Where’s OSX heading?

Matt Gemmell’s weblog has a very nice summary of OSX 10.5’s new features from a developer’s perspective. (And it’s also a very nice read with lots of images. )

The great thing about these improvements is that you can get many of them almost for free, by only doing very small changes to your application. My personal favorite is the “Safari-style” find results popup, which you can use in all your textviews by simply telling them which range of the text to highlight. (It’s so much easier to spot your search results with this — it’s animated! )

Apple makes some “bold moves” in the development of the Cocoa class library. I sometimes wonder what happens when steps like introducing transparent windows turn out to be a bad idea after all; they already had that problem in the past with the shiny white Aqua interface (compare to the Leopard look). Go a few steps further and it will look like OPENSTEP again (which isn’t necessarily a bad thing. ).

For the looks, that’s not a big problem. However, when it comes to more in-depth features of the class library that will need to be deprecated later, this may lead to quite a bit of legacy code needing to be maintained. (How do they manage all these backwards compatibility issues with MacOS 9 and OPENSTEP…?)