Designed to keep you waiting less and coding more, Apple’s ground-breaking approach to developer productivity streamlines all your most common and time-consuming tasks by fusing familiar user interface concepts with a unique mix of performance technologies in a complete Integrated Development Environment.
Whether your goal is to port a UNIX text filter, build a new kind of spreadsheet application, develop a full-featured video effects generator or make something altogether different, you’ll find sophisticated tools and technology to help you work quickly. Best of all, a full suite of developer tools — called Xcode — is included free with Mac OS X Tiger.
Xcode 2: A New Way to Work
Combining powerful UNIX-based tools, an excellent Mac OS X user experience and a mix of high-performance development technologies, Xcode gives Mac OS X Tiger developers the fastest way to create Mac OS X applications, a groundbreaking user interface and the easiest way to take advantage of new Apple technologies. With a compiler machine model developed by Apple in partnership with IBM, Xcode uses GCC 4.0 to optimize code for Apple’s PowerPC G5 architecture.
The Cocoa Advantage
For new Mac OS X-only projects, Cocoa provides you with the fastest route to developing full-featured applications. A set of object-oriented frameworks that support rapid development and high productivity, Cocoa offers a full-featured set of classes which you can use to create robust and powerful Mac OS X applications. Cocoa is programmable in Java, Objective-C (a simple, object-oriented extension to ANSI-C) and AppleScript and allows easy integration with C, C++ and other languages.
The Power of AppleScript
AppleScript gives you flexible Mac OS X scripting capability, coupled with integration with UNIX shell tools. You can use AppleScript for a variety of jobs, including batch processing, file conversion and manipulation, performing tasks at specified times, transferring information between databases and other applications and creating automated workflows by linking the actions of multiple applications to perform a series of related tasks.
UNIX Foundation
With its Open Source, UNIX-based foundation, Mac OS X Tiger lets you script with your choice of languages: Perl, PHP, Python, Tcl and more. You can work with built-in development tools such as GCC, gdb, vi, emacs and pico and take advantage of UNIX shell tools such as grep, chmod, ps, crontab, top and tail. If you’ve written utility software on another UNIX platform, you can quickly get it running in Mac OS X Tiger.
In addition to leveraging the gamut of UNIX tools, you can easily extend the power of your software by using QuickTime’s complete multimedia architecture, including support for Flash 4, Cubic VR, RTP/RTSP video streaming, MPEG and a wide array of graphic file formats.
64-bit Compatibility
Tiger features a redesigned kernel and updated system software math libraries specifically for the 64-bit PowerPC G5 processor. The updated kernel delivers the most substantial benefits of 64-bit computing by breaking through the 4GB physical memory limit. The key functions of the system math and vector libraries have been tuned to take maximum advantage of new and faster math functions supported by the 64-bit G5. Moreover, unmodified applications that use the system math functions will get an automatic performance boost on the G5. The PowerPC chip was architected from the beginning to run both 32-bit and 64-bit applications without the need for emulation or translation software. This means that 32-bit applications that run on Mac OS X today will run natively on 64-bit PowerPC G5 Processor-based Macintosh computers, without the need for recompiling or additional optimizations.
Java Built-in
Java has never looked this good. Built in to Mac OS X Tiger is the latest, certified release of the Java 2 Platform. With improved Code Sense indexing and Ant project templates, Java users can continue to use their standard Java packages and build tools coupled with Xcode’s key productivity features.
