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OS X Operating Systems Businesses Apple

Tiger Early Start Kit 417

Posted by pudge from the do-it-to-it dept.
EccentricAnomaly writes "If you can't wait until next spring for the official release of next version of Mac OS X, Apple is offering a Tiger Early Start Kit to those willing to pay $500 for an Apple Developer Select Membership. And if you don't want to spend the money, they've also added a developer overview page describing some of the guts of Mac OS X v10.4."
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Tiger Early Start Kit More

Tiger Early Start Kit

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  • cheers (Score:4, Interesting)

    by millahtime ( 710421 ) on Wednesday October 20, 2004 @05:35PM (#10580740) Homepage Journal
    Here's hoping the G5 powerbook comes out at the same time as Tiger. That is a mac fans wet dream.

    • Re:cheers (Score:5, Funny)

      by ravenspear ( 756059 ) on Wednesday October 20, 2004 @05:37PM (#10580760)
      That is a mac fans wet dream.

      Strange, I thought that was to see Jobs best Ballmer in a naked, sweaty cage match.

    • Re:cheers (Score:5, Informative)

      by AKnightCowboy ( 608632 ) on Wednesday October 20, 2004 @05:40PM (#10580784)
      Here's hoping the G5 powerbook comes out at the same time as Tiger. That is a mac fans wet dream.

      Sorry, but until they have some new lower-power and cooler G5 chip it will never be in a Powerbook. Even the new iMac has big fans in it.

      • Re:cheers (Score:3, Insightful)

        by HeghmoH ( 13204 )
        Never is a long time. Saying, "until they have some new lower-power and cooler G5 chip" is kind of pointless, as they'll have that by Christmas. Improvements are always being made. Once enough are made, we'll have a PowerBook G5. The question is not if, it's when.

    • Re:cheers (Score:2, Insightful)

      by over_exposed ( 623791 )
      Like others, I say not bloodly likely... There's a reason the 2.5 GHz G5 towers ship with water cooling. Unless you want some really nasty thigh burns or some new-age scorch marks in your desk, G5 laptops aren't going to be coming any time soon.

      • Re:cheers (Score:3, Interesting)

        by bhtooefr ( 649901 )
        Keep in mind, Apple likes their boxes QUIET. I'm thinking you could get away with two big ass heatsinks and fans on that 2.5GHz G5. Also, from what I've heard, the 12" AlBook has some heat problems, so Apple could release a hot laptop...

        • Re:cheers (Score:2, Interesting)

          by over_exposed ( 623791 )
          Oh I know... My 15" power book get's plenty warm. There are times when it's uncomfortable on my thighs. That's with a 1.5 GHz G4. This is what leads me to believe it would be nearly fatal to have a G5 on my lap :-)

        • Re:cheers (Score:3, Insightful)

          by suckmysav ( 763172 )

          " Keep in mind, Apple likes their boxes QUIET. I'm thinking you could get away with two big ass heatsinks and fans on that 2.5GHz G5. Also, from what I've heard, the 12" AlBook has some heat problems, so Apple could release a hot laptop..."

          You do realise that if your CPU is dissipating enough heat to put a small furnace to shame, it doesn't really matter how efficiently you move this heat out of the laptop because you will be wasting so much power that your battery life will be shot to hell anyway.

  • Don't forget about NDA (Score:5, Interesting)

    by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday October 20, 2004 @05:36PM (#10580753)
    There's some nasty NDA business going on.

    You can't even talk to other devs about Tiger if you have it.

  • $500 to Beta Test! (Score:5, Funny)

    by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday October 20, 2004 @05:38PM (#10580762)
    Wow the guys over at Everquest will be jealous!

    • Re:$500 to Beta Test! (Score:5, Informative)

      by boredMDer ( 640516 ) <pmohr+slashdot@boredmder.com> on Wednesday October 20, 2004 @05:47PM (#10580852)
      Actually:

      $500 gets you select ADC membership +
      • Pre-release versions of Mac OS X v10.4 tiger and Xcode 2.0
      • Exclusive access to the latest tiger documentation
      • Direct, one-on-one access to tiger support engineers
      • Special developer discount on the latest Apple hardware
      • GM versions of Mac OS X v10.4 and Xcode 2.0 when available
      http://www.dslreports.com/forum/remark,11632974~mo de=flat [dslreports.com]

      • Only a few things missing (Score:5, Funny)

        by SuperKendall ( 25149 ) * on Wednesday October 20, 2004 @06:10PM (#10581040)
        Sounds pretty good, the only thing more I would ask for are...

        A Developer commentary track:
        {booting OSX} "Ding! Welcome to the developers edition of OSX. I'm Joe Schmo, lead designer of Aqua, and with me I have Jim Bob of Core Graphics. We've got some great stories here for you! You'll see that it's starting up services, let me tell you about a time old Jim was writing one of those and the power went out after a fifteen hour coding session..."

        And of course "Deleted comments - too hot for public release!"

