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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.
Could you give us an SDK for the iPod? We've been very good boys and girls this year, and we promise to be nice with it.
Thank you,
AAiP
P.S.: It'd be really cool if you could make it your "Oh, and one more thing..." We love it when you do that.
Obliteracy: Words with explosions
I am a long time mac user, and make a decent living thanks to apple, however, this stuff always manages to piss me off.
The developers of Konfabulator have created an elegent piece of software that is easily expandable by anyone with a modicum of scritpting knowledge. So what does apple do, steal the idea and incorporate it.Their Dashboard implementation is a nice take on it, but is such an obvious rip off, that it must be frustrating to the creators of it.
Wouldn't it be more fair to their developers to license it at then expand on it by tying it inot the OS?
If you are one in a million, then there are six thousand people who are just like you.
I'm hoping that the increases in speed seen in the last upgrades continue for "older" machines. I'm assuming so based on what Apple has posted on their website, but a lot of that is G5 performance info.
I'm hoping that the "instant search of everything" feature, which I'll almost never use if my current searching is any indication, won't bog down the system while indexing everything.
All in all, not too revolutionary. Which is just fine with me. I think Panther is damn nice and would rather they spent time cleaning up and helping developers make their apps more reliable than anything else.
Also staring our favorite upcomming Movie! (Wonder if the apple screenshot factory are /. or Firefly fans)
Well finally OS X will have 64-bit pointers and long longs.
I've been waiting for that feature for a while now and to me that's the most valuable thing, along with Xcode being updated to take advantage of the LP64 model.
Up until now, the 64-bit G5 processor was rather wasted.
This is...
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What, you mean like the indexing of all content based on meta data?
Of course, Longhorn's implementation of this by filesystem is completely different from Apple's implementation of it (creation of XML files which are then compiled into a fast, easy to read database)...but the end result will be transparent to the user. It's a chicken-and-egg thing. Apple started indexing content by metadata in Sherlock and the iLife apps. Microsoft says, "yeah, well we're gonna build it into our OS!" So Apple breaks out the Sherlock system and integrates it into the GUI...thus making it LOOK like an OS.
Off topic, check out which site they chose for the screenshot of RSS in Safari. Cowboy Neal is famous once again!
Hey freaks: now you're ju
...but the actual promotional banners Apple are using at WWDC for Tiger have the strapline "Redmond, start your photocopiers".
Although ironically, Steve Jobs noted in the keynote speech that he "ran into Bill Gates a few weeks ago and his company
feels that their relationship with Apple is better than ever."
I think there's some pics of the banners at macrumors.com...
iTunes is SoundJam. Apple bought the app, rebranded it, tweaked it, and released it as iTunes 1.0. The rest is history.
BLING BLING. Meet the architecture that's changing everything.
That is essentially what's happening - see freedesktop.org. Main influences are clearly macosx and amiga/beos, not windows.
Yes, they were a major Firewire developer - and then they made it a standard for everyone to use.
Doing so increased the number of Firewire devices, which made their including it on all Macs by default appealing to those who needed video editing/etc.
You'll notice how they're open sourcing things like parts of Xcode and other parts - making them popular so it's easy to add them into their products. Like IBM, Apple has figured out that instead of forcing the world to be compatible with you, if you give it to the world and becoming compatible with it, you enjoy greater use.
52 Weeks, 52 Religions with John Hummel
Hey, check out the Dashboard page here:
On the simulated Dashboard you can have all sorts of nifty mini-programs called Widgets. One of Apple's sample programs is a stock price table, and they're up 7.36 percent. Microsoft is the only stock on the fictional list that's down. Direct link to the image here.
Nice to see Apple's sense of humor. And in fact this sort of functionality is a real smack in the face to Redmond, who have updated little on their desktop (XP) in three years, while Apple has had three release cycles that have been better each time.
I had doubts about my slightly smaller LCD display (21" 1600x1200 Philips Brilliance), but then I tried it. All I can say is: Fuck seeing beyond my desk. If I want that, I'll buy a webcam and stick it on the other side of my screen or something. The ability to read two A4 pages of a pdf with crystal clarity (well, 300DPI horiz X 100DPI vert with subpixel/cleartype) just rocks too much.
