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Jobs Previews Displays, Tiger at WWDC
DonaldGelman writes "Apple has just announced a 30-inch Studio Display capable of displaying a resolution of 2560x1600. The display requires a new Nvidia card with 2 parallel DVI connections. The display is going to retail for $3299 in August, and the Nvidia card for around $599." Jobs also announced new 20- and 23-inch displays, for $1299 and $1999 in July. All three feature a new aluminum enclosure, and DVI. Also from WWDC...
Jobs also previewed Tiger, with Spotlight (fast iTunes-like searching in all apps, and systemwide), Dashboard (Konfabulator-like widgets combined with Exposé for fast showing/hiding), Automator (visual AppleScript, combining prewritten actions into scripts), H.264 code for QuickTime (high definition scalable video from MPEG), iChat AV conferencing (up to 10 for audio, four for video), RSS reading in Safari, Core Image and Core Video (realtime filters at the core OS level), and system-wide Sync Services. All of this is extensible (except for iChat conferencing), with SDKs available for developers.
There's a lot here, and a more detailed description is forthcoming. Tiger will be available in the first half of 2005.
... it's Apple's WorldWide Developer Conference.
The Army reading list
For those of you wondering where the pictures on the cinema displays came from it's the Jungfrau Region of Switerland. The valley is the Lauterbrunnen Valley. Now if I could only get the display to go with the picture...
NMG
A nice Safari RSS screenshot, starring our favorite site.
Apple's basically gone and done their own version of the coolness that is Konfabulator, little widgets that do a variety of things.
Actually I think Apple are already on to this: See here
These new displays are:
1. Larger
2. Use DVI instead of ADC, so you don't have to have mac hardware to use them.
Not announced on stage, but previewed off, is 10.4 Server: includes 100% 64bit libs, ACLs, iChat server, SUS. Also includes NT migration tool, improved email, and a one-click SOHO setup. Nice bump.
--
$tar -xvf
"You can now host your own iChat server. Instant Messaging serves as a vital means of communication for organizations of all sizes, so it's useful to deploy and run your own private and secure IM server. Based on the open source Jabber project, the new iChat server in Tiger Server lets your company protect its internal communications by defining its own namespace, using SSL/TLS encryption to ensure privacy, and Kerboros for authorization. The iChat server works with both the iChat client in Mac OS X Tiger and popular open source clients available for Windows, Linux and even PDAs."
http://www.apple.com/server/macosx/tiger/
Remember Watson? Remember how Sherlock 3 basically became Watson?
Remember Konfabulator with all of its widgets? Well, now Tiger's going to have Dashboard. I wonder if it will accept Konfabulator widgets (which I've been using) or if there will be an "import" program? And Konfabulator 1.7 just added Expose-like features (press F8 to get your Widgets in front - useful).
Granted, Apple had something like this back in the older Mac days (or so I've read here and there), so it's kind of like they're "bringing back" something old into the new - but if you're an Apple developer, it seems as though there's always the fear that your favorite app will get assimilated into the next version of OS X.
Granted, I like OS X (my work is buying me a new Powerbook in about a week - yay me), but it does kind of make you go "Hm".
52 Weeks, 52 Religions with John Hummel
Hey we've being given an iSync SDK this year. You can't have everything! ;-)
"The performance gains and features supported by Core Image ultimately depend on the graphics card. Graphics cards capable of pixel-level programming deliver the best performance. But Core Image automatically scales as appropriate for systems with older graphics cards, for compatibility with any Tiger-compatible Mac."
Apple certainly doesn't seem cowed by Microsoft. There were three big banners at the WWDC dissing MS. One said "Redmond, start your photocopiers," One said "Introducing Longhorn" (above an image of a Tiger CD), and one "Redmond, we have a problem. Curiously, pictures are onPaul Thurrott's decidedly anti-Apple blog.
I really hate reading this panic "they're stealing!" attitude every time.
Let's do a review here, okay?"
Frankly, Konfabulator was a low hanging fruit. It didn't really introduce anything except using Javascript, it just tied together a batch of old technology with a very old Apple idea. It's common sense to realize that Apple would move widgets back onto the desktop and add Javascript support once they realized how well it would work out. About the only thing you can really take issue with is Apple's decision to use Javascript.
