mixed environment file sharing (LAN between Mac/Win/Nix), and maybe after 15 years actualy have the damn green 'expand' button do something USEFUL. I hate warning new users "DONT TOUCH THE GREEN BUTTON!" Every damn app does very very wonky shit when you touch it...
Sounds good to me. Leopard has most of the features I need. Now I just need to see more polishing.
I think in the scheme of things Exchange support is more crucial to people than playing back WMV (with Flip4Mac does fine on my Mac)
Legacy Quicktime 32-bit has pretty much been deprecated. My guess is that Quicktime X is the further evolution of QTKit and will be the defacto 64-bit media API.
Seeing as how QuickTime is Windows and OS X I'd expect QuickTime X to be Cocoa on both platforms allowing not an open but a closed Yellow Box environment for Apple that allows them to streamline QTKit for QuickTime, iTunes and Safari.
WebKit for Windows has several options outside of Apple.
It could be the end of version 10.x
2010-2011 may herald the beginning of OS X 11.0
I'm happy if they stop adding MORE stuff... to be honest, I already feel 10.5 has a lot (too much) crap. A lot is fluff and I struggle every damn time I have to explain to a switcher all there is to use.. they go into overload.
Even for myself, I use maybe half the goodies that OS X offers and I've been usin' Macs since 84!
It'd be nice if they would finally, once and for all, fix certain really basic stupid things like easier mixed environment file sharing (LAN between Mac/Win/Nix), and maybe after 15 years actualy have the damn green 'expand' button do something USEFUL. I hate warning new users "DONT TOUCH THE GREEN BUTTON!" Every damn app does very very wonky shit when you touch it...
People that are waiting for OS 11 will be forever disappointed.
There will not be a day where you see a huge revolutionary change marked by a name change. It's silly to believe that Apple will come out with OS 11 and it will be 3D or some nonsense like that. Apple knows that radical change pisses people off.
Mac OS X has a great foundation...and will continue to smoothly evolve to add different, new concepts (as opposed to change radically). Mac OS X is modular enough to do this. If Mac OS went to 11, it would be in name only...and chances are the change between 11 and X would be minimal.
But...
1) Will it work on PowerPC Macs?
2) How much will it cost?
3) Will we really have to wait a year for a JavaScript engine that's in nightly webkit builds?
4) Will anyone upgrade if there are no new features?
1. Hopefully not. I hope they don't waste resources to support a computer nobody should have anymore.
2. The same as always
3. Yes
4. Yes there are new features. If they deliver, higher performance and stability are itself very very good features. If performance increases by 30% (and they are promising more) then that is worth way more than the price of the software since one would spend at least $500 extra in hardware to get that.
Look at what Apple has been doing with names as of the last few years. Apple Computer is now just Apple. iTunes Music Store is now iTunes Store. PowerBooks have been renamed MacBooks. Now, their .Mac service has been changed to MobileMe, and banners at MWDC said "OS X for Mac" and "OSX for iPhone".
I wouldn't be surprised to see Snow Leopard as the beginning of a transition to provide Apple's OS to operate on non-Apple hardware.
Not going to happen because the money is in both hardware and software. Not one or the other. I don't think there is any doubt about that.
It will happen. Perhaps later than sooner, but it will happen.
Apple's current profits are in hardware. However, Steve himself noted how Apple is a software company in the event with Gates and Mossberg. Plus, there's that recent purchase of that PPC company...
Also, I see motivation for such a cross-platform move to compete with Linux. I know, I know: Linux is a long way off from prime-time when it comes to large adoption and ease of use. Still, it's hard to argue with FREE. --Almost as hard as arguing with EASY.
Apple is gearing-up to become a software company. Its stock will be $400 a share when this happens.
I don't think we need to get our panties in a bunch over having to upgrade to Snow Leopard for our current machines, but it does give a tantalizing idea of what regular Macs are going to be a year from now, when they ship with it!