From a rock-solid, developer-friendly UNIX foundation to grid computing, powerful technologies drive Mac OS X Tiger to its leadership role as the world’s most advanced operating system.

UNIX-based

Beneath the easy-to-use interface and rich graphics of Mac OS X lies Darwin, an open source, UNIX-based foundation built on such technologies as mach and FreeBSD. With Tiger come significant enhancements to this UNIX foundation, including improvements to dual-processor support for increased performance when reading and writing files to disk and when using Mac OS X with NFS file servers.

UNIX users will feel right at home because Mac OS X offers a complete X Window System implementation for running X11-based applications. Fully integrated with the OS, X11 for Mac OS X, based on the open source XFree86 project, gives UNIX users the ability to run thousands of X11 applications concurrently with other Mac OS X applications.

64-bit Power

With the release of Mac OS X Tiger, Apple delivers the astounding power of 64-bit computing to the Mac. You can now build and run a new generation of 64-bit applications that address up to four billion times as much memory as 32-bit applications, without compromising the performance of your existing 32-bit applications.

Tiger gives you the tools you need to develop 64-bit apps. Called Xcode, this set of 64-bit-ready development tools lets you take full advantage of Tiger’s enhanced 64-bit capabilities right out of the box.

Distributed Computing Made Easy

Turn a group of Macs into a single supercomputer easily with Xgrid. Integrated with Tiger, this distributed processing technology lets you swiftly configure multiple computers to work together to solve complex problems much faster than any single machine. Xgrid even operates in screen saver mode, so your Mac can crunch data set around the clock, even when you’re not around.

Java

Recognizing that Java has become the de-facto standard language for developing cross-platform applications, Apple has made Java a core-component of Mac OS X, which includes the full version Java 2, Standard Edition, version 1.4.2. Since Apple has optimized Java on Mac OS X, Java applications act as first-class citizens on Mac OS X.

Core Image

Mac OS X Tiger introduces a breakthrough image-processing technology known as Core Image that allows developers to harness the power of today’s advanced video cards. Until now, taking full advantage of the graphics processing units in these cards required in-depth knowledge of pixel-level programming. With Core Image, you can express effects and transitions with a just few lines of code. Core Image handles the rest, optimizing the path to the GPU. The result is real-time, interactive responsiveness as you select and apply filters.

Crystal-clear Video

Tiger also features QuickTime 7 with H.264, the industry-standard, ultra-efficient, fully scalable video codec that delivers pristine video quality at remarkably low data rates for everything from 3G for mobile phones to high definition DVD. Since H.264 is built into the QuickTime architecture in Tiger, QuickTime-based applications like iChat AV and Final Cut Pro HD also take full advantage of this advanced video codec.