Here are few articles posted today about Mac OS X: ”
OS X Mobile and Automotive Editions: Is It Possible?“, Leopard Core Animation“, “64-bit Leopard knocks off Vista“, “First boot with Leopard” and “Multi-Threaded OpenGL On The Way“.
Mac OS X Leopard Mash-Up Articles
About The Author
Eugenia Loli
Ex-programmer, ex-editor in chief at OSNews.com, now a visual artist/filmmaker.
Follow me on Twitter @EugeniaLoli
From the “First boot with Leopard” article: “When renaming a file, the selection now exclues the file extension.”
I am so glad they added this feature. I got addicted to this on Gnome. It is one of those little changes that you don’t notice how much better it is until you try to go back to the old behaviour.
From the “First boot with Leopard” article: “When renaming a file, the selection now exclues the file extension.”
I am so glad they added this feature. I got addicted to this on Gnome. It is one of those little changes that you don’t notice how much better it is until you try to go back to the old behaviour.
This is also the default behavior in Vista.
I’m already quite happy with Tiger on my workstations/laptops. No real complaints anymore.
Tiger server is a TOTALLY different beast though, and it seems really half-assed. Any clues as to Leopard server? Is it going to be more refined (read: functionality works as intended, and doesn’t require CLI hacking to get something that is supposed to be GUI configurable working..)?
I’ve been dying for an easy to manage server for departmental/office-wide use, that doesn’t require the know-how of Solaris/JES. Solaris/JES does fine for my needs, but many of my clients have NO way to maintain the system, and I don’t have enough time in the day to spend trying to help them all the time.
*Crossing fingers for an awesome server OS*
http://www.apple.com/server/macosx/leopard/
Looks like your wish may come true.
this IS a big deal! The emulation layer that 64-bit windows bites.
In the WWDC presentation, the guy said there was NO emulation with regards to 32bit programs etc?
Edited 2006-08-15 01:00
The new Xcode 2.4 lets users create Universal Binaries and 32/64-bit apps out of the box, not asking whether ‘you want this or not’ — It just happens…
All newly created apps are therefore both 32-bit, 64-bit, Intel and PPC all-in-one…
I meant the emulation layer for Windows bites
Leopard 64-bit isn’t just 32-bit native for apps, but for drivers too! Now that’s, progress.
Leopard 64-bit isn’t just 32-bit native for apps, but for drivers too! Now that’s, progress.
Indeed! I thought it wasn’t possible, seeing noone else(?) had implemented it yet, while it seems such a huge advantage towards smooth transitions.
This isn’t in the least bit (or 16 or 32 or 64) revolutionary: Microsoft did it with DOS device drivers under Windows 95 and before. What do you think “MS-DOS Compatibility Mode” was? They were 16 bit drivers being controlled by a 32 bit OS (well, a large part of Win 95 was, and all of NT has always been at least 32 bit).
I can see the logical question: why doesn’t Microsoft do that again with Windows Vista? Technically, there’s absolutely nothing stopping them from doing it. However, Windows 95 was never stellar for performance with anything that ran the MS-DOS Compatibility Mode drivers, for several reasons. Why? That’s because there’s quite a few hoops for the OS to jump through whenever going between any combination of bitness, at least with x86 processors. Also, those old MS-DOS Compatibility Mode drivers weren’t designed to work outside of the limited standard DOS address space, which required nasty hacks to reserve low memory (which by today’s standards, is very small) for such devices, and often required copying data from lower memory into the final destination as a result. The same problem exists with using old ISA cards on 32 bit machines that have 32 bit address spaces, but ISA only goes to 24 bits, meaning that the lowest 16 megs must be treated in a special manner. so, too, older 32 bit bus interface devices must have the same sort of lower address space RAM reserved for device I/O, and data then must be copied from that lowest 4 Gigs into any address space that’s beyond the 4 Gig limit. All this results in the same issue that’s existed for several generations, only on a larger address space: special memory handling problems and performance problems that require extra copying once systems exceed a certain amount of total RAM compared to I/O space accessible by the busses on the machine, and when combined with legacy drivers that work in the lower bitness of the past, more time-consuming hoops that are jumped through whenever those devices are used, and a more complicated and bug-prone OS.
So, Microsoft can get away with saying “We don’t want to go down that road again!” because they have the advantage of having the biggest chunk of the PC OS market, and by market share alone, that can strongly influence device makers to make 64 bit native drivers for Windows. The advantage is that there’s no hacks in the OS to support jumping through needless hoops: the disadvantage is that a lot of older hardware won’t have any support in Windows x86-64, but with more modern busses, that may not be that big of a problem, since a lot of old devices won’t work on the newer machines. Apple, by contrast, doesn’t have that 800 pound gorilla backing to require that of other hardware makers, and can’t afford to lose any of its audience: the advantage is that more older hardware is supported, at the distinct disadvantage of mucking up the guts of the OS and slowing the I/O system down.
So, that’s the what’s and why’s of the bits that really matter at the low-level.
this IS a big deal! The emulation layer that 64-bit windows bites.
WoW only provides emulation on platforms that don’t support native execution or whose execution speed is slow (e.g., Itanium). WoW64 doesn’t perform instruction emulation on x64 platforms. It uses the architecture’s native x86 support.
IIRC, the performance hit of running a 32bit application on win64 is only around less than 5% the last time I saw the benchmarks (game related ones).
Yes, Microsoft windows DOES use wow for win32 applications running on Win64, jut as it uses wow when running win16 applications on win32.
Win32 is merely an evolution of win16, and win64 and evolution to win64.
Basically, Microsoft has two choices; have two of everything or have one of each, and have a wow layer – like I said, the performance penalty is so small, it doesn’t even register on the radar; no worse than the thunking that occurs when running older version of applications on the latest version of Windows.
i hope one of the top secret features steve has is the complete removal of brushed metal. there is safari, quicktime and the finder. can’t think of anything else.
i didn’t even realize safari and the help menu were using CoreAnimation. that’s pretty nifty, one hopes developers dont abuse it, but i can see it being incoorperated into apps in really cool ways next year.
There’s always UNO: http://gui.interacto.net/
I use this on every Mac I own, having everything unified is so nice.
They’ll trump MS’s Minesweeper with a Sudoku game. This will be Apple’s coup de grace.
well, the opengl related article was disappointing.
no multithreaded opengl until now, maybe in leopard and maybe only for mactel.
that makes me angry.
It was very disappointing indeed. It speaks of magical 2x improvements on FPS, yet there is almost no information what they _really_ mean with multi-threaded OpenGL. I would recommend waiting until we hear about this from either Apple or a more reputible source with more of a real explaination of what it is suppose to be.
Kinda on the topics, what is Apple going to do to counter DX10? The DX9-DX10 upgrade is very significant, and I don’t see much happening in the OpenGL camp at all. Apple can’t bank on others keeping on caring about OpenGL forever, but take charge and make better use of the graphics hardware in their computers. Both as far as core graphics/desktops go, as well as gaming.