All posts from Daring Fireball

Mac OS X 10.6 Snow Leopard has been out for a little over three weeks now. I’ve gone through the Google Analytics stats for Daring Fireball to see how quickly DF readers are switching to it, comparing 10.6 Snow Leopard’s percentage against 10.5 Leopard’s.

A few notes:

The numbers come from Google Analytics, and I’ve chosen to measure “visitors” (rather than, say, page views), because I think it correlates the closest to individual readers.
The percentages are based on total Mac users, not total DF readers. Over the period in question, Mac users account for 77.5 percent of the total visitors to Daring Fireball; Windows clocks in at 12.8 percent1 and iPhone OS at 7.5.
I’m only charting Intel 10.5 users against Intel 10.6 users. PowerPC 10.5 users account for about 4.5 percent of DF-reading Mac users, but they cannot upgrade to Snow Leopard without buying a new Intel-based Mac. Feel free to add 5 percent to the 10.5 Leopard numbers to get a sense of how many 10.5 users there are, regardless of architecture.
Throughout July, Snow Leopard’s numbers were already running at around 5 percent on a daily basis, and they slowly inched upward throughout August. By 27 August, the day before Snow Leopard went on sale, that number had grown to 11.2 percent. Even knowing how many developers read DF, that surprised me.

Important Caveat: Daring Fireball readers are, without question, not representative of Mac users in general. Draw from these numbers what you will, but do not assume they represent Mac users in general.

Snow Leopard Adoption by Mac-Using DF Visitors

(Raw numbers.)

So it took about five days for 10.6 to pass 10.5. I made similar comparisons in 2005 and 2003 when, respectively, Mac OS X 10.4 Tiger and 10.3 Panther shipped. These Snow Leopard numbers compare pretty well, but it’s worth noting that both the number of Mac users and number of DF readers have grown significantly since then.

Among all Windows-using DF visitors, XP accounts for 71.2%, Vista 17.3%, and NT 9%. Alas, Google Analytics does not break down iPhone OS users by version number. ↩

Regarding yesterday’s piece on how Mac apps should be distributed to users, a bunch of readers emailed or tweeted to point out two exemplary apps: Delicious Library and Potion Factory’s The Hit List.

Delicious Library ships on a disk image, and if you try to launch the app directly from the image, the app detects what you’ve done and asks if you’d like it to install itself in your Applications folder. The Hit List ships in a zip archive, and does the same thing if it detects that it’s been launched from a folder other than Applications.

Potion Factory’s Andy Kim has a good write-up here regarding how he came to this clever design.

Update: JNSoftware’s Dialectic does something similar.

 ? 

It’s Only Rock and Roll Event Prelude

The word is that Apple’s “secrecy machine” has been kicked back into high gear ever since you-know-who returned from you-know-what. Anecdotal evidence backs that up: I’ve heard very little about tomorrow’s “It’s Only Rock and Roll” event.

What I do know is what everyone knows: there are going to be new iPods. Everyone knows this because there’ve been new iPods announced at special music events just like this one every September since 2001.

The most important iPod, the Touch, is getting a camera, and I believe will match the iPhone 3GS on processor speed and RAM. Three sizes: 16/32/64 GB for $199/299/399. iPhone OS is the future of the “iPod” brand. The Nano is getting a camera. The Classic isn’t going away just yet — I think they’ll bump the capacity from 120 to 160 GB and keep the price at $249.

That’s about it for the sure thing bets. There’s a lot more I’m interested in, though.

The Nano — I’ve heard two not-good-enough-to-bet-on but worth-mentioning rumors. First, that Apple has developed some sort of top-secret new material / treatment for the Nano shell. No idea what it is, if true. Second, that the Nano is getting an FM tuner. That sounds slightly odd to me, insofar as the iPod’s lack of an FM tuner was a frequent complaint years ago, but seems like something no one complains about anymore. But why not, right?

The Shuffle — My gut feeling is that the current no-button Shuffle has been a dud sales-wise, and at best has been a disappointment. Notice anything weird on the current Apple Store page for the iPod Shuffle? Apple still sells the old previous generation Shuffle. And they’re not just selling off old stock — they’re still making new ones. It’s hard to see how the continuing demand for the old Shuffle isn’t an indictment of the new Shuffle’s design. So I’m thinking Apple will announce a brand-new design — maybe even with a button.

Steve Jobs — I hope he’s up on stage doing his thing, but my gut still says no, that he’s done as the company’s spokesman. If he’s not there, how much of the press coverage will revolve around speculation as to why he isn’t? Or, what if he is there, but looks just as gaunt as he did a year ago? It’s going to be one or the other, folks.

iTunes 9 — The rumors and leaks regarding iTunes 9 have revolved around purported social networking features. What I’m interested in is more esoteric: is the Mac version still a 32-bit Carbon app? Common sense says yes, but that’s because common sense says it’s never a good time for a low-level framework rewrite. But the writing is on the wall: the future is 64-bit, and the only path to 64-bit is Cocoa, so eventually, it has to happen.

What makes iTunes such an odd duck for Apple is that it’s not just a Mac app — there are far more iTunes users on Windows, and but there is no 64-bit Cocoa runtime for Windows. So here’s my pet theory: at some point iTunes will be rewritten using WebKit to render the UI. I’m not saying iTunes will become a web browser — just that the UI itself will be a WebKit view. WebKit is cross-platform and built for the future.

Cocktail — And speaking of WebKit, there’s Cocktail, the much-rumored new multimedia “album” format that Apple is expected to debut tomorrow. The idea is to create a new “collection” format that is more than just a collection of songs. What platform could this be based on that would support playback on Mac OS X, Windows, iPhone OS, Apple TV (with a software update), and even, say, a new tablet platform scheduled for early 2010? Oh, and it would help if it were based on technologies like HTML, CSS, and JavaScript that developers are already familiar with.

Obviously: WebKit.

So my guess is that Cocktail is going to be like a sort of next-generation Dashboard.