But LCD flatpanels really don't take up much room - you hear 21" and you think "huge footprint" -but with a flatpanel, I have room for an open A4 book, keyboard, mouse, and writing pad on the desk area area in front of the huge panel - i.e. I have a desk again, not just a shelf for a monitor!.
I think I speak for many people when I say that the "private browsing" is actually rhe best part about the release...
No mention of virtual desktops in Tiger, so for now we have to assume it isn't going to get them.
Seems like a no-brainer to at least include an option for virtual desktops if you would like to use them.
Oh well, at least there's Desktop manager. Still it would be great if this were built-in.
Yeah, GeForceFX Go 5200 - real hard up for specs there...c'mon, my outdated 1 ghz 12" powerbook (read, low-end) has this.
If desk space is a problem, I'd think they could just use a VESA stand and stick the thing on an articulated arm attached to the wall or something. That'd get it off the desk, and it could be easily moved to make more room.
Personally, I don't think I'd like a 30".
The optimum is probably multiple smaller displays, which can be angled separately.
Unless you're sitting far away from that 30" display, if you're sitting across from the center of it, then text displayed at the left or right edge will have a certain amount of distortion just through the effects of perspective because you're looking at it on an angle.
I see this sometimes with my widescreen LCD, and it's just a 17" model. I find it kind of weird and uncomfortable. As a result, I find my monitor is somewhat less useful for editing in two side-by-side windows. I wind up scooting over so I'm directly across from one window, and the other window gets used less.
The optimal arrangement would probably be a curved surface, so all points on the screen would be equidistant from the user, and all points on the screen would be directed right at the user.
Until someone comes up with such a display, multiple independent displays are probably better.
That's a pretty neat innovation, in my book. Is it major? Well, no, probably not. But it doesn't take a whole lot of stand-alone "hey, neat!" innovations before they start to add up to something substantial.
Careful ladies and gents. Read the bios for the creators Konfabulator....they used to work for Apple. I bet that the design and core technology of Konfabulator is prior intellectual property that Apple legally owns.
You know, I frequently think the same thing of all the Linux articles. Frankly, I could care less about minor updates to Linux. So maybe we should both be grateful they don't stick with a single platform.
Firewire and USB were invented at the same time. Also, until USB 2.0 came around, USB couldn't do what firewire did. (And even now, there are still things it can't do.) So there is no "instead of" to be found in the situation. Just because Apple invented Firewire doesn't mean it's not a standard.
Mod down posts with a "Free Mac Mini/iPod" sig, they're spam!
I don't have room on my desk at the moment, but having two 30" Cinema Displays side-by-side is just what the video and audio professionals live for.
Any decent music studio will have ProTools running with _at least_ two of the biggest displays available. One display is typically used for the "mix" window and the other is used for the "editing" window. With the abundance of virtual instruments and effects software popping up on-screen, more and more audio production is being done on-screen instead of using racks of "old-school" hardware. As this trend continues, screen space is more and more important.
As a software developer, I'm happy with one 23" Cinema display. But as a musician running ProTools, I'd love to have two big 30" displays side-by-side. I imagine the video folks would like that too, probably even more.
Rotating the display is supported on Macs on the Radeon 9800; the retail cards can do it out of the box, the OEM cards require a driver hack.
IBM launched the T221 over a year ago.
This baby is has "only" 22.2 inch, but a stunning resolution of 3840x2400 pixels (yes, that's 9.2 Megapixels)
The Nvidia Quadro Cards that support that kind of ultra-high resolution have been out for quite a while too.
So nothing new here, just shiny design.
Those banners have taken on a newer, more conflicted meaning for me, as I can't help but to notice two of Tiger's biggest features, "Dashboard" and "Spotlight" are carbon copies of some of the nicest third-party apps available for Mac OS X today, "Konfabulator" and "LaunchBar", respectively.
I'm of the opinion that UI advancements like LaunchBar and Konfabulator are of such high-quality that everyone should be able to take advantage of them, which means to break them out of their niche market (third party mac apps are by definition a fraction of a fraction of a market) they need to be rolled into the OS. So I'm happy about that. I'm happy that my Mom will be using "Widgets".
