Slapdash

Mac OS X Developer Previews

Mac OS X Developer Previews

My working setup for DP 2 thru 4:

  • Power Macintosh G3 Tower (Blue & White)

  • RAM: ???

  • First release: Developer Preview 1, May 10, 1999

  • Final preview release: DP 4, May 15, 2000

  • Public Beta: Sep 13, 2000

  • Full Release: Mac OS X 10.0, Mar 24, 2001

Mac OS X represented a shift in the Rhapsody strategy to address developers’ concerns about the effort of rewriting applications to take advantage of the new OS’s features. It provided three ways to run applications:

  • Classic, which ran unchanged classic Mac OS applications in their own windows,
  • Carbon, which allowed developers to recompile their classic applications against a new API implementation to get many of the benefits of OS X with minimal changes, and
  • Cocoa, the API to natively build new Mac OS X applications.

Before the public launch of Mac OS X, it was released to developers in a series of Developer Previews. Each of the four preview releases had significant changes

Developer Beta 1

  • Note: I could not get the installer running

Developer Beta 2

  • Contemporary Review by John Siracusa
  • Distinguishing features
    • Last release with the Platinum UI, like Rhapsody and OS X Server

Developer Beta 3

  • Contemporary Review by John Siracusa
  • Distinguishing features
    • Introduction of Aqua user interface
    • Closest to what Steve Jobs demoed in the introduction of Aqua
    • App icons in the dock fill a full square instead of having arbitrary shapes with translucent backgrounds, similar to the NeXTSTEP dock

Developer Beta 4

  • Distinguising features
    • First to have dock with app icons with arbitrary shapes and translucent backgrounds

Resources