WWDC 2004 Promises a Long[horn]-Be[OS]-Tiger Mac OS X

posted by Eugenia Loli-Queru on Mon 28th Jun 2004 23:16 UTC

As Futurama's Professor Hubert Farnsworth usually says: "Good news everyone...". Apple introduced today its upcoming 64-bit enhanced Tiger operating system due in the first quarter of 2005. Click in for our report from today's WWDC opening which includes 18 pictures of the event.

The Apple WWDC is taking place at the Moscone Center in San Francisco, the same place as last year, and the keynote was on the 3rd floor. On our way up up to the second floor we bumped to some old friends, Andrew Kimpton and Duncan Wilcox, both ex-Be engineers now working on Mac-related projects. Speeding fast next to us, there he was, the man himself, Dominic Giampaolo. Many will remember Dominic from his work on the 64bit filesystem for BeOS, BFS. Dominic now works at Apple... read more on that below.

Moving to the 3rd floor --where only the Media and VIPs had access at that time-- we saw Steve Sakoman, also an ex-Apple, ex-Be, ex-PalmSource and now back-at-Apple's-iPod-division exec. Steve looked pleased at how things were progressing for WWDC and he was also looking forward to the keynote. On the way to enter the large keynote room we saw Pudge from Slashdot and started chatting about various things. Later, we got to chat briefly with the editor-in-chief of the MacAddict magazine too.

Overall, the crowd this year seemed quite a bit larger than last year. There were especially a lot more media people. Last year they had all the media people only semi-filling up 1/4 of the 3rd floor, while this year they were filing up the whole floor. There were also more registered developers than last year, Steve Jobs said they had 17% more people registered this year.

The show started on time and Steve Jobs (wearing the exact same black sweater and jeans he always does on keynotes -- this time he shaved though, we women notice these things) initiated the show with a roundup on iTunes, Airport Express and the BMW-iPod deal. After this, Steve explained the absense of the 3 GHz G5 that he had promised last WWDC and put the blame on the industry hitting the wall at 90nm. Then, some developers came on stage to show their new apps for OSX like Alias with Maya and a guitar pro application. The big wows came, though, from a small third party developer who had developed complex satellite orbit prediction software with Cocoa and OpenGL in under 3 months using XCode. The application is very "visual" and impressive, and Steve called it innovative. However, coming back home and trying to find some info on "Orbit" through Google, I found a bunch of other similar apps, all for Macs too.

And there was of course the introduction of the new Cinema Displays with the gorgeous looking 30" model, coming in August. Another important point of the keynote was that Mac OS X had now about 50% of the Mac installed base and over 12,000 applications to choose from. Apple is pleased with the fact that they achieved this transition in about 4 years.

Moving on to Tiger (screenshots), there are over 150 new features in the OS, but there was only time to show about 10 of them: "VoiceOver": Access the Mac through speech, audible cues and keyboard navigation for the visually impaired. .Mac Sync: Keep valuale data on Macs, portable devices and .Mac accounts up to date using sync. Enhanced UNIX Support: Work efficiently using Tiger�s 64-bit enhancements, new utilities and an optimized Kernel and Xcode 2.0. Macminute presented Xcode earlier today:

With Dead Code Stripping, developers can remove unused executable code from compiled applications and immediately see the effect in smaller code sizes and faster customer downloads. Applications are purportedly even easier to design, create and maintain by offering developers a clear visual representation of the application structure with Visual Modeling and Design.
Xcode 2 also includes: 64-bit development tools to build data-intensive applications using 64-bit memory addressing; an integrated Apple Reference Library to offer a single search and presentation interface to all of Apple's online and locally stored developer documentation; Apple's enhanced version of GCC v3.5, the next generation of the compiler; graphical remote debugging to display the debugging of data for full screen applications on remote machines; Auto Vectorization to automatically generate Velocity Engine-optimized code without requiring any source code changes; Ant build system support to make cross-platform development of Java applications easier; and support for Subversion Source Code Management, in addition to supporting CVS and Perforce, to enable easy integration with a range of development infrastructure.