Just a nitpick...Apple bought SoundJam (and the team who wrote it), and turned it into iTunes.
banner pictures
"Apple tends to succeed better when they adopt the standards (USB, Firewire, etc) rather than go it their own (ADC over DVI, for example)." I thought FireWire was an Apple standard - certainly, FireWire is a trademark of Apple.
It seems even the Konfabulator authors are surprised by this. Even as a mac fan, I think it is reprehensible.
I have been asking myself how long till Apple would put metadata to good use, and if it would be before WinFS and Reiser4. Well, it looks like the answer is here.
Please correct me if I got my facts wrong.
Not to be nit-picky, but Firewire doesn't really illustrate your point. Apple didn't adopt Firewire. Apple invented Firewire instead of using the standard (USB).
(($3299 + $599) * 2) ~ (($3300 + $600) *2) = $7800 + tax. granted $7800 IS $6000+, but so is $10000... you are short selling the cost by saying $6000+, should say $7800+ (tax and such)...that's more expensive than some cheap used cars...
Just beacuse GNAA Goat-See (775677) belongs the the infamous Troll-Group GNAA, doesn't mean his claim is invalid.
Dont judge a book by it's cover 100% of the time. Reserve at least 1% for the benefit of the doubt.
MacRumors.com did publish the article and the screenshots (the screenshots were subsequently removed due to legal threats from APPLE Computer, Inc.).
SHAME ON YOU for modding the parent and the threads as "OFFTOPIC" of "TROLL"
http://www.macrumors.com/pages/2004/06/20040626041 303.shtml
http://slashdot.org/~GNAA%20Goat-See
Mac OS X 10.4 (Tiger) Screenshots?
Saturday June 26, 2004 04:13 AM EST Posted by arn
Note: This is a Page 2 News Item Images Removed at the Request of Apple Legal
With WWDC just days away, the first Mac OS X 10.4 (Tiger) information and screenshots appears to have been leaked. According to unconfirmed sources, Apple will reportedly provide developers with a Mac OS X 10.4 Preview copy at WWDC on Monday. These screenshots provided reportedly come from this upcoming developer preview.
(Of note, the screenshots come from a previously unconfirmed source, and as a result may spark the usual debates of legitimacy -- though on casual inspection, do appear real ( removed )
Overall Mac OS X 10.4 is said to not hold any dramatic changes from Mac OS X 10.3.
The preview is labeled "Version 10.4 Pre-release" (removed) and build number 8A162 ( removed ).
A new version of Safari (v2.0) is bundled with the release and offers at least two new features. These include support for RSS news feeds as well as a new "Private Browsing" mode. Private Browsing allows users to browse without keeping a history of pages viewed.
System Preferences (removed) has been tweaked yet again, with the addition of an iTunes-like search function on the top right ( removed ) which hilights relevant control panels in real time. As the search gets narrowed ( removed ) so do the control panels that are hilighted.
In addition, Apple has added new security features to their firewall, most significantly a Stealth Mode ( removed ) which should "Ensures that any uninvited traffic receives no response -- not even an acknowledgement that your computer exists."
Perhaps the most dramatic change, however, is the inclusion of a new Expose feature called Dashboard ( removed ). Dashboard appears to be a Gadget/Widget based utility which provides users with a quick access (invoked by user-specified function key) to frequently used tools/applications. The tools available to users in the Tiger build include Address Book, Calculator, Calendar, iTunes, Stickies and World Clock. The tools provided however, are heavily themed with un-Mac OS X-like styles. It's assumed that developers will be able to provide additional "Gadgets".
Confirmation or invalidation of these images should come at WWDC next week.
Thanks to Gary Niger and Ron Delsner of GNAA for providing the information in this article.
Rating (44 Positives; 67 Negatives) [ 215 comments ]
Different technologies. Apple needed to be able to do high-speed isochronous data transfer. Try taking input from a video camera over USB (especially USB 1.0, which was all there was when FireWire came out).
pooptruck
I think the i-line of products or e-line of products might be more what your looking for. Or you could just settle for something else.
