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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
Let the copying of Tiger features into Longhorn... begin!
... it's Apple's WorldWide Developer Conference.
The Army reading list
If it's quiet around you, you can probably hear the collective screaming of the Longhorn team from Redmond WA that sounds like "AGHGHGHGHHGHHHHHH!!!!"
"Peter, did you copy all that down?"
"I got only the first half before I fainted. You?"
"I got most of it. Ok, the Longhorn features spec meeting is Wednesday morning, we have two days to put all that new Tiger stuff in!"
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.
(marketing drone sitting around table with other marketers. All sipping lattes)
"so, get this: Are you ready? We release computer displays. TA DA!!
BUT WAIT, there's more. Not only do we release displays that are the same as our current ones, but we will demonstrate the innovation... BY CHANGING THEM TO BE MADE OUT OF METAL!!!!
Everyone knows metal is faster than plastic. But, wait for it, wait for it, get this: we'll keep them the same price that they have been for over a year!!!!!!!!"
(thank you's and hugs for everyone followed by a power lunch, martinis and more fucking crazy pills)
'the Internet is right.'
Can you say "purchase order?" I'll take five.
irb(main):001:0>
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've been contemplating one of these screens, but never wanted to commit because I couldn't just slap in a KVM for my other machines (mainly the Windows 98 Box fo' Games and my wife's Windows 98 Box fo' Work Crap). Now, I don't have any excuse!
(Looks at price tag.)
Well, I guess I still have one....
52 Weeks, 52 Religions with John Hummel
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 knew I picked a bad week to not be rich.
Wanted: witty unique signature. Must be willing to relocate.
Apple's basically gone and done their own version of the coolness that is Konfabulator, little widgets that do a variety of things.
I think I can understand why they would need 2 DVI's for this, however, I have a question:
Could this also work if you had 2 new nVidia boards set up in SLI mode? Just have each board rendering one half of the screen, as they normally would in standard operations during gaming. This would take some of the strain off the single board that would ordinarily do the job, and probably allow for some faster/cooler effects to be rendered on this big-ass screen.
There is no mod option "-1: Disagree" for a reason. "Overrated" is not an acceptable substitute. Post something instead.
This is a completely Apple-created innovation and is not a rip-off. Oh no. Definitely not.
No, I'm serious. Really. Because despite all the talk of it being a clone of Konfabulator, it appears, in essense, to be Apple's original Desk Accessories brought into the 21st Century. Which is nice.
You are not alone. This is not normal. None of this is normal.
The new advanced video technologies (core image) seem to have longhorn like requirements:
ATI Radeon 9800 XT
ATI Radeon 9800 Pro
ATI Radeon 9700 Pro
ATI Radeon 9600 XT
ATI Radeon 9600 Pro
ATI Mobility Radeon 9700
ATI Mobility Radeon 9600
NVIDIA GeForceFX Go 5200
NVIDIA GeForceFX 5200 Ultra
Seems some current Mac models will not support this! You can bet there will now be users who think that 10.4 will not run on their machine just because core image/video does not. They just won't get the advanced new graphics.
These new displays are:
1. Larger
2. Use DVI instead of ADC, so you don't have to have mac hardware to use them.
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.
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/
So, they did it again. They released the new version of their software, and it has real new features that really enhance the experience and could really compel me to buy it. Hopefully they have also fixed some of the issues I had with especially Safari (unusable while loading slow page) and iChat (goes bad after receiving voice chat invite behind firewall).
Please correct me if I got my facts wrong.
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
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.
Ahh, so THAT's where CowboyNeal has been hiding while he is away from the Poll options! :)
Are you local? There's nothing for you here!
This is...
O
U
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R
A
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O
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...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...
Apple has just announced a 30-inch Studio Display capable of displaying a resolution of 2560x1600
Jobs also previewed Tiger
There Grrrrrrreaat!
Aha! So this is why nVidia has been working on the 2 card video load balancing system.
