So, if they are saying that we are going to see the final product on June 11th, then why the hell haven't we seen any builds. The next build that comes out better have a ton of improvements!

Look at this Trac entry.

Read in the green part: "We need to revisit this after Leopard ships".

So, they can't change lauchd besides bugfixes... And this is probably because Leopard is near the RC and the trunk is already freezed.

Maybe we'll see a build this week and maybe one final RC during May.

What builds? The only purpose of the betas that Apple sends out is for developers to support Leopard in their applications. All they need are the core foundations of Leopard, such as Core Animation, etc., and no "secret features". 3 months is plenty of time for Apple to finalize Leopard.

Most likely, we will be getting a new Leopard seed either on or about the 15th of this month.

The point is that Apple has committed to an event at the National Association of Broadcasters Confrence this year. There, it is highly probable that they will be announcing the new Final Cut Studio with a probable release date with Leopard.

FCS is certain to include CoreAnimation support to make their rendering faster.

Huh? Could you elaborate how CoreAnimation, of all things, could increase render performance?

How about compositing multiple layers together in real time with full anti-aliasing and highspeed video conversion through writebacks from the graphics card memory and offscreen buffers?

would it make any difference with the GMA950? I'm not talking about running Quake 4 with all the graphics options on full or anything stupid - I mean normal day-to-day tasks as you just described Adrian.

You'd need a far superior layer than Core Animation for that, one with specifically crafted modules direct GPU specific execution. Otherwise, performance gains would be negligable.

I agree. Core Animation has no functionality to render to a offline texture and even if it had that (internally), reading data back from the GPU is still a major bottleneck that would negate any performance gained.

well hopefully something happens the 15th....