        • Re:Only a few things missing (Score:5, Interesting)

          by IAmATuringMachine! ( 62994 ) on Wednesday October 20, 2004 @07:35PM (#10581649)
          While I was interning there this summer, we had a pretty big power outage, lasting maybe 30 minutes. A bunch of people were pissed about some lost work and productivity, but then it dawned on us.... Having all the developers lose power was the best test of the filesystem we could have ever asked for!

        • They used to do this (Score:3, Interesting)

          by MacFury ( 659201 )
          I remember in the mid nineties Apple would send me videos about various subjects. It was basically a guy talking about something like OpenDoc for a half hour, describing it in more detail than the press releases, showing sample applications, etc. I think these were phased out with the ever growing popularity of the web.

    • No. $500 for ADC membership that comes with extras (Score:5, Informative)

      by Rascasse ( 719300 ) on Wednesday October 20, 2004 @05:50PM (#10580877)
      You get an ADC membership. This entitles you to an Apple hardware discount, some programming technical support, access to pre-release software and some other niceties. Moreover, this particular deal comes with the WWDC 2004 videos DVD that has already been distributed amongst ADC members. You also get the Tiger beta that developers received at WWDC 2004 (though it's probably a more recent build). The WWDC tutorials are great resources and I'd be more attracted to this offer because of that. One can argue as to whether charging developers for assistance in making software for their platform is a good strategy or not for Apple. But this isn't merely a "$500 for the privilege of beta testing" rip-off.
      • Especially helpful if you plan on buying a system. The discount for a dual 2 gig is $500 and the discount for dual 2.5 gig is $600. Forgetting all the other stuff you get, you make your money back right there.

      • Re:No. $500 for ADC membership that comes with ext (Score:5, Insightful)

        by BasilBrush ( 643681 ) on Wednesday October 20, 2004 @05:59PM (#10580951)
        You've got to charge for something like this. Otherwise non-developers will sign up just to play with the pre-release OS, and get the hardware discount. You have to price it at a level where professional developers are not put off, but non-developers aren't tempted. With non-developers being quite willing to pay $125 for a new OS version, it has to be significantly higher than that. I'd say somewhere in the $300-$1000 range is sensible. Why not $500, it's a nice round number?

        • Re:No. $500 for ADC membership that comes with ext (Score:5, Insightful)

          by dbirchall ( 191839 ) on Wednesday October 20, 2004 @07:29PM (#10581605) Journal
          You've got to charge for something like this. Otherwise non-developers will sign up just to play with the pre-release OS, and get the hardware discount.

          Let's see... Tiger is probably going to be $129, and the hardware discount is $400+ on any 15" or larger Powerbook, any Xserve or any 2x2GHz Power Mac (maybe the dual 1.8, as well). So if you're in the market for a pro machine, and are planning to buy Tiger when it comes out, you can probably save money overall by being an ADC Select member -- even if you don't take advantage of *any* of the other benefits. (Like the free copy of OS X Server, which would cost $499 otherwise...)

        • I'll also note that there is a "no-frills, no-bennies, no-cost" ADC membership option. It's good for going to grab recent versions of XCode, SDKs, and misc other online dev resources that Apple provides free of charge. This level works great for MacOS X open source or shareware dev types, hobbyists, etc.

  • Quartz/JavaScript support? (Score:5, Informative)

    by kngthdn ( 820601 ) * on Wednesday October 20, 2004 @05:38PM (#10580763)
    The advanced drawing capabilities of Quartz are exposed to the Web Kit environment through a set of modular extensions to HTML. This will let you draw beautiful user interfaces using JavaScript.

    This has got to be the coolest new feature, considering how weak DHTML currently is. I could be wrong, but adding support for other APIs doesn't seem like it would be too hard. I'd love to finally be able to ditch Win32.

    • doesn't this look like XUL [mozilla.org]?

      I bet there will be a website like Mozilla update [mozilla.org]'s extension portion, and provide free downloading of millions, ah... sorry, maybe thousands, ah... maybe hundreds, never mind, of open source small applications! Brillian days of Apple are coming via these small applications! Maybe.

      Doesn't MS is also doing something alike named XAML?

      I'd like to buy some stock of Macromedia, dreamweaver may become a major developing tool in next ten years.

    • This is for making widgets for dashboard... not for regulary application development or web development purposes.

    • This is likely a reference to Safari's new canvas [mozillazine.org] tag, mainly intended for dashboard [apple.com]. A version of it is being specified in the graphics [whatwg.org] part of the WAHT WG [whatwg.org] Web Applications 1.0 spec, so you're likely to see it in Mozilla sooner or later

  • But there is no ... (Score:2, Informative)

    by madsenj37 ( 612413 )
    But there is no discount for student developers that I can find.

  • Mouse gestures for Dashboard? (Score:4, Interesting)

    by hunterx11 ( 778171 ) <hunterx11@NOSpAm.gmail.com> on Wednesday October 20, 2004 @05:40PM (#10580782) Homepage Journal
    Does this mean that Tiger will support other forms of mouse gestures?

  • Oh how I wish (Score:3, Interesting)

    by thammoud ( 193905 ) on Wednesday October 20, 2004 @05:42PM (#10580802)
    that the Linux GUI toolkits just copy the Mac rather than Windows and stop the bickering and come up with a Unified desktop.

