Tiger - down to the core
Watching the Steve Keynote today and reading everything I could find I feel the urge to comment on Apples next cat OS release that normal people have to wait until first half of next year. So what is it all about? Well you can read the official Apple promotion on it yourself. I just want to highlight some stuff. 64bit: It seems to be there at least what the memory management is concerned, as far as I could read its still NO complete 64 bit system. Safari RSS: Yawn. Get Netnewswire it will do more for you. Spotlight is cool on the surface but its still no metadata filesystem instead some indexing database tailored onto the OS. It seems fast (on a G5) but I am curious how the indexing will work and if it sucks realtime performance.
On the good front are some amazing things for the moving picture people. First off the the new MPG4 codec H264 looks stunning. I will let you all know once I get my dirty hands on it but having one codec fits all sizes is amazing. And if the quality gain is as claimed this is finally (since sorenson) a codec worth encouraging to use on the web (and dvd and cellphones and cds and ... and ...).
What excites me the most of what is known of the yellowblackwhitestripecat are the Coreplugins for image manipulation and video manipulation. Core Video will let ANY application developer who incorporates video get access to an array of effects that can be applied in REALTIME to any video (or for images in the case of coreimage). CoreVideo is hooked into the Kernel and is executed on the GPU. Yes you read it right it performs all necessary tasks to manipulate your images on your GraphicsCard leaving out the processor to do some more important tasks (ähm decoding DV clips for example). Apple delivers some multiple plugins with the package but you can roll your own of course. Ultra cool stuff and I can not wait until I can test drive motion which already incorporates this technology.
For the Rest (iChat conferencing, Konfabulator knockoff Dashboard etc) its nice additions and I am sure there will be a time when I use it but its not breathtaking. As for Xcode 2 I am sure developer will love the new overview interface and all the little enhancements I personally hope it will just be less buggy.