Fraser Speirs Cocoa and Photos

In Praise of Tiger

With Leopard’s release imminent, I think we should take a moment to reflect on Mac OS X Tiger. In my opinion, Tiger has been an outstanding foundation for the growth of the Mac platform that we have seen over its lifetime. The fact that the six month delay to Leopard was met with more mild disappointment than wailing and gnashing of teeth speaks volumes for the completeness and maturity that late versions of Tiger achieved.

Lets not forget, also, that Tiger was ported en masse and nearly perfectly to the Intel platform without a massive halt in its continued maintenance. That, in itself, is a massive achievement by Apple.

As a developer, Tiger represented a good mixture of technologies to get most jobs done. The developer community has been evolving the user experience over Tiger’s lifetime and new technologies in Leopard will help us go faster again. The fact remains, however, that Tiger was a very complete OS and API set that enabled us to build excellent applications.

That said, wait and see what we’ll do with Leopard. Tiger was great, but it’s going. Pretty soon, most of the community will be on Leopard. And then the games begin.

I agree–Tiger is the OS X release that I’ve learned Cocoa on, and it seems like Tiger was really, really cool for developers as it (Core Data, especially) has opened up a whole new way to write Macintosh apps.

I’m still not fluent in Tiger, so it’ll be a while before I’m up to speed on all the new stuff coming in Leopard, but… I do think Tiger gets a bad rap sometimes. I don’t see anything coming in Leopard (from an end-user standpoint) that’s as big of a deal in Leopard as Automator and Spotlight (even though it’s a little flaky) are in Tiger. That said, I don’t have access to Leopard seeds, so it could be like jumping from CP/M to System 6 and I wouldn’t know that yet.

I don’t see anything that particularly excites me end-user-wise about Leopard. Time Machine and Spaces…meh. Maybe iChat Theatre….

But the same was entirely true about Tiger. I didn’t really see what all the fuss was about with Spotlight and Automator.

With Tiger, and I think infnitely more so with Leopard, I’m more excited about what 3rd Party Apps will come. I’m excited about Leopard more because of ObjectiveC2.0 and, for example, Delicious Library 2 than HTML Mail (boooh!) and a fancy backup system.