Upcoming 10.4.8 to bring "significant" Rosetta enhancements

We have already seen one report covering what's on the menu in an upcoming 10.4.8 update, and this new one should be great news for all the science nerds and Adobe suite users out there who are stuck running PowerPC apps on Intel Macs: AppleInsider is reporting that Apple has seeded a new build, and in addition to testing the components we already knew about, Apple also specified that developers should get rough with Rosetta when testing their scientific apps, as Tiger's PowerPC emulation environment has seen "significant performance enhancements." I personally hope this is true, as Photoshop and After Effects still run like dogs on my MacBook Pro, even with 2GB RAM.

Also on the menu is a bit of a quirky detail about two pieces of software that apparently aren't playing well together: Apple warns that running Cisco VPN and Parallels Desktop, at least on their latest 10.4.8 builds, can make Mac OS X fall down and go boom (read: kernel panic). There is no word on whether this will be fixed by the time 10.4.8 is released into the wild.

A final piece of good news from this AI piece is a general ETA for this release, which could land "before the end of the calendar year." Stay tuned.