And "Dashboard" and "Spotlight" or whatever seem to be at least high-quality implementations of said UI advances; as they should be, as they are carbon copies of already thoroughly refined products.
But if Steve doesn't personally show up to Arlo's house with a cartoonishly overflowing wheelbarrow of cash, I'll be pretty fucking disappointed. Konfabulator was clearly Arlo's labor of love for several years, and overnight Apple has relegated it to second-ran status by slavishly copying it.
~jeff
I would have owned a mac years before I finally bought one had they been more affordable. What this comes down to is market segmentation - the ability to maintain margins at the high end without abandoning the low end. Doing this effectively is unquestionably a good thing.
If Apple neglects the low end, it is because they don't think they can maintain margins on their better toys if they go for the cheaper market.
But at the point where there are millions of people who would legitimately get a mac if there was a cheaper one available...well...
And again, I say this as a powerbook owner.
-Looking for a job as a materials chemist or multivariat
Be careful, Microsoft might also accidentally copy open sourced licensing from Tiger into Longhorn as well, can't have that now can we? ;)
;)
;)
I wonder if Apple did anything to Tiger to prevent it from being used in that Pear PPC emulator?
I also wonder what Tiger Woods thinks about the next MacOSX being named in his honor? If not Tiger Woods, then who, Tony the Tiger?
Also nice to see rather than offering a free upgrade ala BSD Unix, that Apple is charging for the Tiger upgrade. Very good for those who want to pay for service packs that fix the exploits that Panther had.
Remember, Slashdot does not have a -1 disagree moderation, and no, troll, flamebait, and overrated are not substitutes.
Have we come so far as to forget Desk Accessories?
I knew Arlo when he was working on Kaleidoscope; I don't feel sorry for him. He had a great idea, and Apple took it. He used to work for Apple; I'm sure if he had left on good terms they would have tried to work with him.
... can anyone of you fellow slashdotters see any which way Mickeysoft Windoze has an edge over todays Linux/x86 for standard working enviroments and Mac OS X for high end desktop computing experience? Could it just really be that MS has to get it's stuff together or else they're in for some serious business trouble?
Not only have I allways believed (known) that MS will be severely cornered by Linux/OSS, but I'm also starting to believe that they'll have a hard time positioning themselves between Linux and it's zero-fuss alternative Mac OS X.
I've been running Linux as my only OS since 3 years now and just recently got myself an iBook. I didn't change the OS and I have to say that I'm completely sold. Aqua has some quirky downsides compared to a well configured Fluxbox or Windowmaker, but all the rest is just one big consistency orgasm that makes up for it tenfold. The ease of a system that installs your printer by having it plugged into one of it's USB ports combined with a terminal that's two clicks away from running with Z-Shell and two clicks to get Apache running with PHP and MySQL simply is a completely different league than any Windows crap you can think of.
So, once again, my question in a different way: How many years before Mickeysoft effectively loses it's monopoly?
I say 3 years. 2007 and they're de-throned. That was my call 2 years ago and I'm getting more and more shure about it by the minute.
We suffer more in our imagination than in reality. - Seneca
Apple's had a bunch of failures. It's called "research and development." Whenever things get too complex and wierd to support the current appbase, they get the kuybosh and whatever's left is folded into the mainstream. In fact, I'm sure in about ten years we'll start hearing tales of all the cool OSX/iLife/iTMS/iTunes related functionality we'll never see, because it was just too wierd.
Hey freaks: now you're ju
Their is also a mention of unifying all service launching under a single command lauchd. this coul dbe nice to keep track of what is going on and making sure compatible sets of processes get launched together much the way firewall now adapts to running service automatically by opening and closing their ports as needed.
Some drink at the fountain of knowledge. Others just gargle.
In Apple's version, the widgets are hidden until the dashboard is activated, at which time they slide to the foreground.
In my opinion, Apple's solution is a lot more elegant, and one I'd actually use. It's a subtle difference, but it's different. I also applaud the addition of the widget launcher... much better than having all widgets running at all times.
The argument is really about whether this is a rebirth of Apple's old Desk Accessory application type or just a ripoff of the Konfabulator widget idea, or some hybrid of the two.
Notice how they have the Slashdot RSS in thier Screenshot?
