Theocacao
Leopard
Design Element
Comment on "The Reasons for Leopard-Only Apps"
by Paul N — Jan 05
It remains to be seen if Leopard will offer substantial improvements for the end user, enough to warrant the $129 price. The ADC seeds certainly don't show it... And I don't know if many users will want to shell out that much money for the OS, if its prime utility turned out to be "TextMate and Delicious Library upgrade enabler".
(For example, Time Machine requires a second HD -- how many Mac users have that? Maybe 3%? The vast majority have just the one slow disk that their non-upgradeable iMac or PowerBook shipped with.)

Yes, I know about the Inkredibl Sikrit Leopard Feechures to be shown next week... I guess we'll just see how that turns out.

I hate to say, my feeling is that the vast majority of developers out there just aren't very impressed with Leopard's improvements, and would contend the notion that Apple's frameworks are "unmatched across the industry". GC? That's so 1997. Obj-C properties and foreach syntax? Ok, these are useful improvements, but very modest compared to Microsoft's language/runtime improvements in .NET 3.0. Core Animation? Well, it's not unlike Microsoft Avalon/WPF... Except that Avalon is both shipping in Vista and backported to XP as part of .NET 3.0.

That's a significant point, IMO. Microsoft is making a strong push with their impressive new language support and APIs, and they've made every effort to make them available even on 5-year old PCs (with the major exception of DirectX 10, which is Vista-only).

Apple, OTOH, basically hopes that their developers want to be on the cutting edge so much that it may cloud their business sense. Looks like it's working. Overall the Mac dev community's attitude seems to be turning towards "if you can't afford the New Stuff all the time, you shouldn't be on the Mac anyway"... I recall the Mac community used to be much less consumerist before Apple rediscovered its massive hubris through iPod/iTunes. Maybe it's just nostalgia.
Back to "The Reasons for Leopard-Only Apps"
Design Element

Copyright © Scott Stevenson 2004-2015