Insert Bad ‘Cat’s out of the Bag’ Pun Here
by John Paczkowski
Posted on October 4, 2007 at 9:19 AM PT
With the iPhone firmly ensconced at market and the full brunt of its engineering resources brought to bear on Leopard development, Apple is reportedly on track to meet its self-imposed deadline of shipping the next version of the Mac OS later this month.
Developers received the latest Leopard pre-release last week, a build that some say seems very close to the final release candidate. And now sources close to the company are telling Apple Insider and Think Secret both that we can expect Apple to ship Mac OS X Leopard on or around Oct. 26.
Accompanying it, at least according to some theories, will be a significant software update for the iPhone, one expected to add support for Notes syncing and perhaps even the SDK (software development kit) for which developers have been pining.
“Apple hasn’t shipped an SDK yet, not because Apple is evil, but because the iPhone is a Leopard device,” theorizes Blackfriars Communications analyst Carl Howe. “You didn’t think all those nifty animations on the iPhone were all one-offs, did you? Everyone was so excited to hear Steve Jobs say that the iPhone was built on a Mac OS X foundation that I think many people never really thought about the fact that he never specified which one. I believe that the iPhone is built on a Core Animation and Leopard foundation, and since some Leopard functions are still not public, Apple can’t release the SDK without (you knew this was coming) ‘letting the cat out of the bag.’ I have heard from developers that applications of all types are being held for the Leopard release. Why? Because they rely on either foundational data structures or features. … Once the Leopard launch is complete and all the Leopard functions are public, all of these constraints will be relaxed.”
Comments
Not buying it. It may well be Leopard-based, but there’s no reason that I can see NOT to announce the fact, or the fact that they’re waiting on Leopard to ship before doing an SDK.
As such, I’m putting more faith in the “offline-Safari” rumor than I am on this.
Posted by Michael Long at October 4th, 2007 at 3:50 pm