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October 10, 2003
ramping up for panther...or not?
Apple and their practices with their developers excite me one day and confuse and annoy me the next. The seed process and development of Panther over the past few months has been no secret. The fact that Apple seeded developers pretty much weekly was published all over the net. In fact, I found myself checking various rumor sites to find when the new builds were available. They had the latest seed information minutes after Apple made them available and it was easier than logging into my ADC account and checking there. I loved having the weekly seeds even though I ended up only installing about every other one since they were so frequent. I can imagine for many developers it helped them a lot in their product development and panther compatibility updates. This has been a good thing for both parties...up until recently. Now I feel more like we were used as a massive testing pool for Apple to leverage and then cast off when they got what they wanted. Here we are, 14 days away from "Panther Night", and developers who pay a very healthy sum of money to Apple are left using an relatively older build of Panther. Now that it is crunch time, I guess we're supposed to develop and test our products using a pre-release build and then hope nothing has changed when the final goes into consumers hands on the 24th. To be somewhat realistic and fair, in all likelihood nothing major has or will change that affects most developers. But it's the principle of the thing. I didn't pay Apple to be a beta tester. I paid for a service that would enhance my ability to produce our products and run our business, and it seems like we're getting the shaft when it counts. We would like to have our products ready for the release date. We would like to ensure, to the best of our ability, that they work with the version consumers will install. But in the current scenario we don't get that option and it annoys me to no end. I can imagine various reasons for Apple doing this, and most of them make some sense for Apple, but that's just it, they make sense for Apple, not the developer community. I imagine Apple's thinking could be something like this: "If we release the final Panther to developers, then it will go out all over the net early thus hurting our sales." My response: "Too bad suckers. It's already out there anyway. We paid for special treatment, now give me my final version of Panther!" UPDATE: I am now downloading a newer version of Panther from ADC. Many thanks to the powers that be at ADC for 10 days advance access. I would have hoped for more, but I'll go with the glass is half full view and not cry over what is history now. :)   Posted by brian at October 10, 2003 01:06 PMTrackback Pings: TrackBack URL for this entry: Listed below are links to weblogs that reference ramping up for panther...or not?: Pan-Thor! from The Brad Hole Tracked on October 11, 2003 2:56 AM Panther Beta Program from Michael Tsai's Weblog Tracked on October 12, 2003 11:18 AM Related:
Comments
i read that 7B85 is the GM... therefore you should already have the final build Posted by: john on October 10, 2003 1:41 PM7B85 was released to INTERNAL testers at Apple. The last release to developers was 7B74. So, unless developers obtained 7B85 from un-official sources, they do NOT have the alleged GM... Posted by: JustMe on October 10, 2003 2:00 PMI also loved having the Panther weekly releases.
Agreed. In the meantime, it's not like these unofficial sources are all that hidden. ;) Posted by: Joshua on October 10, 2003 3:04 PMNo one outside of internal Apple sources got anything after 7B74. Not Developers via ADC nor customer quality via AppleSeed. No body seems to have a clue as to why, but someone internally decided that it was time and put it out for the greater pirate army because not only is it out in the wild, but widely available - after all everyone that *wasn't* supposed to get it seems to have gotten it. *ARGH*. That said, I fear it may have been Apple acting on it's threats - for the last few seeds the seed note have mentioned that if the leaks continued, the seed program would be shut down. So they may have decided to mole hunt the last few builds of Panther. Too bad they don't seem to have found their mole. It'd be nice if we could get our build now that they have found that it's not ADC or AppleSeed leaking. Dammit, why couldn't we have heard more from Apple and less from the rumor sites... Posted by: Rincewind on October 10, 2003 7:48 PMI am also an Apple developer. I agree completely with your post. Not only did I install every build but I also identified a number of bugs. I tested each build on three different Macs in several different environments. I'm sure that the work I did with the builds made the product more robust. How does Apple thank me for my efforts? By making sure I can't get the final build! Sheesh. I follow all Apple's rules. I never leak information. I won't install from a "shady" download. Pre-release builds of the OS are part of what we pay for to be "Premier" developers. Should we all get $1000 back because Apple doesn't deliver on the agreement? Posted by: Bryan Schappel on October 10, 2003 9:16 PMFor what it's worth, thanks for all the hard work and beta testing. Posted by: Daniel on October 10, 2003 11:28 PMYou should release the betas for APE and WindowShade. That'll show 'em! (OK, I'm a greedy bastard....) Posted by: Pope Zaphod on October 11, 2003 1:44 PMto be honest, apple isnt asking you to beta test. the very fact that you are doing so is a moot point. they have pools of testers to break and fix the OS internally, my brother and five or so of my friends are the people that do that. I on the other hand have nothing to do with the OS so i didnt know that Panther had GMed till i read it online, much how brian finds his build status, Sure i have a copy of **85, but it wasnt till i bothered my brother to no end that my original developer copy i got from him was so out of date. and for that comment on how it will hurt their sales, i know atleast 50 people that have the GM release taken from online, but they are still planning on going into the stores and paying the 130 for the box, I for one am placing my online order for the upgrade thingy, since i just bought my