Archive for November, 2007
Leopard, not all that
November 26th, 2007
Hi All,
Now we’ve seen the dust settle from the Leopard release, and the subsequent x.0.1 update, I feel confident in doing a little reflection on its release. First and foremost, this is definitely not the most stable release of Mac OS X. If you use your machine for mission critical things or want rock solid stability, stick with Tiger. I’ve seen some ‘odd things’ in Apple apps which are new in Leopard – which I won’t detail here – but overall it seems Apple applications seem to have weathered the storm OK. 3rd party developers are the ones actually feeling the brunt of the Leopard changes.
We’ve seen numerous API (application programming interface) bugs throughout the OS, some (most?) being crashers. When they are reported to Apple they are almost all ‘known issues.’ Try telling a user that the bug is not in your application, but their shiny new $129 OS? Perhaps most alarming is the fact most of these bugs are in the old APIs.
With Apple never having to back-port their applications it seems they are able to use the newer API. It would seem the older API was neglected when testing/fixing bugs in favor of the newer stuff and simply wasn’t fixed for the Leopard release. In the past there was some of this happening, but nothing like what we’re seeing in Leopard. It truly seems like Leopard was rushed out the door. With the API ever-expanding, I suspect we’ll get less stable API with each OS release. The only way I see to stop this cycle is if Apple gives Developers a decent build long before the actual release date and are willing to fix reported bugs. That doesn’t seem likely.
I’m sure these issues will be ironed out with the various Leopard maintenance releases, but in the mean time we’re left working around bugs in the OS that probably shouldn’t be there.
cheers, will
music: tori amos | the beekeeper
# posted at 11:29 pm by Will