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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'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.
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...
There are two main differences that I see between Konfabulator and Dashboard, and they're important to me.
1) Konfabulator costs money. It's a nice app, it really is. I used it for a while, but it's not to me, worth the $25 they want for it.
2) Konfabulator doesn't hide itself until I need it. It's always there, sitting on the desktop or flaoting above everything else. Dashboard appears only when I want it to and then goes away.
T Money
World Domination with a plastic spoon since 1984
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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
You're right, I don't think spotlight seems like LaunchBar - but it does remind me a lot of Quicksilver. But that doesn't mean these are new ideas...
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.
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.
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 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.