With Apple, there’s always a bit of concern that new technologies won’t get back-ported to older versions of the OS. It’s a lega concern. Look at Apple’s track record, particularly when it comes to Safari. It’s been less than sterling. However, a feature from Apple’s Leopard developer preview has come to Tiger through the wonderful QuickTime 7.2.

The fun new functionality is all there after updating to 7.2, but there are no new header files (no public API yet). plus, the functionality is now used by QuickTime Player Pro. However, you probably won’t notice much of a change apart from a little progress indicator in the Recording section of the prefs when it’s scanning for cameras, and hopefully a performance improvement.

Since it’s in the wild, I can now talk freely about that cool new feature of QuickTime. All of that I learned simply by hunting around and looking at sample traces of a running video stream in the new version of QuickTime Player.

The programming masters at Ecamm go into much increasingly detail, but the upshot is that Apple has put some of Leopard into Tiger. While the lack of headers makes the API inaccessible for most, it’s still possible for those with the right headers to use it. Combine that with Safari 3.x, things are looking up for Tiger stalwarts. You may not be as left behind as you thought.

Original post by Derik DeLong