The real reason they dropped ADC was that they realized there was a limit to how much power you could push through the video card, and the 23" display was right about at that limit. If you check Apple's tech specs, you'll see that the 30" display has a 150W power supply - it simply needs a separate cord and brick. And once you're resigned to having two cables, it makes little sense to nitpick about having three. I like how they've at least bundled them at the monitor end, though.
right-on rumor
I think you greatly underestimate its appeal. It's expensive, but huge screen real estate is worth it. I have the 23" display right now, and there's little doubt that I will eventually (within a year or so) get the 30".
Video editors and - especially - motion graphics designers use every pixel of those huge screens. And they have the bucks to buy them, too.
The Cinema Display started at $3,999 in its time and it was a bestselling product. This display is actually cheaper than the original!
D
The GL "software-fragment program" renderer introduced in 10.3.4 provides a fall-back path for machines with an older GPU.
So Core Image apps will run on any Mac, they just won't always be hardware accelerated.
Unfortunately, even if you could afford it, it is not possible. The 30" display requires an AGP graphics card with two DVI connectors, leaving none free for a second display. Hopefully the next generation G5 will include PCI-E, allowing two cards to be used (and then, in a few years time, I'll be able to afford one second hand...).
I am TheRaven on Soylent News
Dual-link DVI: One channel, one pixel clock, but 6 differential pairs (rather than the normal three). Usually with dual-link, your GPU's video controller spits out two adjacent pixels each pix clock.
Dual-channel DVI: Two independent single-link DVI channels (like two of what you normally get). In this case, your display is divided in half; the left half comes out of one channel, and the right half comes out of the other channel.
The first one is a DVI standard which simple doubles the DVI maximum dot rate from 165 megapixels/sec to 330. Some nVidia cards can do this, and it works great.
However, it sounds like the apple thing is doing dual-channel. I've also experienced nVidia dual-channel, and it has a problem. The problem is that it's using two independently programmed video controllers, and I've seen them get out of sync. The result is a tear-line down the middle of the screen when there's motion going on that crosses that line. It's really irritating.
I realize this should just be a software problem, because the two video controllers can be programmed at the same time and started at the same time, and they SHOULD stay in sync, but I've seen them get out of sync. Where I experienced this was with the Windows drivers. If you reboot into the dual-channel mode, it works fine, but if you change the resolution to one that uses only one channel, and then you change back, the two video controllers always end up out of sync.
Anyone buying this panel from apple should check this and complain. This is a software-fixable problem.
Courtesy of Think Secret:
Jobs said that Apple has one half-million .Mac subscribers. The synchronization engine is built into Tiger with a new .Mac preference pane; mail account settings can be synchronized and third-party apps can sync data.
Thanks a million. Push Start to replay.
what i'd really like to see is an x86 port of their operating system...
Umm... have you heard of this thing called Darwin? Mac OS X is basically Darwin layered with Apple's Aqua interface. (Well, that, plus all the nifty apps like iChat and iMovie and those other things that are OS X-only...)
Come to the University of Mars! Classes starting soon!
Behold!
I live ze unknown. I love ze unknown. I am ze unknown.
It's not.
Wheelbarrow of money could make this all better, Steve. Wheelbarrow of money.
~jeff
At least, that's not quite the way I read it, although there's obvious functionality overlap. It looks like Spotlight is taking advantage of the metadata search system in Tiger -- this sounds to me a lot like an implementation of BeOS's beautiful search functionality. (Panther is there in the speed, but BeOS allowed all that useful metadata searching that Panther's system doesn't -- Tiger's apparently does.)
What's so amazing to me about dashboard is that it is a more innovative way to do what Microsoft Longhorn's Sidebar is trying to do. Take a look here and you tell me that Apple didn't see Microsoft's sidebar and figured out that Expose would let them do something that Microsoft couldn't even think of.
I am absolutely thrilled by the prospect of Dashboard not cluttering up my screen with "essential" information. Microsoft's Sidebar is translucent and floating on the right side but its constricted to that finite pixel width. Apple's solution is characteristicly Apple and its just a damn good way to use the Quartz engine. I think this really is a kick into the ribs of Longhorn, so far from screenshots I think its pretty clear Apple has solved this problem better than Microsoft.
No, a lot of those choices were made during the 80's, when no one else was doing anything like what Apple did, at least not to a significant enough degree to matter.
