Mac OS X 10.4 Tiger

Mac OS X version 10.4 Tiger, is a scheduled next major upgrade to Mac OS X for Apple's Macintosh computers, due for release in early 2005.

Apple CEO Steve Jobs previewed Tiger in his keynote speech at the Worldwide Developers Conference on June 28th, 2004. The previewed features include:

• Spotlight, a powerful full-text and meta-data search feature built right into the menu bar which can search everything from files to iCal calendars, as well as any text within a PDF file.
• iChat AV that supports up to 4 in a video conference and 10 in an audio conference.
• Reader for RSS and Atom web syndication feeds built into the Safari web browser.
• A new mini-applications layer based on HTML, Cascading Style Sheets, and Javascript called Dashboard, which returns desk accessories to the OS, and has been widely compared to Konfabulator, a third party product.
• A scripting tool called Automator which uses Applescript to link applications together to form complex automated workflows.
• VoiceOver, a spoken interface allowing the OS to read from the screen, and to permit operation of the OS by voice command.
• Improved .Mac syncing features
• An upgraded kernel with optimized kernel resource locking, support for 64-bit memory pointers and access control lists.
• Xcode 2.0, including visual modeling, an integrated apple reference library and a graphical debug remote.
• Full 64-bit architecture, with backward support for 32-bit programs.
• A system-wide metadata indexing engine, which automatically takes all file metadata and puts it into an index.
• A new graphics processing API, Core Image, leveraging the power of the available accelerated graphics cards.
• Quicktime support for H.264/AVC which offers better quality and scalability than other video technologies.

Tiger is said to possess features to make the Mac OS competitive to the also long-rumored Microsoft Windows project Longhorn. Apple made fun of this at the WWDC persentation, with large posters with slogans such as "Introducing Longhorn", "Redmond, start your photocopiers", "Redmond, we have a problem", and "This should keep Redmond busy".

The day before the official introduction of Tiger, screenshots of it had been leaked to the Internet, showing features like Spotlight and Dashboard. Due to the leaker's lack of credibility they were considered fake by most, but later proved to be correct.

Other recent Mac OS development code names have been Jaguar and Panther.