    Apple has made Unix a dream desktop OS. I just hope that they support 64bit Java on this thing. I will buy it and switch from Linux (Fedora 64bit) if they come out with a 64bit powebook in a heartbeat.

  • The first rule of developer releases... (Score:5, Insightful)

    by trudyscousin ( 258684 ) on Wednesday October 20, 2004 @05:50PM (#10580876)
    ...is that you do not talk about developer releases. Hence, the NDA. It's not nasty, as another poster observed. All it requires of you is to have one nice cup of Shut The Fuck Up after another until the final release.

    That said...

    Select membership gets you access to pre-release software, one incident of support from developer tech services, one hardware discount, and issues of the operating systems when they're finally released at no additional charge.

    The way I look at it, $500 gets you the OS release that's bound to take place during your year's membership, and you can easily save far more than the difference when you buy a Macintosh system through the developer discount program. Being able to get assistance directly from Apple when you have a coding issue is a boon. The rest is icing on the cake.

  • Core Data = good idea, weak storage (Score:3, Interesting)

    by chmod u+s ( 211367 ) on Wednesday October 20, 2004 @05:52PM (#10580899) Journal

    Core Data sounds like so many other great 3rd party tools out there, except now part of the OS (so to speak). A standardized object-relational persistence mechanism and design studio - Awesome. But why only:

    • A text-based XML file format
    • A better performing binary file format
    • A high-performance, SQLite-based database file format

    Why not an odbc/ado/adsi type of interface that will allow the use of any persistence mechanism? Using LDAP or any sql-92 compliant existing database would be useful. Hey apple, you listening?

    • Keeping it simple (Score:5, Interesting)

      by SuperKendall ( 25149 ) * on Wednesday October 20, 2004 @06:16PM (#10581090)
      Any app that really needs something like LDAP or JDBC or what have you can still use those.

      To me, the idea of provided a core OS service that essentially acts as a really nice standard embedded DB you can use quickly, is awesome. I'll continue to write apps using more standard databases, but there are smaller apps I have in mind that can really make use of this feature. I was already looking over small DB's and debating about the best way to move forward with an embedded DB in an app.

      Fundamentially the configuration and administration needs of an embedded DB vs. an external DB are different, and I don't mind treating them differently.

    • Why not an odbc/ado/adsi type of interface that will allow the use of any persistence mechanism?

      It's called setting a reasonable goal for version 1.0. SQLite is an excellent, public domain database that works on a local file and requires no server. It directly fits in as a persistence mechanism with Apple's document-based architecture. Hell, even I saw the potential years ago when I started development of STEnterprise [subsume.com]. If Apple picks up the ball, then I say "Great". If they go on to extend it to m

  • Looks like they are working a lot of features in that are similar to QuickSilver [vjarmy.com] (their web site seems to be down, hence the linking to instructions). I've only used it a bit, but it's great and I can see why Apple would want a lot of the functionality at the OS level.

  • I'm waiting for 10.6... (Score:4, Funny)

    by NoMoreNicksLeft ( 516230 ) <john.oyler@noSpAm.comcast.net> on Wednesday October 20, 2004 @05:55PM (#10580924) Journal
    aka Tubcat.

  • All these new features... (Score:4, Interesting)

    by DA_MAN_DA_MYTH ( 182037 ) on Wednesday October 20, 2004 @06:00PM (#10580961) Homepage Journal
    I mean the one that would force me to upgrade, is if on their DVD application they had an option to leave the window always on top.

    I like to watch AntiTrust (Shhh... Don't tell anybody) while I'm coding.

  • Spotlight and Backup (Score:5, Interesting)

    by Drishmung ( 458368 ) on Wednesday October 20, 2004 @06:26PM (#10581186)
    http://developer.apple.com/macosx/tiger/index.html [apple.com] says:
    In a nutshell, every time a file is saved, it is examined for meta-data and content, which is then placed into an indexed database.

    I wonder if Spotlight calculates (or could be made to calculate) an MD5 for the file. This would be useful for backup. If the backup program looks up a file's MD5 in its catalog and finds it already there, no need to back up again. This would survive arbitrary renaming or moving (the metadata would still need to be backed up for each file), and would make for major efficiencies when backing up multiple machines on a network (only one copy of Hei.dfont, Osaka.dfont, xxx.App, etc. in the backup set).

  • Between Linux and OS X... (Score:5, Interesting)

    by Qbertino ( 265505 ) <moiraNO@SPAMmodparlor.com> on Wednesday October 20, 2004 @06:33PM (#10581242)
    .. I presume the air will get thin for MS in the long run. Look at those features. It's like "Gee, that would be really cool to have" and three years later OS X has it, 5 years ahead of all the rest. I find the Automator one of those supercool things. Those things that will eventually put me out of business when everybody can automate his tasks with a few mouseklicks. But it's cool nonetheless.

  • Anyone else notice.. (Score:5, Interesting)

    by iONiUM ( 530420 ) on Wednesday October 20, 2004 @06:36PM (#10581266) Journal
    That in the RSS feeds [apple.com] demonstration for Safari, the site they use is Slashdot?

    Just thought that was interesting..

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