macOS Archive

At its heart, Mac OS X is a Unix operating system. This means that plenty of Unix open source software compiles and runs on it. However, compiling software can be tedious, especially if it has many dependencies, or if it hasn't been tested on Mac OS X. You have to perform the usual configure/make/make install process and hope it all works fine. Maybe you have to tamper with the makefile or even the source code. Moreover, you'll need to make sure all libraries used by the software are installed. Here is where Fink comes in.

"Many languages that worked flawlessly in Panther do not work in Tiger, due to an ill-conceived attempt at better cross-platform font support. For the first time in a decade, Windows is actually ahead of the Mac in supporting complex typography and Asian languages."

Another pre-release build of Mac OS X 10.4.3 was among the software seeds reportedly released by . Now at build 8F31, the third maintenance release to Tiger is is approaching 110MB in size and includes well over 500 minor fixes and enhancements. The frequency in which Apple has released new builds of the update indicates that a release is on tap for the first half of October.

Read this article to determine your transition path and learn what you’ll need to do to make your application ready for Intel-based Macintosh computers.

The new Developer Transition Resource Center is targeted at developers who have been tasked with moving their applications to Apple's forthcoming Intel-based Macs, scheduled for release in 2006. The site ties together topics, resources and tutorials, some of which were previously available on other parts of Apple's site, including QuickTime archives of WWDC sessions. In addition, Apple today updated its Xserve RAID storage system, a 3U high-availability, rack storage system to deliver a massive 7 terabytes of storage capacity at an aggressive price of just $1.86 per GB.

"Until yesterday, there were 4 different variations of the Aqua theme used by Apple for OS X: the standard Aqua theme, the new Platinum theme, the much distained Brushed Metal theme, and the funky Woody theme. Commentators have pointed out on more then one occasion that while Apple's Human Interface Guidelines has guidelines for which theme to use where, even Apple disregards those rules and uses whatever theme some unknown source in the company chooses."

Vector programming doesn't stop with PowerPC. Learn how to do SIMD vector programming for MacOS X for Intel. This page provides an overview of the hardware and programming interfaces involved, and provides detailed translation help information for leveraging your investment in AltiVec forward to the SSE world.

In Tiger, Apple introduced a new system startup program called launchd. The launchd daemon takes over many tasks from cron, xinetd, mach_init, and init, which are UNIX programs that traditionally have handled system initialization and prepared the system for the user. These venerable programs are widely used by system adminstrators, open source developers, managers of web services, even consumers who want to use cron to manage iCal scheduling, and they can still be called with launchd.

An OSX security update includes fixes for the following: AppKit, BlueTooth, CoreFoundation, cups, Directory Services, HIToolBox, Kerberos, loginwindow, Mail, OpenSSL, QuartzComposerScreenSaver, Security Interface, Safari, X11, and zlib.

One of the advantages of OS X's BSD heritage (via Darwin) is that it has access to all the scripting languages found in UNIX(-like) OSes. Here's an introduction to open source scripting.

The big themes seem to be networking and minor annoyances, with a secondary focus on iChat and Mail, which always seem to have problems in the first release of a major Mac OS X version. It’s those changes—along with improvements to Tiger’s disk repair tools—that we’ll focus on during this inside look at Mac OS X 10.4.2.

This could be completely faked, but engadget has a screenshot of OSX x68 running on the x86 virtual machine VMWare. It's an interesting feat if its true, but it also has other implications. Since VMWare obviously does not implement any of the various DRM schemes, this would poke holes in the assertion that Apple is using Trusted Computing in its developer boxes.

Slashdot reports: "Several people have discovered that the new Intel kernel Apple has included with the Developer Kit DVD uses TCPA/TPM DRM. More specifically, it includes "a TCPA/Palladium implementation that uses a Infineon 1.1 chip which will prevent certain parts of the OS from working unless authorized."

Apple Computer this week began asking its developers to test and report back to the company on the first external pre-release build of Mac OS X 10.4.3, a forthcoming maintenance release to the Mac OS X 10.4 Tiger operating system.