OS X 10.5 Leopard: News on the new features; MacOS developments past and present

Introducing OS X 10.5 Leopard: HOTNESS!

Ok fine, that is really VisiCalc for the Apple II, one of the first Killer Apps in computing history.

(Note: The nifty blogging tool Ecto 3 is now at beta 6. It is still a bit buggy but i am a registered user so i'm giving em feedback on the bugs, crashes etc.)

A correction: someone anonymous added a comment that Apple WebKit, the core engine of Safari, is NOT derived from Gecko, the engine that runs Mozilla Firefox and other Mozilla web renderings (Thunderbird, Camino and SeaMonkey among them). Evidently the WebKit was an in-house project or whatever.

Today I started looking a bit at the history of Apple's OS evolution. It's a pretty arcane area. Chances are, you haven't been sitting around lately wondering "What ever happened to HyperCard or Quickdraw GX? What is the connection between Cocoa and Yellow Box / Rhapsody? Where did the OS X Developer Kit come from?" etc.

The hairy backroads of Apple's circuitous development path since the 1970s are not really that interesting to most people, but with OS X 10.5 just released, it is a good time to review where the Apple Macintosh operating system came from, and thereby getting a more granular sense of its trajectory and future developments.

The big trend I noticed when reading up on the history was how Apple used to have a lot of shoddy in-house technologies that never quite worked smoothly. The core of OS X itself came from the NeXT Corporation, and it's interesting to see how NeXT developer tools (Interface Builder mainly) were ported to OS 9 before X came out, and those sorts of elements became deeply embedded into OS X today.

A kind of plugin structure has been evolving in OS X: Core Audio, Core Graphics and other packages inspired by Quicktime's design will allow app creators to easily make powerful and cool applications.

AppleInsider.com is a damn fine website. So without further ado, a collection of articles which both explore the original history of the Apple, as well as the brand-new features in iCal, Developer Tools, Core Video and other aspects of the new OS X 10.5. Some of these are on the Insider, some on other sites.

Introductory Mac OS X Leopard Review: Present & Future Value. The historic big picture, including the Apple II and BeOS.

Introductory Mac OS X Leopard Review: Core Graphics and the new UI. Nitty Gritty stuff, but also a review of what's happened since OS X 10.0.

RoughlyDrafted.com: Ten myths of Leopard #1 Graphics must be slow. Shorter: It's faster because various drawing bits have finally been set up to run through the graphics card (GPU) instead of the CPU, so you can get purty effects without the pokiness, unlike Windows Vista.

RoughlyDrafted.com: How Apple Keyboards lost a logo and Windows PCs gained one. The true story of where the Command symbol came from: Swedish campground maps!

A look at the old techs: Platform Crisis: the Lazy Dinosaur. Proprietary techs and long term legacy support caused Apple and Microsmish to become "Lazy dinosaurs" at various points. The graphic is awesome.

Adobe to update some CS3 level apps for OS X 10.5. However your CS2 apps may go haywire and were "not designed" for Leopard and therefore may cause problems that eschatonistically "Likely to encounter issues for which there is no resolution." Like the Bush Administration?

An introductory review of 10.5: iCal and Mail. 10.5 Address Book and iChat: looking nifty. Check this out: all the effects available to mutate the looks of images are actually "Quartz composer composition files" and you can make your own. They are available all over Leopard in iChat, Photo Booth and elsewhere, part of Core Graphics. The main ones are in /System/Library/Compositions, but add your own at /Library/Compositions and create new photo filters in the Quartz Composer in the latest Developer Tools (more below). Also Address Book now automatically digs up TIFF files matching email addresses from Library/Images/People , anywhere a person's email address is used.

Both of these are cool elements that basically allow any developers to tie in their apps to an open framework in the system, creating better and more well-integrated applications. Like embedding Quicktime or other common things, new OS X development features seem to have a solid, open orientation that permits applications to use customized services around the whole system. This is the big evolution in OS X operating system design under the hood, and Linux and Windows would be wise to understand what is going on here. Look at the next one:

Strongly recommended for geeks: An introductory Mac OS X Leopard Review: Developer Tools. Includes HyperCard and AppleScript. Bonus: the new Developer Tools include easily deployed versions of key UI parts of iTunes: the iTunes Store heirarchy breadcrumb thingy is included, as well as the iTunes "smart playlist" Rules Editor system.

OS X server will run on virtual machines legally. Ok, one key thing for modern web servers is to run numerous 'virtual' operating systems on one server box, which takes a ton of RAM and CPU, but ensures that if you get hacked or otherwise trashed, the one virtual operating system can get chucked like a soda can without fucking up the other virtual OSes. You run like five virtual Linux boxes on one real machine, and they're basically unstoppable because even the worst fuck-ups can be limited to just killing a single virtual machine. Also allows better development because you can make test 'sandboxes' to run self-contained whatever. Apple changed their license policy to allow this, and it's a good thing:

Many of these businesses need to separate programs from the main operating system in the event of a malware infection or a crash, or else need a sandbox to test new software without buying an entirely separate computer. This is already commonplace with Virtual PC, VMware, and similar tools on most operating systems, but until now has been impossible with Apple hardware. This will change in the next several months when SWSoft intends to release Parallels with its first instance of Mac OS X virtualization support, Rudolph says.

All righty, good stuff to check out if it's your kind of thing.