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.

Comments

iPod SDK!

[American AC in Paris]

Dear Steve,

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.

Re:iPod SDK!

[Anonymous Coward]

With such a huge screen, could this be an indication of a move into the family room? Or, AirTunes and Airport Extreme could be integrated with AirVideo using H264 and all Apple would need is a set top box (with DVI, similar to El Gato's Eye Home) and bam... a user would have access to all content on their mac in another room on their "TV" or any other display hooked into a set top box, with remote of course. Using that bandwidth couldn't they set up dumb clients that could run applications off a family server as well? Crazy theories are fun!

Re:iPod SDK!

[daviddennis]

You could do that, and it would be a Good Thing, but I think a $3,800 screen isn't that likely to appeal to the average householder.

Or maybe not. Here's a 30" flat panel TV that runs for $3,500 and has pretty low resolution. The Apple display makes that unit look like a joke, at least in resolution terms.

D

Speed

[scrotch]

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.

HFS+ support, SQLite, etc.

[This is outrageous!]

Three bits I found interesting here: in Tiger,

• UNIX utilities such as cp, tar and nsync can properly handle HFS+ resource forks
• command-line access to Spotlight
• new Open Source libraries for XML transformations (libxslt) and data persistence (SQLite)

Re:Microsoft...

[dasmegabyte]

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!

Apple drops MSFT stock price

[Random BedHead Ed]

Hey, check out the Dashboard page here:

http://www.apple.com/macosx/tiger/dashboard.html

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.

Re:Is it just me...

[Radon Knight]

Also, for the developers here, Apple's Core Image technology sounds pretty cool. 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. It's an abstraction layer that allows real-time image manipulations. Instead of applying a filter to a graphic in the GIMP and then having to wait as it munches through it in the CPU, the application of a filter can be offloaded to the GPU which will then burn through it, giving much faster (in many cases, real-time) previews.

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.

Re:A suggestion

[Have Blue]

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.

Re:Why do they keep doing this.

[Damek]

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...

One difference from Konfabulator

[Anaphiel]

In the most recent build of Konfabulator, with the "Konspose" feature that Apple seems to be aping, all of your widgets stay visible at all times, and hitting the Konspose key brings them to the front and screens the rest of your apps behind a textured background.

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.

Wheel Barrel of Money?

[tyrione]

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.

Re:Cost too dam much.

[Dixie_Flatline]

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.

Re:8 million pixels? Chump....

[John Whitley]

I've seen this display (actually, IBM's Roentgen display, the immediate predecessor of the Viewsonic model). It is utterly fantastic, with some caveats.

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 ;-) or blockyness. The detail on high-res museum art scans was astonishing.

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.

Gotta Love Wall Streets Reaction

[tyrione]

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...

[AusG4]

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? :)

Two words, one hyphenated:

auto-vectorizing compiler.

For those wondering what this is ... 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).

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.