Slashdot Mirror
Mac OS X 10.4 "Tiger" Preview at WWDC
hype7 writes "Apple just announced that it will kick off WWDC 2004 with a preview of the next iteration of Apple's operating system, Mac OS X, in a Steve Jobs keynote. This version of Mac OS X, 10.4, has been code named 'Tiger.' As usual, Apple is being incredibly tight lipped about what's going to be added; there hasn't even been that much speculation of new features on the rumor sites. WWDC is scheduled to begin on the 28th of June."
...and here's why: After this last semester of dealing with linux and windows in the house, cheap x86 hardware, school, and work, I HAVE HAD IT!
i will be buying Apples for both me and my girlfriend and an older dualproc Sun server to chain SCSI drives off of.
I HAVE HAD IT WITH SHIT NOT WORKING OUT OF THE BOX, FIRST TIME! i am not dealing with Windows nor linux for any of our serious design work anymore. i know this a massive linux crowd here, and honestly, i really love linux for my firewall and server stuff and my run Gentoo on the Sun (doubt it though...gentoo-sparc is nice, but Solaris 9/10 it ain't).
i don't have the time to fuck about with things anymore. i have to be able to plug it in, turn it on, and let people get to work. i say more power to Apple and they can have some of my cash too. You take the power of *nix (yes, i know what is under the Apple hood, i'm speaking general here) and put a slick, smooth, beautiful, easy-to-use GUI on top, have Adobe compile the must-have apps for it and i'll buy. Apple has done this. Now i will buy. And no, i don't have loads of cash laying around, i'm going to have to scrape to do this, but you know what? It's worth it.
The big question I'm waiting to answer is whether this will be an incremental update or a major update. Panther added some nice new functionality Fast User Switching, Expose (which I don't use nearly as much as I thought I would the first time I saw it), and better networking support. It was a tough call but I believe it was worth the upgrade, fast user switching alone has made my life a lot easier.
What's left, quite a lot actually. The Finder for one thing could use a lot of enhancements. Forgoing the whole brush metal fiasco, I care little about, there is the whole underlying functionality. Why is it that the OS can't update the window's contents without being pushed to do it. This is something that is fundamentally critical to an operating system. Additionally browsing folders across a network with a large number of files in it is painfully slow, and I'm talking my 100MB network at home.
Lastly I would like to see a decent integrated development environment. XCode is a nice upgrade from previous tools but I'd still like to be able to work on the GUI and on code at the same time. CASE tools have come a long way, but Apple's tools still have a very antiquated feel about them.
Sir, there is a dragon outside with an armful of armor. He's inquiring if we offer free refills.
Come on, you're not even trying. A decent, powerful, extensible Finder replacement (cf PathFinder)? A more flexible dock for us power users (DragThing is invaluable, but there's no way to replace the Dock itself for things like notifications, icon updates, minimized windows)? Ability to "check out" home directories from a server? Polishing more of the rough edges off Xcode and the other bundled apps? More consistent UI (eliminate -- or make universal -- the metal abomination)? A universal metadata layer so that everyone can -- for example -- easily and simply access iPhoto and iTunes attributes on files? A Cocoa component architecture for sharing third-party Cocoa views? Garbage collection for Cocoa? Support for PDF annotations in Preview?
Yeah, I'm replying to my own post. My previous one was trollish, and I thought I should clarify.
/.ers think it's cool, but when Microsoft does it, they complain" meme. The facts are that a) Microsoft is a convicted monopoly, and Apple isn't, and b) more importantly, Apple does it better than Microsoft. Microsoft embeds lousy software in a lousy OS, releases lousy service packs, and talks about "innovation" when all they create is bloat. Apple embeds good software in a good OS, releases upgrades that really do improve the software and OS even further, and continues to be the driving force in innovation for the whole PC industry.
/. who are smart enough to recognize that. People don't hate Microsoft because it's Microsoft. They hate it because its products and business practices suck.
I'm really sick of the "When Apple does it,
I'm not saying this is a permanent state of affairs. Companies can and do change. If you'd asked me twenty years ago, I'd have said that IBM would never be anything other than "Big Blue", a giant corporation sucking the life out of the industry by trading on name recognition to crush smaller companies that were doing all the real innovation. These days, IBM are the good guys. It may be that Microsoft will go through a similar change, and in twenty years they'll be an ally to small developers and desktop users, while Apple (or, more likely, some company we've barely even heard of in 2004) will be the giant evil force that's holding back the whole industry.
But right now: Microsoft is a bad corporation with bad products, Apple is a great corporation with great products, and there are a lot of people on
The correlation between ignorance of statistics and using "correlation is not causation" as an argument is close to 1.
They ought to suck up the price of the upgrade and roll it into their .Mac subscriptions. Make it cheaper to get .Mac + the upgrade vs. just the upgrade alone.
I am a recent convert and I am *utterly* pleased with 10.3. With that being said, there are a couple things I'd like to see improved/fixed:
1. Give me the option to have my quoted text in Mail.app appear at the top of my cursor when replying to an email. Few types of miscreant are worse than top-posters, and Apple doesn't need to be aiding and abetting.