Overrated / Underrated : Moderation
So widgets are a direct ripoff of "Konfabulator".
How is "Konfabulator" anything other than a direct ripoff of the OS 9 Control Strip?
That's a serious question. I've never used Konfabulator.
Irritable, left-wing and possibly humorous bumper stickers and t-shirts
Just a nitpick...Apple bought SoundJam (and the team who wrote it), and turned it into iTunes.
How about the tons of widget developers for Konfabulator? Now they can get their project to *way* more people instead of the small segment of users who bought Konfabulator.
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.
You should simply never buy anything, and that way you'll never have that problem.
sulli
RTFJ.
Fortunately they also announced these products to the development teams today.
In other news, starbucks stores around the Apple campus are open 24 hours a day over this summer...
-Adam
"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.
16:9 is OK for watching movies, I guess, but when I'm writing code, it's VERTICAL SPACE that's at a premium, not horizontal space.
I would love a "tall" (or at least 4:3) Apple Cinema Display instead of these shorties they keep making.
Best Buy can have you arrested
It seems even the Konfabulator authors are surprised by this. Even as a mac fan, I think it is reprehensible.
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.
It appears you can mount the Apple displays using a VESA mount - you could probably therefore rotate the display 90 degrees, and rotate the image appropriately...of course, this probably wouldn't be supported, so might need a software hack or the like...
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.
If their high-end Mac starts at $3K, the iMac base is $1300, the lowest iBook is $1100, and the eMac is $800, what do you consider MID-RANGE?????
This is about as insightful as saying BMW can't compete with a used Hyundai.
To lessen the Flamebait aspect, quality costs money or time. If you want to build your own hot-rod in the back yard over a year that's great, but don't go pooh-poohing my brand new Corvette over it.
R: That voice. Where have I heard that voice before? B: In about 365 other episodes. But I don't know who it is either.
As sarcastic as it sounds, it's true. The Desk Accessories weren't *real* apps, just little buggers running in an early 1980's kind of multitasking mode.
o sh &story=Puzzle.txt&sortOrder=Sort%20by%20Date&detai l=medium&search=Desk%20Accessory
http://folklore.org/StoryView.py?project=Macint
So yes, it's a rip off of Konfabulator. But Konfabulator was a rip off of Apple's original. Sort of like how Apple did labels in pre-OS X and Unsanity provided them as an APE module. Then Apple re-integrated them in OS X.
What matters here is it's still an opportunity for 3rd parties to provide a superior alternative to a basic function provided by Apple. Watson is better than Sherlock. xPad is better than stickies. Camino is better than Safari. ( of course, these are all arguable )
Ho hum. I don't really care. But from a usability standpoint it's a *great* idea to have my sticky notes *appear* ( rather than fly away ) when I move my mouse cursor to a certain corner. I like the sound of that, since I use stickies all the time.
lorem ipsum, dolor sit amet
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.
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.
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.
When you make tools that enhance the OS, For any OS. You suffer the risk that the OS maker will use it in the next version. In general this is better off for the consumers. Because they don't have to search for a tool that they don't know that they need, then pay extra money for it. But if your tool enhances the interface (Apple's bread and butter selling point), they will take it (if they can) or buy it (if they have to) to put it in their software to make it better.
So if you want to make a living off your tools you better copyright or paten it, so Apple will need to pay for it to put it in their next OS.
If something is so important that you feel the need to post it on the internet... It probably isn't that important.
Sheesh!
--- Ban humanity.
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.
http://www.apple.com/macosx/tiger/safari.html
Also, those who are FIREFLY fans will note the movie is mentioned in the post...
If you look at the calculator in the Dashboard demo, you'll notice it says 1.337!
I love a company with a sexy UNIX based OS and a sense of humor.
I can't speak for Konfabulator, which I never really found useful, but LaunchBar is already facing stiff competition from QuickSilver, a free and considerably more intuitive work-alike.
