Appletell

Former Apple Senior Software Engineer Scott Kovatch, now Adobe’s Senior Computer Scientist, announced Tuesday at WWDC that he will be heading up a project within Adobe to help port Java SWT from Carbon to a Cocoa interface. Although work on the project has already started, Kovatch sated he will not join the group full time until mid-august. 

The Standard Widget Toolkit is a tool used to give Java applications native GUI for each supported platform. The Mac OS X version was written back when Carbon had a slight performance advantage over Cocoa, but that has changed, and support for 64-bit Carbon has been dropped entirely. In addition, according to this Mac OS X report, after 10.6 or 7, Mac OS will be entirely written in Cocoa Touch.

The Cocoa port of Java SWT is anticipated to be ready for the release of Eclipse 3.5 sometime in 2009, but nothing is official as of yet.

Via [Infinite Loop]

Despite the screenshots we saw yesterday showing Universal applications running under the purported Mac OS X 10.6, LogicielMac today surfaced a screenshot of the 10.6 developer build’s accompanying PDF, which shows support for Intel only.

Keeping in mind that this is just a developer build and it is still far from finished, the Intel-only stipulation does make sense. No new consumer features are being added in, so people with 10.5 won’t be missing out on any new iChat effects (God forbid!) and it really makes no sense to continue optimization on a platform that has been dead for years. I think of 10.6 as an Intel-optimized 10.5, with new underlying technologies that wouldn’t have had any application on the single and at most dual-processor PowerPC machines. This will pave the way for Mac OS Touch, which, while having a new naming scheme, will have the same underlying components from OS X. Carbon, however, will be gone, as the UI will be based on Cocoa Touch.

For those who doubt me, just check this article...the night before the internet erupted about Snow Leopard.

Mac OS X 10.6 will be the last iteration of OS X if Apple has a good plan. Its crowning feature will likely be resolution independence, but, other than that, there won’t be many new features, just improvements.

Which reminds me...why didn’t they talk about resolution independence in OS X 10.6? Do they really have it up their sleeve to get it done by Leopard? Sound off in the comments.

Orchard Spy has released a few screenshots of Mac OS X 10.6 Snow Leopard, and while they look the same as Leopard, (Leopard looked like Tiger once, too) they do tell us some preliminary things about the new OS, and we’ll tell you after the break.

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Mac OS X 10.6 is Snow Leopard. While only mentioned once at the WWDC keynote, it was enough to let us make some very safe assumptions. Snow Leopard, as evidenced by its name, is a bigger than usual incremental update. Here’s what I’m expecting.

• Snow Leopard will have some visual tweaks. The only way this isn’t happening is if it is free or very discounted. Apple will not be able to get many laymen to buy an OS that looks the same.
• It will remain under the hood, much the same as Leopard, with fixes and stability changes.
• If it is free, then it is entirely likely that is will be Intel only, and Intel-optimized version that fixes stability and other things without having to simulntaneaously code for PowerPC. It will signal that 10.7/Mac OS Touch will be a big release with no PowerPC support.
• It will contain no new end user features.
• It will not contain Carbon APIs, but Carbon apps will still run. This signals the death of Carbon in Mac OS Touch, with perhaps one last OS before Carbon goes away.

What do you think Snow Leopard will be? it’s still very much a mystery.

For those who are having a hard time organizing their life’s accumulation of receipts and documents in time for the filing of tax returns, Neat Receipts Advance Release for Mac may just be what you need. PC users who are more organized than us may find the Neat Receipts familiar as this is the same PC version ported into the Mac system.

Neat Receipts is a nifty way of getting rid of receipts and documents by scanning and organizing them on your Mac. And like we said, this is just an Advance Release for Mac, hence some of the features in the PC version are not yet completely available. Anyway Neat Receipts was developed using Apple’s programming environment Cocoa and as such Mac users will find the intuitive design of the Neat for Receipts familiar with other Mac applications. 

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