Mac OS X on Intel

Optimism

• I’m inclined to believe Apple’s claims that creating a Universal Binary won’t be that hard—nothing like Carbonization. My applications already use the NSSwap* APIs in places where they care whether the processor is big- or little-endian. Of course, they also depend on some third-party libraries…
• Using Intel’s mobile processors for laptops does seem to make sense.
• Existing native applications will be supported. Most of the rumors didn’t mention this, but it’s obviously a requirement.

Pessimism

• What’s Rosetta’s estimated performance? Will Classic be supported? Unbelievably, the keynote coverage I’ve read thus far indicates that Jobs did not answer these questions.
• What can Apple do about one of the problems that plagued OS/2: reluctance to develop native applications because Windows applications will be able to run at full speed?
• Most importantly: Apple depends on hardware revenue. How will they be able to compete with Dell, et. al., when they almost went bankrupt competing with Power Computing? Switching business models is much harder than switching processors, and there’s been no indication of how Apple will manage the former.

The ADC site is still down for maintenance, so I don’t know what the Developer Transition Kit contains.

Utility Windows

The Apple Human Interface Guidelines say:

A user can open several utility windows at a time; they float on top of document windows. When a user makes a document active, all of the application’s utility windows should be brought to the front, regardless of which document was active when the user opened the utility window. When your application is inactive, its utility windows should be hidden. Utility windows should not be listed in the Window menu as documents, but you may put commands to show or hide all utility windows in the Window menu.

But the example given includes a regular Finder Info window:

However, Finder Info windows do not float or hide when inactive, and they do appear in the Window menu. The guidelines go on to say:

A user would never need to minimize a utility window because it is displayed only when needed and disappears when its application is inactive. Therefore, the minimize button is always unavailable.

I was actually looking at the HIG to see if it had anything to say about the new “Unified title/toolbar look” option in Tiger, but I couldn’t find anything.

iCab 3.0 Beta 280

iCab 3 is now available as a public beta.