tadunne Posted April 7, 2007 Share Posted April 7, 2007 The finder: Looking at all the screen shots of finder most apps have eiither had brush metal removed and turned into either itunes 7.1 look or tiger mail look. The finder has pretty much remained the same with the exception of the shared network folder item. The fact that the finder is still in brush metal must mean that we can expect to have a new look maybe with core animation effects ( well they didn't just add core animation it for no reason ) Media access and ilife: In some open file dialogue screen shots there is a new option to view the media files on the system, simular to the media access in ilife and iwork. As ilife is obivously linked to the release of leopard and Vista now has some ilife style features as standard. I think we expect to have ilife bundled as part of leopard. LLVM: While I don't think this will appear in leopard and is of more use to mac os x on the iphone. I've been reading alot into this technology. Basically it will give the ability to developers to create programs and have them compile to byte codes. The LLVM (low level virtual machine) then Just in Time compiles the code to the native CPU architecture. There is evidance that the iphone is using this tech to get code running on the arm processors. This could be of great benefit to leopard if they get it working on that. At the moment if a developer wants to support intel/ppc/32bit/64bit they have to provide 4 binaries for each cpu architecture. If LLVM was used they would only have to provide the version compile in LLVM byte codes. LLVM will then compile the code to create a binary perfectly tuned to the native architecture and space is saved by not having to ship 4 binaries. LLVM will take part in leopard in a small way at least. It's part of the open gl system. Open GL script/code is turned into LLVM vyte codes. LLVM is then used to either create GFX shaders etc to run on the GPU or if the system does not support it on the CPU. Link to comment https://www.insanelymac.com/forum/topic/47777-my-thoughts-on-leopard-secret-features/ Share on other sites More sharing options...
twoodcc Posted April 7, 2007 Share Posted April 7, 2007 well i sure hope that the finder gets some core animation in it.....and at least a fairly big change to the finder as a whole. finder didn't change a whole lot from panther to tiger.....so hopefully leopard will be a little bigger change Link to comment https://www.insanelymac.com/forum/topic/47777-my-thoughts-on-leopard-secret-features/#findComment-342160 Share on other sites More sharing options...
Adrian Fogge Posted April 7, 2007 Share Posted April 7, 2007 For the most part, those seem pretty reasonable expectations, however as far as the LLVM is concerned, I doubt that they would take this kind of a route at the moment given how much work they have been putting into things like Rosetta and retraining developers to make use of Universal Binaries and the code modifications necessary to guarentee cross compatability if they were just going to be going to an entirely new format immediately. LLVMs really work well in embedded enviroments and other low-processing power situations where you really need microcode optimizations to get performance going really well. I could understand them using it for cross compatability between the iPods and the iPhones. The problem there comes into using it in an actual computing enviroment where you are moving between processor architectures... You would need to provide at least some level of source to the applications so that they could be compiled on the first run. While this may work just fine for open source projects, good luck trying to convince someone like Adobe to go for this new system. If the user really wants to get their apps trimmed down a little further so that they do not contain the unnecissary code, they could always use ditto (a standard command for which there are a couple graphical frontends available) to remove the PPC or Intel portions of a Universal Binary. Link to comment https://www.insanelymac.com/forum/topic/47777-my-thoughts-on-leopard-secret-features/#findComment-342170 Share on other sites More sharing options...
tadunne Posted April 8, 2007 Author Share Posted April 8, 2007 Yeah I know that LLVM won't be ready for leopard (but it will be around on the version of leopard on the iphone) It will be a useful addtion for developers. Check out the presentation PDF linked from this arstechica article it's quite interesting. At the moment developers have to create a number of conditions so their programs use the correct datatypes etc available on each cpu architecture. Compiling to LLVM IR should provide a level of abstraction for them simplifying the development process to some extent. M$ .net uses simular architecture 9 (I know, I know) . Once the source has been compiled to LLVM IR the LLVM will optimise the code and then the developer can either choose to have the code JIT compiled or compiled to whatever LLVM backend exists (x86/ppc/arm etc) They even have a backend that pushes out C code so the program can then be compiled on any compiler that supports C. Those excellent Intel compilers that don't support objective C can finally be used!? Link to comment https://www.insanelymac.com/forum/topic/47777-my-thoughts-on-leopard-secret-features/#findComment-342431 Share on other sites More sharing options...
Recommended Posts