On Monday, Apple gave developer’s a early preview of the next version of OSX

This one, code named ‘Tiger’ is not due for release until the first part of next year. Apple was laying down the smack talk from the beginning, with banners floating around the conference that had pictures of the OSX install DVD, and captions like “Introducing Longhorn” “Redmond: Start your photocopiers” and others also poking fun at M$ for copying so much of OSX into each successive version of Winbloze. While most of the new features in Tiger (there’s 150 in all) are covered by the developer’s NDA, people who know where to look can find copies of the developer’s preview online.

My favorite announced features are in Safari. There is going to be an RSS reader – which is cool because you don’t have to launch a separate news reader to catch up on all your favorite feeds. – This is why I really never got into the whole RSS thing… It didn’t make sense for me to open one app, read the ‘headlines’ if you will, and then have to open the site in my web browser anyway if I want to read the whole article. Now I can do it all from the same browser, and I think that’ll make it more popular (at least with me). The other new Safari feature, is ‘private browsing’ Safari now has a ‘private’ mode that doesn’t leave any site’s your visiting in your history so it covers your tracks….

The feature everyone is talking about is Dashboard. Most of the reaction is good. But, some people, including the creator of Konfabulator, are claiming that Apple stole the Dashboard idea from Konfabulator. These people are conveniently forgetting that Konfabulator itself is just a hack of the original Apple Desktop Accessories from Way back when (like 1984 or 85 IIRC)…. so, to all you ‘Apple is Evil, they stole from Konfabulator” people – GET OVER IT – Arlo didn’t write anything new… his “idea” was a re-hash of something Apple had over a decade ago!

The update gnomes at Apple have been busy this week…. Airport Express, New G5s, a new version of iTunes…

Between what’s been announced this week, and the big music event in London next week (rumored to be the release of iTunes Music store for Europe). Steve isn’t going to have anything to talk about at WWDC except for Tiger (10.4)!

G5s are now dual processors across the board…with the top end being a liquid cooled Dual 2.5 Ghz system… Still can’t afford them..but damn.. I want one.. can’t wait to play with the 2.5s..and see how the liquid cooling was implemented..the picture about it on Apple’s website doesn’t really show where in the system it is (I would assume that its now inbetween the front fans and the CPUs..or its part of the heatsink assembly).. It also doesn’t mention if there is an extra pump to keep the liquid moving or not… oh well.. still an amazing update.

Airport Express is a wireless access point (802.11g) that fits in the palm of your hand. It provides wi-fi support for up to 10 users, sharing of a USB printer, can be used to extend your existing Airport network, oh yea.. it also has an analog and digital audio output so you can stream your iTunes music wirelessly to your home stereo…all for the low low price of only $129.00

iTunes 4.6 is going to be released sometime this week… from what I’ve read in Apple’s announcement of it, it primarily just adds support for AirTunes (the tech to wirelessly stream to the Airport Express), common sense also dictates that 4.6 would be the iTunes version that includes support for the iTMS Europe (If its really getting released next week).

if this is the pre-show announcements…. WWDC ought to either have some REALLY good surprises, or there will be no hardware announcements, and it will be all about Tiger.