Due to a total lack of time on my end, we didn’t have a Week in Review last week, but now I’m back, ready to summarise the news of the past week. Obviously, the week was dominated by Apple’s WWDC and Microsoft’s announcement regarding Internet Explorer, but in between all that, we had a lot of news on alternative operating systems.
Let’s get the big news items out of the way first. Apple held its Worldwide Developers Conference this week, with its start marked by the usual keynote address. During this keynote, Apple announced a new iPhone model, but of course out interest goes towards Mac OS X 10.6 Snow Leopard and updated MacBooks.
Apple did not reveal anything about Snow Leopard we didn’t already know, but a few unclear things did become clear. PowerPC is no longer supported, and the release is completely 64bit. The biggest news, however, is its price: Snow Leopard will go for 29 USD for Leopard owners, and Apple advises Tiger owners to buy the iWork+iLife+Snow Leopard combipack coming in at 169 USD. Snow Leopard will be released in September, just like the server variant.
Apple also announced several updated MacBook Pro models, including a 13.3″ model. New features include SD card slots, fixed but very long-life friendly batteries, and better displays.
Moving on to later in the week, Microsoft dropped a bomb by announcing that in Europe, Internet Explorer will not ship as part of Windows 7. Instead, Retail copies will be browser-less, and OEMs will have to pick a browser to ship with their machines themselves. You’d expect Opera and the EU to be happy with this move, but as it turns out, they were not. Especially Opera’s position in all this divided many of you.
We also had lots of discussion on Mono this week. Not only did we discuss “Why Mono doesn’t suck“, but we also found out that Debian’s next release, Squeeze, will ship Mono as default alongside GNOME, as a dependency for Tomboy, the note-taking application. Many people – among which myself – wondered why a lighter, more portable, and less ‘patently-challenged’ variant wasn’t chosen. On top of that – why a note taking application at all?
It was a week full of alternative operating system news. We introduced RMoX, a GPL-licensed operating system written in occam-pi, QNX 6.4.1 got released, and the Codezero Microkernel version 0.1 made it out onto the web. We also talked about SkyOS, because Robert Szeleney is experimenting with the idea of using Linux or NetBSD as its base kernel.
In addition, Fedora 11 was released, as well as version 2.6.30 of the Linux kernel.
