Sure, Tiger - the latest release of Apple's Mac OS X - has a huge array of new features. Sure, the Spotlight search features alone are compelling enough to make you want to upgrade. Automator enables workflow and user-level scripting. And Dashboard is a whole new dimension in desktop widgets.
But for all the 200 new features and usability enhancements, that's not what the secret sauce is all about.
Because the killer feature of Tiger is that all of this technology is in the hands of developers. It didn't really click at first, because I was so focused on the new features as a user. For example, in my research I have a huge collection of PDF files. For years I have been waiting for a useable full-text searching facility, to no avail. But now Tiger has it built in, and I can't imagine going back now I have it. (It's a bit like the transition from using a dial-up modem to having broadband at home.)
But now that the dust has settled, I see things from a slightly different perspective. And it is obvious now that Tiger provides by far the richest development platform available today, bar none. Because virtually everything cool Apple have done in userspace, they have exposed to developers.
CoreImage gives me a GPU-accelerated image processing architecture. CoreData gives me object persistence with no drudgery. Dashboard lets me easily write widgets in HTML+JavaScript. I can easily add my own file formats to Spotlight for indexing. I can write Automator plugins. And QuickTime is the most sophisticated multimedia framework available (even though most people think it's just a media player). And the list goes on.
And in many places, Apple have used published standards (eg. H.264 for video, OpenGL shading language for CoreImage kernels) and open source technology (eg. Jabber for instant messaging, SQLite for database). There are many more examples of this.
So as a developer, I look at OS X and positively salivate at the potential of such a rich platform. I don't care if another platform has a monopoly-sized market share, as there is less competition and there is abundant fertile ground on the Mac for true innovation.
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