What's really odd is that the new GeForce 6800 Ultra that they require to use the 30" Cinema Display HD isn't in that list.
I'm guessing this is a case of the right hand (Core Image team) not talking to the left hand (whoever worked the deal to use the GeForce 6800 Ultra with the display). Hopefully the new card, and thus the big new LCD, will be supported by the time Tiger ships.
"The worst tyrannies were the ones where a governance required its own logic on every embedded node." - Vernor Vinge
For what? For writing some cool widgets that acess interfaces Apple published allowing for that functionality to be capitalized on by themselves and any one else?
You're acting like this Service is something that would take years of design/development to produce when these add-ons were sitting around Apple Engineering for years as fun experiments for core engineers. How do I know this? When I worked there they had plenty of 'cool' prototype ideas just waiting to be added into the OS. How do you think they are able to always add 150 new features with each new full version?
What's next? Pay everyone who contributed to the development of XML now that Apple is integrating it into their OS? That seems to be a bit more impressive, just like the new MPEG-4, Part 10 Codecs.
Compare it to a new LCD TV. At least here, it turns out that the 30" display is only $500CDN more than a 30" LCD television. Apple's not charging an outrageous price, even if it is high. Apparently, the market is willing to bear that kind of price.
I've seen this display (actually, IBM's Roentgen display, the immediate predecessor of the Viewsonic model). It is utterly fantastic, with some caveats.
;-) or blockyness. The detail on high-res museum art scans was astonishing.
It was originally designed to have the resolution and quality needed for certain xray diagnostics and other image-sensitive telemedicine applications as a primary market (thus the Roentgen name -- the discoverer of X-Rays). One of the demos I saw used a modified version of (IIRC) Framemaker to display a document with footnotes with a 4pt physical size. The serifs on the font were clearly visible, with no eyestrain (due to the monitor, anyways
HOWEVER, this is roughly a 200dpi display -- current operating systems simply aren't designed for screens with pixel density this high. GUI widgets and text are often ridiculously small.
That, plus the original display required a four-head graphics card (or cards w/ four total outputs) to drive it. Looks like the newer Viewsonic uses four separate DVI-D connections.
I work for a scientific publisher, and every time we try to put one of our manuals either on disc, online, or as an e-book, they've all failed miserably compared with the print editions. Biologists, who you'd think would be on the cutting edge of technology, want their manuals in dead tree form. So viva the printing industry.
Most people up on stocks knows that Merrill Lynch was predicting new iMac announcements at WWDC.
They don't announce them and like pouting children Wall Street responds by punishing the stock down nearly $1.25.
I personally think Steve loves to poke at them once in a while.I expect the iMac to be announced closer to August in time to hit a big splash with the Education sector once again.
Am I the only one who is could care less about Tiger and more about XCode 2? I hope not. I'm not that much of a loser, am I? :)
... what really sets the G4 and the G5 apart from the P4 and Opteron is the presence of the VMX/Altivec/Velocity Engine unit (to use AIM/Motorola/Apple nomenclature). This unit allows you to process up to 4 32-bit values (128-bits) at the same time with one instruction (Single Instruction, Multiple Data).
Two words, one hyphenated:
auto-vectorizing compiler.
For those wondering what this is
Intel CPU's do have this technology as well, although it's half the width (64-bits at a time, rather than 128-bit).
When Apple posts benchmarks showing their machines to be faster than x86 machines, the benchmarks almost always make heavy use of these SIMD instructions... and rightly so. A vectorized application can be enormously fast compared to it's analog floating point/integer application.
The problem is that the SIMD instructions are relatively tough to use... you have to be very careful when taking advantage of them, otherwise your applications could actually run -slower-.
With the auto-vectorizing version of GCC included with XCode 2, we could start to see see some very respectable performance coming out of Macintosh applications in the future. Obviously you probably won't be able to simply recompile your application, but surely taking advantage of the auto-vectorization will be far easier than writing to the standard vec_x functions.
bash-3.00$ uname -a
SunOS panda 5.10 Generic sun4u sparc SUNW,Ultra-2
I'm extremely dissapointed that the Sync SDK still requires a $100 a year .mac membership in order to sync across a network. To date iDisk is the only "real-time" file sync system available for the MacOS, and there's no such thing as iDisk Server for MacOS. :(
I think the reason they don't ask you for a serial number is that they don't want to be intrusive....