I don't know where you get the idea that Apple is replacing these programs. When they released Safari, did everybody stop using other web browsers? Does nobody use Entorage or MailSmith or Eudora just because Apple includes Mail? Are people going to stop using NetNewsWire just because you can read RSS feeds in Safari now? Don't people use VLC dispite QuickTime?
crushing the very developers that make people switch to the Mac because of the cool things that shareware developers do.
I don't know about you, but I switched because of the things that Apple had developed.
Really? Abandoning the midrange never hurt BMW, Rolex or Tiffany's.
And Apple didn't abandon the midrange. They keep reducing the price on last year's best until it's at the midrange level. I can't speak for their LCD prices ( I dunno what a good price is for an LCD with the warranty, connector, refresh rate, footprint, power draw, resolution and viewing angle of a mac LCD ), but their laptops and desktops are very competetively priced. Not "cheap," certainly not on par with slim margin commodities market PC offerings that you might find at New Egg, but comparable with what you'd get from other sources.
Even so, innovation drives prices down, not vica versa. There is no reason to charge less for high end goods unless there is a HIGHER end good people care putting their money towards. And since the demand for things like "big fucking LCDs" exists regardless of the price, Apple can almost print their own money with this stuff.
Hey freaks: now you're ju
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.
I would say there are more Konfabulator users that were surprised and or upset than its developers. The Konfabulator idea has been around for a long time, since early 90's. It's just that Arlo and crew had the best implementation around that I've ever seen.
If Apple wants the developers code, it will purchase. Its done so with Soundjam (which became iTunes) and other applications. If your idea just furthered their idea, then obviously they just go with theirs. According to the preview Dashboard will have its on SDK kit. That said, it may be possible for people to develop simultaneously for both Dashboard and Konfabulator, but that depends more on the backend engine.
I really LOVE Konfabulator, but that said, 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. A bring the widgets out to play, now put your toys away concept.
Hell, if you want to spend some real money, buy one of these babies.
3840 x 2400. 9,216,000 pixels for about $6,300. Per pixel, that's cheaper than buying two 30" Cinema displays.
... okay so now opinions are wrong? I'm just saying I like the software and dislike the hardware prices, is that so wrong? Why even have a replies if all your gonna do is say "STOP SHARING". I'm not going to force apple to do anything, I just would like it if they did this...They mos def will not listen to a single post, and btw Unicorns went exthinct a long time ago...weirdo. Of course, you only said that because you are an idiot, and I am not disappointed.
For The Best Jazz/Hip-hop fusion > COlD DUCK
Now on the other hand all this looks surprisingly similar to my own application Watch It. But I'm just going to rewrite it-- no bitching here. I was even thinking about writing a calculator using the same basic design, transparent and resizable. But I thought no one would use it so I haven't created the application which would be trivial. Now, however, I might reconsider writing it, because there are going to be a lot of users still using Panther and earlier after this comes out.
Win a signed Stephen Carpenter ESP Guitar from the Deftones: http://def-tag.com/?r=0008781
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!
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.
NEWSFLASH!!! Most consumer goods come out of the same plants as other goods. And yet, the quality is vastly different between them. The VALUE is in the design, not just of the outside, but of the inside. If you spec out a monitor with substandard parts in an inefficient layout, your Chinese fab will deliver a monitor with those parts in that layout whether it's right or not. After all, they have your reconditioning contract, too.
Take the hook off a Mac desktop and compare the internals to any PC desktop. Looks the same -- from three feet away. Get any closer and you realize how different the "commodities" really are.
If you don't care about such things, fine. Use what you want to use. Just realize that you can throw together eggs, ham and butter and still make a shitty omelette.
Hey freaks: now you're ju
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
Umm... have you heard of this thing called Darwin?
I _HATE_ it when people bring up Darwin as if its equivalent to Mac OSX. Using Darwin is _not_ like using Mac OSX, and that is what is important to the user.