2. Speed. I'll take OS X over Linux/X11 or XP any day of the week, but I'd love to see XP's responsiveness in the Tiger GUI. Again, I prefer the stability to the speed, but having both would be rich.
3. As mentioned, SMB interoperability can use some tweaking in the areas of both speed and ease of use.
4. This is sacrilegious, but the Finder still isn't there for me. I *hate* the spacing of the icons in icon view (they are like 3 feet apart), and the viewing of directories and files simply isn't as intuitive to me as it is in XP. Pathfinder does a much better job, in my opinion.
dmiessler.com -- grep understanding knowledge
Even though they say it's a no-no in Usenet land... "Me Too!"
I'm piping up just so all the Linux heads can see that we're out there. Before you complain, know that I have no problem compiling the Kernel, I have a couple of Linux boxes running web sites in my home server closet and a very active postfix mail server servicing a bunch of different purposes and etc.
I'm no expert, but then again, I don't want to be. My 13 year old daughter has an iMac and an iPod and she loves them. I'm a convert. My next "main box" will be an iMac or a G5 or something, especially now that I'm getting into the digital video thing.
In any event, thank you Apple for saving me from Config File Hell. I'm sick of editing obscure, unique, hidden freaking config files, recompiling this and that and all the rest of the headaches associated with using Linux. I want the security and performance of *nix, with the ease of Windows. That means, OS X.
Hey - Accessibility isn't just about the blind. I actually use the screen reader for a lot of purposes. For example, I am curently using the screen reader to help me audit a bunch of data files. The computer reads, "1000 mhz 10 db, 1250 mhz 15db..." and I check everything on paper while it's talking. The spoken interface is also great for when I'm using my bluetooth mouse from WAAY across the room (i.e. watching a DVD) and I need to know what time it is.
"One touch of Darwin makes the whole world kin." George Bernard Shaw
I work as a system administrator for a small non-profit. I have enough work and dealing with configuration of yet another Linux box is not something that I would like to do on my free time. Do not get me wrong, I love what I do for living; however, I do not want to do my work at work and at home.
When I switched to Mac OS X I was fairly pleased with the fact that I could work from home on a system with a stable GUI that hasn't crashed on me in more than one and a half years. I can do all my work on a system that does not require a lot of maintenace; that increses my productivity. I am impressed by the quality of Xcode and how much you can do with it without installing a ton of new things. I can do OpengL programming, write user interfaces and do all sorts of things out of the box -- install Xcode and you're a done! Did I mention well-integrated Java support?
With that in mind, I am looking forward to the new version of the operating system that I love to use. However, I hope that Apple incudes more than new icons and new GUI features in 10.4. Here is my small wish list:
Update CVS to the most recent version.
Add better group and user management. For example, make sure that every user is a member of 'staff' and the admin user is a member of 'staff' and 'wheel.' It would be cool if UNIX inclined people could have a set of advanced options when it comes to user creation.
Fix passwd. I would like to use it in order to change my passwords; it is faster for me that way. I am sure that this command can be updated to change my KeyChain password.
Add more fonts.
Add tabbed sessions for Terminal. I know that there is iTerm, but it choked on me way too many times. I like Terminal better.
Add virtual desktops as a part of the window manager.
Provide a stable front end to firewall that supports both TCP and UDP rules. Currently, only TCP traffic can be managed.
Well, I guess that is it for 10.4.
I want
improved Finder I think all Mac OS X users will agree with me better feature parity between Cocoa and Carbon every release improves this for older features, but every release also adds new features to one or the other w/o adding them to both better integration of Cocoa and Carbon Let me put an HIView in an NSWindow (no, the child window workaround is no good, because it doesn't work with keyboard navigation and it causes visual oddities such as disabling controls or taking away key window status.). And let me create custom menus in Cocoa. rpc.quotad I'm setting up an Xserve (w/ 3.5 TB Xserve RAID) running Mac OS X Server to serve files via NFS to some Solaris boxesThere's more, but I can't remember all of it right now.
-- Tim Buchheim
You found out wrong. Drivers don't have to be part of the kernel. They can also be loaded as modules. You don't have to recompile your kernel.
Nope. I spent about a month researching this, and had several people tell me that even though it shouldn't be this way, it was. It's a Toshiba laptop with a combo sound/video card. I tried 6 separate distros, including Mandrake, Gentoo, Slackware, and Red Hat. The video card worked fine, just not the sound part. This was a little over a year ago, but things probably haven't changed that much since then.
Your complaint is that there is no pre-built binary for your sound-card. This is not a fault of Linux. It is either the fault of the distribution for not including the driver (if the source is available) or the fault of the manufacturer for not supporting Linux.
Don't care WHOSE fault it is, just that the problem exists. Every single time I've tried Linux I've wound up having to dink with crap that I have absolutely no love for dinking with. I want something that works out of the box. Linux has NEVER footed the bill insofar as that consideration is concerned.