Ars Technica’s John Siracusa has posted his writeup on Tiger. I haven’t had time to read all of it yet, but the first half is an amazing piece of work. There’s a ton of content in there that is entirely new to me, like the writeup on launchd, Apple’s new open-source daemon-launching code. As usual, he goes to great lengths tracking down all of the metadata changes in Tiger, and for once he likes what he sees, although there’s still a lot of work left to do in 10.5. This is a really technical guide to what has changed under the hood in Tiger; it’s not a “the shortcut for doing Foo in the Finder changed; Apple Sucks” sort of write-up.

One thing that I’m wondering that I haven’t seen anyone address: if Apple is currently on a 18-month OS X release cycle, and 10.4 is out in April 2005, then the next release will be in October 2006, or slightly before Longhorn’s current release timeframe (“before Christmas 2006”). This should be fun.