Tiger on Track for Mid-April Release

Yahoo! News - eWeek ^ | Wed Mar 30, 9:31 AM ET | Ian Betteridge - eWEEK

[Swordmaker]

Tiger on Track for Mid-April Release

Mac OS X 10.4, also known as "Tiger," is proceeding on schedule, as Apple has dropped the prerelease tag from the latest build of the operating system, indicating that it has moved to final candidate stage.

It is understood that Build 8A425 was distributed both internally and to selected key developers last Tuesday, and unless major new issues are discovered it will be the last significant milestone before the product goes gold master.

The build includes only two significant glitches, concerning Japanese language support in some Carbon-based applications, and issues with some Nvidia GeForce graphics cards.

Assuming that no major issues appear, this means that the product is on track for release about mid-April, although it could be pushed back by up to a week if required.

Apple declined to comment on the release date of the product, other than to reaffirm its commitment to ship Tiger "in the first half of 2005."

Apple has also quietly released more details of the Tiger sessions at its upcoming WWDC (Worldwide Developers Conference), with over 90 sessions added to the program on the WWDC Web site in the past week.

Aspects of Tiger covered include utilizing the new synchronization engine in Tiger to sync via .Mac accounts, accessing new features in QuickTime 7 via QTKit, and building 64-bit solutions for Tiger-only applications.

Tiger will be the biggest software release of 2005 for Apple, and was described in a recent interview by Ron Okamoto, the company's vice president for developer relations, as the "most significant release the platform has seen since the original Mac OS X."

In addition to better support for 64-bit applications and a completely new version of QuickTime, the product includes Spotlight, a desktop search engine, and Core Image, a revamped graphics system.

[Swordmaker]

Tiger release on track for mid April... PING!

If you want to be on or off the Mac Ping list, Freepmail me.

[ikka]

Prediction: the Core Image stuff and the apps built using it will blow people away. I played with the software that the guys now on the Core Image team had programmed 10 years ago, and it was amazing stuff then.

[SunkenCiv]

Thanks for the ping. Mid-April release? Income tax deadline day.

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[af_vet_rr]

I don't think it has anything to do with income tax deadlines, I think it has to do with the National Association of Broadcasters convention/gathering. Specifically, some of the updates to Apple's video editing offerings require Tiger (at least according to the rumor sites).

It is a good time for it - the last several Tiger builds have been very solid, and if they release new hardware in May/June, Tiger will be ready for it as well.

[Question_Assumptions]

The issue of whether I upgrade or not will be based on how well I think it will perform on my four year old 2001 iBook with a 500Mhz processor and 8mb of graphics memory.