TUAW has an interesting piece, where they report about the rumor, that Apple is planning to release an early 10.6 seed at WWDC. The seed is said to contain mostly security and stability features and is slated for release in December. 

Personally, I think that this behaviour could upset quite some people, as it would be just one year after Leopard, and therefore people’d need to shell out the usual $150 once again. Especially if there’re only security and stability features, one could wonder why those wouldn’t be delivered by the standard 10.5.x service pack mechanism.

That’s why I’d guess that, if there’s really 10.6 coming, it will contain some exciting new features. On the one hand I could think about a better iPhone integration – maybe even multitouch-compatibility for Cocoa. On the other hand, and this is where I’m really confident, I guess that resolution independence will make it in. We’ve had resolution independence in Mac OS X since 10.4 now, by means of a hidden preference which could activate it for specific applications, so one could debug applications against it. This feature wasn’t made for the casual user though, as it was buggy and lacked features. With Leopard, however, resolution independence already looked quite good – so I guess an enhanced version, as well as new hardware (think MacBook Pro 150dpi) could very well be in the domain of possibilities.

I’ll be attending WWDC this year, so I’m all in all pretty excited about this.

The WebKit developers just announced SquirrelFish, a new JavaScript engine for Safari (et others). To quote the developers: “SquirrelFish is a register-based, direct-threaded, high-level bytecode engine, with a sliding register window calling convention. It lazily generates bytecodes from a syntax tree, using a simple one-pass compiler with built-in copy propagation.”

So instead of building and parsing a syntax-tree, like other Javascript-Engines do, SquirrelFish builds executable bytecode. You can find the new engine in the nightly builds. Good chance to play around with it and see how it performs with Javascript-heavy applications. I just rolled a test against our primary product at work, a big and extensive javascript layout application. One could really “feel” the speed differences.

If you’re in the market for a easy-to-use website creation software, you should head over to TUAW, as they’ve post a review of the new RapidWeaver 4. I’ve had version 3 courtesy of MacHeist 1 and liked it alot. Judging by the review over at TUAW, RapidWeaver 4 seems to be a great enhancement to a already incredible software.

For the past months, Peter Bright, a former Win32 Programmer, has given a in-depth overview to the perspective of being a developer for Win32 and for Cocoa. Part one in the series described how misfortune and adversity left Apple with a new OS platform free of legacy constraints; part two discussed how Microsoft had failed to do the same, choosing instead to hobble its new OS with way too much legacy baggage. Now in the third part, Peter exposes in detail what Apple has done with its platform to make it so appealing.

The series is a very interesting read, even if you’re not into Cocoa development, as it explains just why Mac OS X offers so many advances to a normal Developer – especially compared to Win32. If you haven’t read the other parts yet, it’d be wise to start at the beginning before you start to read part three.