More and more rumours and bits of news are making their to the web about Apple’s upcoming Snow Leopard operating system. With the date set for Apple’s Worldwide Developers Conference in early June (as usual), rumours have shifted focus away from features, but towards Snow Leopard’s release date. AppleInsider now claims to have the answer.
According to the Apple news and rumour site, the omnipresent and all-powerful “people familiar with the matter” say that between now and the gold master of Snow Leopard, upper-class Apple Developer Connection members will receive 3 “key builds”, leading up to an August release. These will each deliver important changes, including the rumoured interface update.
Plain old Leopard will not be left out in the snow, however. Mac OS X 10.5.7 is on schedule for an April 2009 release, with ADC members receiving regular builds already. So far, it contains about 99 documented code corrections.
…if Windows 7 launch is also in August. Maybe the 24h, as Ed boot has suggested (http://blogs.zdnet.com/Bott/?p=751)
I think the blogsphere and the twitterscape will explode.
Edit: I tried to edit the title 3 times and I couldn’t, yikes.
Edited 2009-03-31 22:33 UTC
The summer is looking to shape up pretty nicely, if both of these predictions hold. There will also be a release of KDE 4.3 at the end of July which I’m looking forward to, since I’ve decided to wait on migrating from KDE 3.5. The near simultaneous release of these three environments should take the desktop competition up a notch, IMHO.
Why wait for 4.3?
KDE 4.2 is already the single best desktop environment of ANY operating system.
I personally dislike the way microsoft has been moving their interface since XP, and dislike the new explorer, and the fact that they are removing quicklaunch and basically implementing a dock.
I may have to ditch windows completely because of these changes.
KDE 3.5.10 works well enough for me that I’m not quite willing to let go. It’s fast, never crashes, and with Tango Icons + Polyester theme, looks beautiful. I’m holding off for KDE 4.3 because 4.2 was slow (even though I’m told that Qt 4.5 addresses these issues), and by the time it’s released, there should be native Qt4 ports of several programs which are currently works in progress (K3b, KOffice2, Opera 10, KNetworkManager, hopefully Kaffeine). For now though, KDE3 apps are very much alive and I don’t see the point of leaving what’s not broken.
Not so. You can use KDE in Windows.
http://windows.kde.org/
That depends. I hate KDE’s interface with passion, both 3.x and 4.x, and I think that, for me, it’s totally unusable. But you love it, so KDE’s existance is a good thing.
Seemed to take the words out of my mouth.
Looks like there is a release race brewing.
As for comments about quick launch going bye bye, well – it’s still there and the taskbar can be customised a little as well.
I quite like it and it has stopped my impatient GF from going stupid and launching multiple instances of the same software when she sits down at the computer.
7068 is a nice improvement on 7000 and I’m looking forward to the final release (for a change as far as a MS OS is concerned).
The big race is between Windows 7 and Mac OS X – but I have a feeling that even with all the hard work done by Microsoft on Windows 7 they have an uphill battle. One should remember the old adage that bad news travels faster than good news and when it comes to good news, most are pretty sceptical when they hear good news about a product from a company whose previous product was problematic. Ultimately in the case of Microsoft, the main competitor will not by Mac OS X but beating the perception that things have actually changed in Microsoft.
As for Snow Leopard; if it is as good as the rumours say, I am going to purchase it the day it comes out 🙂 I bought 10.5.0 when it came out and had no regrets, I did the same with all previous versions. I’m sure there will be some initial bugs because of the massive transition to pure 64bit and re-writing major parts with Cocoa, but in the long run we’ll hopefully see the big vendors jump on the Cocoa bandwagon and make the switch as well.
Hopefully the next version of Microsoft will be based around Cocoa and live up to the promise for VBA to be back in Office for Mac.
As much as I love OS X and Leopard, … 10.5.0 was just painful. Horribly full of bugs just everywhere. 10.5.2 was the first big update that was more than needed, but things really started to go smooth with 10.5.4.
True but then again, 10.3 had a horrible corruption bug for oxford based controllers and 10.4.0 wasn’t so hot either. I guess it depends on how hard one pushes ones computer; the old story that a stable OS under normal conditions might under stress start having its wheels fall off.