Since I haven’t received my Leopard DVD from Amazon yet, I still have some time to blog.
However, having played with the Developer Preview I got at WWDC a couple of months ago i must say that I am surprised that except for a couple of honorable exceptions, all the OS reviews I have seen so far focus on the end-user features that are available right out of the box. That is just plain wrong. Reviewers should also have spent some time discussing what new features are available for developers and how applications could take advantage of these new or expanded APIs to create better applications for the Mac over the next few months.
It is too bad that the mainstream press didn’t take more time to review the developer CD because if it lis like the one handed to developers last June, it contains a lot of hints on how Mac applications will outshine their PC counterparts over the next two years. My two favorite APIs nobody has talked about yet are:
Ever wondered why there aren’t that many applications that work with RSS feeds? The reason is that there are many different versions of RSS (not even counting Atom) that a developer needs to support if he/she wants to avoid any incompatibilities. RSS Readers must also be able to work with malformed XML files, which are unfortunately very frequent on the Internet. Writing such a flexible parser is boring and time consuming. Apple understood that and decided to include an API to make it easy for any programmer to either generate or parse all kind of RSS feeds. This is great news because now we will probably see many new innovative uses of RSS in Mac applications. I am planning for example to publish puzzles created with my upcoming application as an RSS feed including custom XML files. The client will use RSS to download the latest puzzles included as attachments just like podcasts today include MP3 files.
Core Text is also new in Leopard. Core Text replaces most of all previous text handling APIs. Now it is easier than ever to write applications that can easily handle gorgeous text in multiple columns wrapping around complex objects. Expect to see many specialized text editors to improve dramatically as developers start using this new technology.
Many seem to believe that Leopard is just another small evolutionary step over Mac OS X 10.4 Tiger because they haven’t seen any applications yet that take advantage of all the changes that were made under the hood. I suggest to everyone to take a look at the developer sample projects included on the developer tools DVD to understand what Leopard really is about.