OSX was always ready for Intel?

[fryke]

We don't even mention such sites, really. (had to edit your post, sorry...)

 

[pierino84]

We don't even mention such sites, really. (had to edit your post, sorry...)

Sorry if I mentioned something you think is wrong... those were just some infos for people interested in this subject!

 

[Lt Major Burns]

no talk of piracy. it's in the rules sonny-jim.

 

[RacerX]

...so even _if_ you'd find a Puma/Jaguar/Panther build and even _if_ it had Rosetta, and EVEN IF you'd get it to run on an older PC, the result would probably not be really useable. (As in: Everyday use.) I know RacerX would oppose that he's actively using Rhapsody on PC as a working operating system for everyday tasks, but to that I'd say: Different expectations.

Actually, it would be more along the lines of different application availability. Rhapsody was given to developers and some developers wrote software for it... which I have licensed versions. That is what makes my Rhapsody ThinkPad a usable system for me.

And that is what would set Rhapsody for Intel apart from Puma/Jaguar/Panther for Intel, application availability. The best operating system in the world is only usable if there exists applications for it to do the tasks users need.

As for Rhapsody, I've always argued that usability of it for anyone is based on what tools they could find that would let them do the tasks they needed to get done. Seeing as I use many of the same application titles in OPENSTEP, Rhapsody and Mac OS X, moving to any of these systems doesn't hamper my productivity.

On the other hand, if I was sitting here with a copy of Jaguar for Intel... I wouldn't be able to do much with it. None of the developers of the software I use in OPENSTEP/Rhapsody/Mac OS X ever wrote/ported any apps to that system. Without apps, it would be pretty much useless for me.



And in the interest of full disclosure... I actually spend most of my time in Rhapsody on a Power Macintosh 8600/300. It is many times faster than my ThinkPad (Pentium at 133 MHz), has much more desktop space (it has two monitors) and there are more apps for Rhapsody for PowerPC than for Rhapsody for Intel. The ThinkPad is a great mobile system, but when I need to get work done, the 8600 is where I spend most of my time.

 

[whitesaint]

Yeah, maybe for a relatively simple application. But we don't use "relatively simple" applications all that much for serious productivity work.

An application that was developed with cross-platform tools in the beginning won't have much trouble porting over to a new architecture. Like you said, change a handful of lines of code, click the "Intel" checkbox, and click "Build." But larger applications that heavily depend on architecture-dependent APIs will not be able to make the transition with such ease.

The ease of porting is inversely proportional to the amount of platform-dependent and architecture-dependent code and APIs used in the application. You can't take any old application and click the "Intel" button and expect a working Universal Binary to come flying out the compiler's chute.

Yea, but Cocoa apps will immediately benefit. Even if they are huge projects, all the other frameworks in mac os x are cross platform as well. For instance, a developer could hard code Altivec instructions into their app, and yea ur right, this code will be pretty hard to port over. If one uses the Accelerate Framework, the programmer doesn't have to worry about porting Altivec code over because the Accelerate Framework automatically switches between SSEsMMX or Altivec no matter what the processor is. Not many cocoa programmers at all are using any architecture dependent code, only if they have to, which is pretty rare.