SCSI was adopted in 1985 for the Mac Plus. ATA was just being developed at about that time, and certainly was no standard (nor all that good).
The single mouse button was settled on sometime prior to mid-1981. The reasoning was basically that the three button mouse on the Xerox Alto had been confusing -- none of the buttons had any standard uses, apparently, and they were called the Red, Yellow, and Blue buttons, but the mouse had black buttons. A one button mouse simplified use and documentation.
As for multitasking, the Mac was never really designed to do that to begin with. So it was always something of a hack. That being said, most personal computers didn't multitask, or likewise had cooperative models, at the time these decisions were made.
You youngsters -- you don't realize that a lot of important things happened in the 70's and 80's that still strongly influence what we've got now.
-- This and all my posts are in the public domain. I am a lawyer. I am not your lawyer, and this is not legal advice.
It's not all that standard, but there is a reason for it. Typographic points are 1/72 of an inch. To help with cracking into that market, Mac displays have traditionally had about that resolution.
It's a similar rationale for having the Amiga's clock rate as the NTSC clock.
IEEE-1994 is the standard.
It was developed jointly by Apple and Texas Instruments. Sony started using it after the development phase and skirted the patents (with Apple / TIs blessing) by utilizing the non-powered version of Firewire.
Later, Apple stopped charging for the use of the term firewire, decided not to charge for the powered version of the protocol they designed, but Sony was still into their iLink name.
Again, designed by Apple / TI and then run through a standards organization. Not the other way around.
Apple had indexing of content based on metadata in OS 9. Sherlock supported plugins to let 3rd party application developers tell it how to index content in their proprietary file formats, and the Sherlock interface could search by file type, date, full text of content, IPTC fields inside a JPEG, and so on.
They're just putting back into OS X stuff that was in OS 9.
GCHQ Quantum Insert installed. If only our tongues were made of glass, how much more careful we would be when we speak
Video editors and - especially - motion graphics designers use every pixel of those huge screens.
Absolutely. The 30" display is big enough to have a full-size HD window with plenty of round around it for UI stuff like your timeline.
On a 1920x1200 monitor, you either have to work in proxy view (ugh) or you have to live with a tiny strip of UI at the very bottom. The 30" screen fixes this.
I write in my journal
Content indexing has been in OS X from the start. There are several new twists with Tiger. First, the content index gets updated automatically in the background as files are changed and created, rather than just at scheduled indexing times (I think). But content indexing is only really useful for text files (and Word docs, PDFs, etc.). It's not much good for movies, or image files or whatever. So, in Tiger there is also a metadata indexing system. This system searches out metadata in a wide variety of file types and indexes it. So, for instance, EXIF data from your JPEGs and ID3 data from your MP3 files gets indexed. But searching at the level of entire files doesn't always make sense. For example, e-mail programs usually store many messages in a single file. So, Tiger also provides the ability to search specialized types of information, like e-mail or contacts or appointments, and have the results presented sensibly.
All of this is integrated into a single search interface. So, if you search for "cows" you'll get back all of your text-like documents containing information about cows, based on a full content keyword search, as well as all of your image files and MP3 files which have cows mentioned in their metadata, as well as all of your e-mail messages and appointments related to cows. And all of this happens in real-time, in a list that updates as you type your query. You can also save a query, and re-execute it at any time with a click. Basically, this is a bit like the iTunes "smart playlist" feature, but it's system-wide.
All of this collectively comprises the search technology that Apple is calling "Spotlight". This is a major new feature that many users are probably going to use dozens of times a day.
This space unintentionally left unblank.
As I understand it, resource forks are now a legacy feature of Mac OS 9. Cocoa applications store their resources in a special directory structure called an application bundle. Most data formats -- including compressed files, images, Adobe formats, Microsoft formats, PDF, and on and on -- haven't required the use of resource forks in years. Can't we finally retire this non-feature that was a clever idea if anybody else was going to support it, but a horrible impediment to cross-platform compatibility?
Breakfast served all day!
"Hacker "Sp33k" for leet, or elite. Originating from 31337 "eleet", the UDP port used by Dead Cow Cult, a hacker group, to access Windows 95 using Back Orifice, a notorious hacking program."