If in fact you are a poor college student like myself, you can probably get a nice, legal version for cheap(in fact, my school, penn state, only charges you $5 for the media, the license is free).
I would rather have legal software(whether FOSS, low cost student options or otherwise) than pirated stuff, but maybe thats just how I roll.
HOWEVER, this is roughly a 200dpi display -- current operating systems simply aren't designed for screens with pixel density this high. GUI widgets and text are often ridiculously small.
Shouldn't be a massive problem to overcome on Mac OS X. The imaging layer Quartz is, after all, Display PDF. It shouldn't be too difficult for Apple to persuade Quartz to render at a different resolutions.
"Basically, Core Image means that any developer can write code that offloads image processing work to the GPU without knowing anything about how to program the GPU."
You mean like just about every graphic abstraction level out there? Do you think anyone programs low-level pixel shaders anymore?
There's nothing in Core that hasn't been done before, or is in the process of being created. Avalon is pretty much going to use DirectX from the ground up. By the time Tiger comes out, we'll be one year away from (presumably) Longhorn. By then, if all OSs aren't using similar tech something is seriously wrong.
I am working on my PhD in CS and have had to do a decent amount of coding. I have a Dual G5 2 GHz with the 23" display which sits right next to my Dual Xeon 2.4 GHz WinXP Pro box with a 19" display (which sits right next to my Duran 1.3 GHz Linux box with no monitor). I have to say that getting the 23" display was worth every cent. I barely touch my WinXP box, and only to run my applications. One important thing... the new displays are DVI, not the Apple Cinema Display adapter (which carries power and USB), which means that you should probably be seeing a driver from NVidia for windows boxes at some point. Do it. You will not be sorry (just poor).
Network Security: It always comes down to a big guy with a gun.
And you would be seriously wrong in saying that.
Just pay a little visit to the Konfabulator message boards, where co-developer Arlo has described "how low Apple has sunk."
Speaking as a registered Konfabulator user, I'm disgusted, too. In its blatant rip-off, Apple has not even had the decency of a Microsoft, which at least goes shopping when it wants to "innovate." Calling its Konfabulator widget rip-offs "widgets" is just the icing on the plagiaristic cake.
Apple has already addressed the one biggest issue I have with it--desktop clutter. Sure its cool to have the weather, newsfeeds, post-its, etc. all providing you continous data on your desktop, but they also just clutter up your desktop, having them exist off-screen and come on with a function key is a perfect idea.
Konfabulator already has this feature, too. Get your facts straight before enlisting as a corporate apologist.
Seriously guys, you had a chance to be running side by side with Mac OS X if many folks had spent time finalizing GNUstep. Considering the fact that Mac OS X is NeXTSTEP (pardon me for a probably wrong capitalization), copying OS X features would have been a lot easier.
Through '97 to 2001 I was using Linux with WindowMaker, hoping that one day GNUstep wouldl mature, while most coders were busy copying Windows features. It never happened.
Even before '97, most popular X window managers were in some ways rip-offs from the NeXTSTEP. Or, even one of the most popular file managers... TkDesk had column view!
Now that NeXT hardware is affordable and comes in the form of laptops, I cut the middle man and got an iBook and a PowerBook.
PS: I recently built a PC running XP for gaming purpose. It ain't that bad. Somehow the PC gives me a certain feeling of driving souped up Civic, though.
Let's be fair here: The Palm search technology is barely a shadow of the earlier Newton search technology. Some of the key differences: Newton searching was nearly instantaneous (two or three seconds to bring up all the search results), in contrast to the slower searching in the Palm; Newton brought all of the search results up in one big overview, instead of showing search results a page at a time like Palm does; and most importantly, Newton let you go back to the search results overview after clicking on one of the found items. I can't tell you how many times I have searched for something on the Palm, tapped the item on the third page, realized that it was not the item I was looking for...and then had to go back and perform the entire search all over again, get back to the third page again, and repeat ad nauseum. It is such a colossal waste of time, and it makes searching a chore, instead of an integrated and useful part of the system. The Newton may have had its flaws, but data structures and searching were not among them.