Tiger Raises the Bar

Published April 30, 2005

I've not received my copy of Tiger yet, but I do have a very early build from WWDC and also got to see a lot of the new stuff at WWDC, so I wanted to share some (non-technical) thoughts from a developer perspective.

Tiger has a lot of great features for developers. Cocoa has always been a great framework for developing applications, but Tiger really added a lot: CoreImage, CoreVideo, CoreData, QTKit, Spotlight, Sync Services, and others. These frameworks give developers so much for "free" that they'll be able to focus on cool stuff, tuning, and testing rather than reinventing the wheel.

For example, this semester, I wrote a GUI inventory control application in Java for one of my classes. It was about 3000 lines of code and took at least 40 hours (partially because I was learning Java as I went). Based on what I've seen of CoreData, I think could do the entire application without writing any code by using Cocoa Bindings and CoreData. It would probably take just a couple hours and would almost certainly be better and more feature-rich than what I wrote in Java.

If this had been a "real" application, I'd have saved a ton of time that I could then use for polishing. In addition, think of how many bugs might be lurking in that 3000 lines of code... Here, I'd essentially just be worried about bugs in Cocoa, but hopefully that code was better tested than my Java app :) In addition, if Apple adds features to CoreData in the future, I'd likely inherit then for free.

And that's just CoreData :) Long story short, look for some really cool applications to be built on top of Tiger.

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