MacOS X State of the Union

Last night I watched the OSX State of the Union presentation (on the ADC iTunes) from MacWorld. Nothing really new, but it was a good watch as per usual.

* 64 bit to framework level in leopard
o nothing new there

* multicore
o OS frameworks higly threaded with fine grained locking
o cpu and i/o prioritisation support
o new NSOperation and NSOperationQueue to provide OS support for simple concurrent processing

* memory management
o garbage collection added to the ObjC runtime - hooray! (although hardly breaking news)
+ garbage collection is opt in (at the application level)
+ all objects collected
+ release method is a noop!
+ not mark and sweep - generational, which makes use of the fact that new objects are more likely to be able to quickly be released than old long running objects

* graphics
o the buzzword is "cinematic experiences"
o core animation looks pretty damn cool - it's even integrated with the new cocoa widgets
o resoloution independant user interfaces by 2008 - hooray, just like X11 in 1988 ;)

* developer tools
o the new interface builder is also very cool :)

Update: Gah - now I realise why this doesn't sound new, because it's from August 2006 I assumed it was from Macworld, but it turns out that I just got an email because Apple decided to release it to all ADC members. At least they did I guess.