1 33 7
http://www.urbandictionary.com/define.php?term=
"B.) It's not for you Mr. Sixpack, it's for us artists. We plunk down $3000 -- $4000 once in a while for stuff like this."
Just wanted to apologize to everybody. That sounded elitist. I didn't mean for it to.
I'll add a lil more info here: The ability to see that many pixels on the screen is VERY important. Imagine trying to work at theater resolution (>2,000 pixels...) and only seeing a small chunk at a time, or seeing it downsized to where some of the detail is lost. That's problematic. Monitors that can run at >1,600 pixels are hard to come by. So if Apple is successful here, it'll drive prices down. Either we snag the Apple monitor, or the lower budget places get more bang for their buck.
That's why I was offended at the previous poster's comment. I wasn't trying to say "Im better than you", but rather "you're not the only person in the world". Sorry I didn't communicate that more clearly the first time.
"Derp de derp."
the entire market tanked in anticipation of fed interest rates rising. Apple opened up.
I wouldn't hold your breath. I've used intel's "auto vectorizing" compiler, and truth be told it doesn't auto vectorise shit. You need to write your loops in such a way that there's no way it can bail before the end of the loop, and ... I can't remember ... other stuff. Point is that I found it both easier and faster to use the built in MMX primitives (it was integer math) and go back to using gcc.
Altivec has another problem. The data structures *have* to be aligned on a 16 byte boundary. Note that this is not a "runs really slowly if it's misaligned" thing, this is a "comes to a complete screeching halt" thing. Moving between Altivec and scalar registers is also incredibly slow - it's necessary to write the data to memory then read it back in, meaning you need to move at least one cacheline in the process.
On the plus side, when you do get it right, Altivec f'kin screams along. You can do almost anything with it and be bandwidth limited on a G4. Dunno about a G5 - there are some _more_ limitations to using altivec on a G5 too.
Look into the gcc primitives, it's surprisingly easy.
Dave
I write a blog now, you should be afraid.
Intel CPU's do have this technology as well, although it's half the width (64-bits at a time, rather than 128-bit).
... it still kinda sucked).
The MMX registers are 64 bit, although they're not the main limitation of the MMX implementation. For some inane reason, Intel decided to use the floating point registers for integer data (namely, MMX registers) and so MMX doesn't require additional registers to be added. However, since you're absconding with the floating-point hardware, you can't do floating point math at the same time, and you have to save the state of the floating point hardware before you switch to MMX. In other words, MMX was... "interesting", but in the end, not that useful. After all, for one thing, it eliminated your floating point capability unless you wanted to context-switch out. (AMD's 'improvement' to that was 3DNow! which was basically "MMX that you can use for floating point as well!" - okay, better, but
AltiVec didn't have those limitations - it was very, very improved over MMX.
SSE, however, *did* add 8 new registers, and 128-bit wide objects, for floating point. So an x86 processor with SSE extensions does have 128-bit vector abilities, albeit in floating point. Vectorized integer math is a little rare (hence why MMX isn't that useful anyway) so AltiVec and SSE are actually pretty comparable. AltiVec does have 32 registers (which makes sense, of course, given PPC's 32 register scheme), whereas SSE only has 8 registers. I'm sure some comp. eng. person can come along and tell me why it's efficient to have vector hardware that's the same depth as your register hardware (as x86 has 8 registers and 8 SSE registers, and x86-64 has 16 SSE registers, and 16 normal registers)
(SSE2 basically said "OK, MMX really blew - now you can just use the SSE registers for integer as well.")
When Apple posts benchmarks showing their machines to be faster than x86 machines, the benchmarks almost always make heavy use of these SIMD instructions... and rightly so.
When Apple used to post benchmarks. A modern G5 can keep pace with top end Athlons and P4s anyday, without any specialized benchmarks. Be nice to Apple - the days of the "G3 is 50% faster than a Pentium II using Photoshop's 'G3K1ckZA$$' filter on a mostly-red image of a cow... on Tuesdays!" are over, thank God. And if you had vectorized code on the x86 (using SSE), the comparison wouldn't be that unequal, unless it was heavily biased towards the PPC's obvious strengths (high register count). Then again, it's not like the x86 has any real strengths anyway...
