Apple Preps Tiger for June Conference
Apple has set the stage for its annual Worldwide Developers Conference (WWDC) to take place June 6 to 10 in San Francisco. The primary focus of WWDC will be to showcase the upcoming release of Mac OS X 10.4, known as Tiger. Developers will get their first hands-on experience with the new operating system, along with programming guidance.
"You'll get the in-depth knowledge, hands-on instruction and one-on-one support you need to deliver products and solutions that transform the way your users work, play, search, and share on a Mac," Apple says of the conference.
Development of Tiger has progressed more rapidly in the last few weeks, with Apple issuing new beta builds to its testers. The main new features of Tiger that Apple has targeted for developers are Spotlight and Dashboard.
Spotlight is the new search technology baked into Mac OS X that utilizes an indexed database, which contains the contents and meta-data of every file on the system. Apple has designed Spotlight to instantly pull up search results from any location, be it e-mail, music or iChat logs.
Tiger is also set to include special "Widgets," or mini-applications that perform simple tasks, such as displaying weather or controlling Apple's iTunes. They reside in a layer atop the Mac OS X desktop called the Dashboard. Dashboard appears with the press of a button and disappears just as easily.
Apple has called on developers to design Widgets for Tiger, which are based on simple CSS and JavaScript. The company held a contest earlier this year, offering up a 40GB iPod to the winner.
But WWDC won't run cheap for developers looking to tackle Tiger. Early registration starts at $1,295 USD, and jumps to $1,595 after April 22.