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February 27, 2005
New Tiger builds
I upgraded Tiger today to the newest build, 8A393. I was running a build that was a couple months old, so it's nice to pick up all the new bug fixes. The OS is getting more and more stable, it feels like Apple could have it ready by WWDC.
I have a theory re: CoreImage and the new Quartz features in Tiger. I think Apple has had these features available for their internal application groups for quite some time. Perhaps they weren't as pluggable/reusable as they are now, but thinking about Final Cut Pro, iPhoto, Keynote, Motion, etc, Apple has had similar capability for their apps for quite a while. I think they are releasing CoreImage with Tiger to see what third-party developers will do with all that graphics power. They've had the advantage for a few OS releases (I'm guessing they've had ImageUnit-like components since 10.1), so now they can make it available to others.
We've now got pluggable components for transforming audio, graphics, and video, and APIs to create pdf documents programmatically. Good printer support, zero conf networking, and a complete network stack. Streaming video/audio frameworks, a zero conf embedded sql engine and app data framework, etc, etc. The sense of power you get when sitting down at a Tiger workstation is incredible, you can write software to do ANYTHING. There are times when I'm working on code and just start laughing out loud. Working with OS X is just too much fun. I'm starting to think that I would very much enjoy writing OS X apps for a living.
Posted by djb at February 27, 2005 10:16 PM