But anyway, my point was that the SIMD implementation on x86 isn't really very different than on the PPC, once you count SSE. SSE is register-starved compared to PPC, sure, but so is x86 in general. x86-64 removes that last limitation (mostly, 16 registers is still starved compared to 32, I guess) but I doubt there would be a big performance jump going from 16 128-bit registers to 32 128-bit registers. There's not a ton of code that could efficiently utilize that. There is *some*, sure, but not a lot.
Dave here isn't lying... I recently took some video code that did something as simple as summing the pixel luminosity values of a frame of video. Wrote a bit of Altivec code, and immediately jumped to about twice the speed it was running at. After a bit of tweaking, got it up to 2.5x the original speed. Involved a few loop unrollings and the like, but nothing uber-complex. Now, the whole filter waits on other parts of the pipeline. Simply amazing how easy it was.
I would like to disagree with Dave on one thing. While he rightly points out that AV will choke on non 16-bit aligned data, all malloced memory is automatically 16-bit aligned, and you kinda have to go out of your way to unalign it. So, its not as bad as it seems.
Cheers!
"Originating from" back orifice's default port? Bah! Spoken like a whippersnapper with an uid in the seven hundred thousands.
Elite/eleet/3l33t/leet/31337 had been a running joke for many a year before back orifice. When cDc announced bo at defcon, the carefully-casual mention of its default port drew quite a laugh from the crowd.
Apple's solution is a lot more elegant, and one I'd actually use.
Only if the widgets you use require interaction.. like a calculator. None of the konfab widgets I use do. We've written a lot of our own. They're mostly status widgets. One widget shows status from Big Brother (server monitoring) for example.
I guess I'll have to see Apple's to see if it can do what we need it to do. Konfab can pop up a non-focus-stealing window to alert that a server has gone down (or that a meeting is about to start, or whatever). Can Apple's? Or do I have to hit F8 every 30 minutes?
Seems to me that Apple is pulling a lot of MS style tactics in Tiger. Taking 3rd party apps, and making crappy versions of them... but since they're integrated into the OS, they'll become more popular than the better, competing product.
It depends on what you are doing and where you came from.
When I got into pre-press, we did EVERYTHING including building the pages on Linotype/Hell Combies or Scitex machines...the pages would come from the customer as page-layout boards.
Then the Mac made it big and people started using Quark and Pagemaker to build their own pages...but still didn't have the horse-power to scan and edit the photos...so we used their pages from Quark, their artwork from Illustrator and then swapped out the low-res place-holder images with high-res that we scanned, color corrected and siloed etc etc. Again, pre-press still had a huge stake in the field.
But now, customers are doing their own in-house scanning, color correcting, proofing, assembly and they send it directly to printers. Yes, film is on the way out as direct-to-plate has finally arrived. This may bode well for printers themselves, but I've seen many shops in the Chicagoland area cut way back on pre-press because it's simply not needed anymore.
I should have clarified my original post and say that it's pre-press that's dying a slow death...printing itself will be around for a long time. Packaging and POS displays will is a good area to focus your efforts into if you're looking to get into printing itself.
But you're right, the industry is not dying, it's shifting gears.
"Music is everybody's possession. It's only publishers who think that people own it." - John Lennon.
Um, everybody and his brother was jumping on the RISC bandwagon (or at least trying to) in the 1990's. Even Intel and PS/2-era IBM tried their hand at it for a while.
SCSI instead of IDE
Um, IBM-compatible PCs were mostly using external-controller RLL-encoded hard drives when Apple decided to use SCSI for their Macs, in the 1980's (not 1990's). It was also being generally hailed as the next big thing at the time. IDE/ATA caught on later, after Apple was firmly committed to SCSI. They eventually relented as IDE drives became substantially cheaper than comparable SCSI drives.
PCI instead of AGP
This wasn't Apple being contrarian; it was Apple following along and adopting something that had by then become ubiquitous in PC-land (like with IDE).
a single mouse button paradigm
There was no "mainstream" mouse paradigm to speak of when Apple chose to put a single-button mouse on the Lisa... in 1982.
ADP instead of serial
You mean ADB? That wasn't just different, it had distinctly superior functionality over the serial interface used in most mice for PCs (i.e. daisychaining devices).
http://alternatives.rzero.com/