10/19, 11:30am
Tech migrates to first non-Apple OS
Grand Central Dispatch, originally introduced with Mac OS X Snow Leopard, has been ported to its first third-party operating system, says the team behind FreeBSD. When it is released, FreeBSD 8.1 is expected to support Grand Central by default. The technology is said to have been harder to adapt than some other Unix-compatible frameworks, due to the need to make kernel modifications. Mac OS X blends elements of BSD and Mach.
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09/11, 3:05pm
Tech may encourage support
Apple has taken the decision to make Grand Central Dispatch, a key feature of Mac OS X Snow Leopard, available as an open-source project. Developers can now find the component's services API on the web. Grand Central is intended to simplify multi-core support in Mac OS X, which without an intermediate layer can be difficult to program for.
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12/09, 10:50am
Grand Central trademark
Working through the US Patent and Trademark Office, Apple has filed for a trademark on Grand Central, a technology expected to be used in Mac OS X Snow Leopard, due sometime next year. Not to be confused with Google's phone management system, the Apple technology is intended to aid developers in supporting multi-core processors, which can often be underexploited even in high-end software such as games and rendering tools.
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10/26, 12:05am
New Snow Leopard build
Apple's second build of Snow Leopard, which was released to developers earlier this weekend, brings a number of changes to the next version of the Mac OS X operating system, including a new "simplified" installation experience, preliminary support for HFS+ file system compression and 64-bit kernel, a rewritten Cocoa-based Finder for performance improvements, a new default gamma setting for viewing colors, and basic reading and editing support for Microsoft Exchange in Mail, iCal and Address Book. Apple also noted other multi-core enhancements and low-level kernel operating system changes, including those to queue management in Grand Central its technology for enabling developers to better leverage multi-core processors. The pre-release software, offered to developers for testing, is the second version made available, following the initial preview release at WWDC in June; the final version of operating system, designed for Intel-based Macs only, is expected to ship as Mac OS X 10.6 next year.
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