new computer and all. Posted by: lloyd nicon on October 11, 2003 2:20 PMYou paid for special treatment... and you got it! You got weekly developer builds of Panther. So what if you don't get the GM build for free. You _got_ special treatment. So what if others could download the seeds for free. You didn't have to worry that there was a trojan or virus in your downloads. Quit Yer Bitching Posted by: Special Treatment on October 11, 2003 2:31 PMWe aren't complaining because we want it "free". We will eventually get it; we pay Apple $3500 a year for that "special treatment". What we are complaining about is that Apple wants us to have products ready to roll when Panther ships. We want to do that but because we don't have the final build we can't. It's a catch-22. FWIW, Apple does ask us to beta test. The beginning of every seednote has a a list of features and services Apple wants developers to test against. Apple wants us to log all bugs in their database. This is exactly as it should be. The developer community and Apple have to work together to make OS X the best it can be. At the end of the day we all want the same thing -- happy customers. If you think that Apple can find and fix all of the bugs in the OS alone you are nuts. Apple can not possibly put enough machines together in every possible configuration and test everything. I don't want to speak for Unsanity, and I can't, but I bet that if they had the GM of Panther that their products would be in beta by now. Posted by: Bryan Schappel on October 11, 2003 5:53 PMBasically just "ditto" on Bryan's post. :) Maybe he should speak for me/us. ;) P.S. I still love Apple. I see nothing wrong with pointing out ways that they could improve though....imho of course. Posted by: Brian on October 12, 2003 1:56 AMThere may be a pool of testers at Apple, but unless they are working all of the system apis in every imaginable circumstance imaginable, then they can't come close to testing as much as what the developer community can. Just take a look at the wide range of applications out there and you will see all manner of combinations of system functionality that you would have never imagined. That is what developers bring to the testing pool. Posted by: Rincewind on October 12, 2003 8:26 AMBrian, would you discuss briefly why it is so difficult to convince you guys to release beta version to people that would like to try/test them? Thanks PS: I know there is a (phantomatic) beta-tester email list. But from a lot of comments in the blog it seems impossible to get on it. Posted by: Giulio on October 12, 2003 10:02 AMGiulio: I would say the primary reason is that people simply do not understand what the term beta means. The term beta means that LabelsX may well crash your Finder every thirty seconds if you're copying a file, etc. While I'm sure Unsanity would love more feedback on their betas, the threat that people would not understand it is beta and would write reviews / generate bad publicity is too great. The nature of haxies is such that it's not the same as normal software. Posted by: Steven Canfield on October 12, 2003 11:27 AMSteven, I agree with you IF the betas would be released to the general public, as a developer myself of a quite widely used freeware I understand that problem. But it seems to me that making betas available to people that specifically ask for them and that seems to be aware of the risks in running them should not be a problem. I myself have been using and testing at least two shareware hacks (which I paid for) that developers have provided me when I wrote them and ask for them. To be honest with you I'm sort of upset that I have registered and paid for 4 haxies which I have not been able to use for the past three months, simply because the old APE does not work with Panther, BUT there is one that does which has not been made avilable to users. I think that people that are willing to try (and have access to legally obtained) copies of Panther are aware of the risks of running beta software. Sorry for being so long, Giulio Posted by: Giulio on October 12, 2003 12:23 PMAs far as I can see, Apple is just trying to prevent the developers from claiming Panther compatibility. Sure, stuff may work on 7B74, but wouldn't it be nice to know that it works on 85? And if you have a bug in the OS that you're working around, wouldn't it be nice to know if your workaround is still necessary? Stupid Apple. Give me my seed. I honestly don't give a crap about testing their OS for them; if they paid me I would be happy to break it for them. I care about testing compatibility with my programs, and Apple ought to care too. Posted by: chandler on October 13, 2003 10:47 AMI too pay $3500/year and am confused and distrubed I had to use BitTorrent to download 7B85. Interestingly enough the decision for Apple not to put it on ADC appears to have been a last minute decision. Last Thursday 7B85 CDs 1-3 and XCode html was posted to the developer site. I tried to download the CD segments but the appropriate directory structure didn't appear to be there for file download. I did take a screenshot of the ADC site with the full 7B85 download information in full view. The html was pulled a few minutes later. I suspect Apple may have been doing a test run and I just caught it at the right moment. In the past they have made it available prior to the release date, however, it's typically only been a week or so early. Posted by: Joe on October 13, 2003 12:43 PMlast year jaguar gm was posted 23 days before the release. Posted by: Rosyna on October 14, 2003 12:10 AMApple just posted it today on ADC. Click on the Mac OS X area, it hasn't even made it to the what's new page. Woot! XCode 7B85 as well... Posted by: Joe on October 14, 2003 10:57 AM>That said, I fear it may have been Apple acting on it's threats - for the last few seeds the seed note have mentioned that if the leaks continued, the seed program would be shut down. Apple also did this with their Safari seeding program. Every seeded beta was leaked, so one day everyone got an email saying Apple stopped the program. I do agree that it's a bit strange to be only a few weeks away from release and not have newer betas, though. Posted by: Chris on October 14, 2003 11:39 AMKeep comments on topic. If a comment is unrelated to this post, it may be removed or moderated. |