Apple released a sneak preview of Mac OS X v10.4 Tiger (what a lame name) today at their World Wide Developers Conference in San Francisco.

I have mixed feelings about some of the features, not because I don’t think they aren’t cool, but because it looks to put small 3rd-party Mac developers out of business.

Safari will contain a built-in RSS reader which looks to widen the RSS audience but at the same time force NetNewsWire and PulpFiction out of the market.

Dashboard looks cool; did Apple buy Konfabulator? Dashboard is a complete and utter rip-off of Konfabulator.

The changes to iChat AV look very exciting. It sports a new, very cool 3d interface for group video conferences. To bad there isn’t a way to use the power of the video conferencing abilities of this app as a 3rd-party developer. Imagine the possibilities for real-time streaming performances and etc which would be open to net artists…

There was a bunch of other stuff too, check it out.

update:
WHOOPS. I missed some fairly big news. The server edition of 10.4 comes with a Weblog server “based on the popular open source project ‘Blojsom.’” Blojsom is written in Java but is based on Perl-powered Blosxom which this web site is built with.

update deux:
Looks like Apple didn’t buy Konfabulator, it’s developer calls Apple’s Dashboard ‘insulting’ (link to C-Net, which is notoriously anti-Apple). permanent link to this post