Leopard-mas Eve

‘Twas the night before Leopard, when all round the globe
People were waiting for DTrace and Xcode;

The reviews had been written by Pogue and by Walt,
Leopard looks great, with nary a fault;

But for me, the real power lies under the hood,
ImageKit, Ruby and other such goods;

Leopard’s looking like a developer’s dream,
Now UNIX certified, it’s the OS supreme.

But on a less poetic note, as a new OS X developer with no access to the pre-release seeds, I am massively excited about delving into the new goodness to be found at all levels of Leopard.

I think Pogue, Mossberg and others have already covered the majority of “user” additions to Leopard fairly comprehensively, but what about the changes from a developers perspective?

I’ve already written at quite some length on a number of the new developer additions in Leopard, including things like the scripting bridge, Objective-C 2.0 with garbage collection, new XCode and Interface Builder, PDFKit, ImageKit, the QTKit capture APIs, NSGridView and pervasive 64-bitness. Then there’s more features that I didn’t mention in that last article like DTrace, MPI, Ruby (including rails, Mongrel and Capistrano), new IOStream classes, NSOperation and NSOperationQueue and the list goes on. But what excites me most is the fact that there are yet more developer-related goodies that Apple hasn’t made public.

I’m aware of two of those goodies through people who have broken their NDAs: NSRuleEditor and an off-the-shelf CoverFlow view (most probably NSCoverFlowView). NSRuleEditor provides a view like those found in iTunes and Mail for selecting smart folder/playlist criteria that will presumably form an NSPredicate based on what the user selects. The CoverFlow is fairly self-explanatory. With two such powerful (but secret) additions to the OS X developer toolkit, it makes me wonder what other awesomeness we’re in store for tomorrow… 22 hours and 30 minutes to go!

Leave a Reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *