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!

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.

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.