That said, I don’t want to overstate my enthusiasm here. 64-bit performance on Linux and Windows yields significant, but not overwhelming, performance gains. I certainly would welcome full 64-bit support, since the CPUs are 64-bit and OS X certainly has the potential to be a fully 64-bit OS. But we’ll certainly want to see some specific benchmarks, and honestly, if Apple doesn’t deliver, I’m not going to cry over it. The issues with Windows x64 were that the developers weren’t fully onboard, and you have some people advocating it while others ignore it. I’ve got all the resources here to run it, but when it came down to only reaping benefits on SONAR and almost nothing else, I finally said, forget it. (And that’s not just audio, either; there’s a general lack of fully 64-bit software. But since the gain is only marginal compared to 32-bit, it’s not such a big deal.)

On the animation thing, it’s just not clear to me what’s in the developer tools and what isn’t. There are already ways of doing what Apple describes using Quartz, and even without Quartz you can do it by hand with OpenGL on any platform you like. It sounds as though they’re making these things easier from within Xcode, but given there’s some crossover with Quartz Composer here (OpenGL for 3D, images, and text) … more questions.

“Scene of layers.” I’m assuming this is the one which might have given people trouble. “Scene” in computer graphics literature refers to everything which is being rendered. So, in a videogame, the scene would be the level geometry, the character models, etc. plus all of the data to describe textures and special effect parameters. (for instance, some sort of particle system) Usually Scenes are stored as a list of scene elements in no particular order, or sometimes in a spatial hierarchy of some sort. (bounding volumes are common) I’m not exactly sure what they mean by layers here, since that’s not a common term. =/

The rest seems pretty straightforward. It supports “text, …” as different sorts of rendering, uses a keyframing system, and is automatic? (I assume this means it does the interpolation automatically)

Hmm… I see a bit more why it’s so confusing now, but hopefully that’s informative for someone out there. (Hope that wasn’t too pedantic for others)

Hmmm… smells like marketing. Sorry, if it’s not known that it works with everything, it’s not seamless… and as likely to be either (a) as much of a mess as the other side manage or (b) not living up to the “it’s 64-bit” marketing. Ah, the bye-gone days when video-game consoles reached the magic 64-bit stage, and how little that really meant.