You want people to switch to Linux??? Make gnome work as well as Aqua and you're half-way there.
-B
Jesus tap-dancing christ! After years of putting up with Microsoft's often sluggish innovations/updates and overall unreliability, I switched to a Mac. Now, I barely have time to learn my system before the next major update comes out. The speed of change is giving me geek-whiplash. I was surprised that Mac released Safari, did a couple of minor updates, but then hasn't continued to update it for Jaguar (well, at least not to the extent that they have for Panther). If they only focus support and innovation on the newest OS, but then release a new system every year, people are going to feel that it's a big scam and a bad investment. OSes should be a stable foundation for building more great software on top of. Apple is just rebuilding foundations and there's not enough time for users to build a strong and consistent powerhouse on top.
Plus, it took me months to get into the groove of using expose and the new finder design! I like it, but give me time to appreciate the system in it's entirety before releasing a new one. I don't think I'm going to buy this update - a lot of the new features just seem superfluous.
An operating system shouldn't be 100% old news after only a year or so. Panther still looks, feels, and acts spiffy and new to me. If there's a small update or addition to be had, make it a downloadable update. Most of these features just aren't worthy of an entire new release.
I'm not saying I miss Micro$oft's inconsistent OS updates, but I definitely think Apple should slow down and take their time a little more than they are.
Hey freaks: now you're ju
Have we come so far as to forget Desk Accessories?
i know some jackass always says it, but I'm not paying $129.95 for the latest upgrade. I'll just wait for Lion, Cheetah, or OrangeTabby, whatever Apple's next cat upgrade is. it's all supercool stuff, but i'm a poor college student, not big-time 'i think i'll drop three grand on one of those cool 30 inch monitors... maybe two' core image looks real promising for UI programmers.
I do hope they meant "rsync".
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.)
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.
Konfabulator was a very original piece of software. I can't think of anything else like it. Apparently, Arlo can't as well... and he once worked as a UI designer for Apple.
Dashboard is practically a direct rip-off of Konfabulator. It comes with similar default "widgets," widgets are transparent and glossy, and new widgets can be developed with JS.
Moreover, Apparently Konfabulator is very popular at Apple and Pixar (lots of registered Apple and Pixar users). Schiller supposedly loves the damn thing.
I have no problems with Apple adding something like this into MacOS. However, once they start stomping on the rights of small developers, that's fucking low. This is the second time they've done this, and this time it's an even more blatant case of copyright infringement.
If Apple had developed Konfabulator, and Arlo had developed dashboard 1 year later, Arlo would've been nailed by Apple's legal department.
Why should we even attempt to develop platform specific utilities and software for OS X? If it becomes popular, Apple is going to snag it, make money off of it, and not compensate the original authors.
"Things are more moderner than before- bigger, and yet smaller- it's computers-- San Dimas High School football RULES!"
Yes, it's such a shame that Apple "ripped off" an idea that they developed in the first place! Talk about bad apples on the part of the Konfabulator folks. They rip off Apple, hope no-one calls them on it, then flip out when Apple puts the functionality back into their OS because they discovered that people found it useful.
To the Konfabulator folks: deal. Or innovate. Don't rip off an idea a company implemented over ten years ago and complain when they implement it again.
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.
Honestly. I don't care.
I don't care who did it first. Like I don't care who created the window GUI first. I hate the idea that someone owns an idea.
People wanted something like Konfabulator but without the problems that follow Konfabulator. Apple now gives it to them. And I really don't care if it is similar in some way. Konfabulator took an old idea and made it better. Apple now does the same. The Konfabulator guys have no rights to start a riot about this. Now they are forced to make their product better. So basically the users win.
If Apple had been successful at stopping everyone else using the window system we never would have gotten a window systems we now have. If it is possible to completely own an idea there would never be any innovation. There would be no progress.
How would the world be if the Beatles would have registered Rock'n'Roll and no one been allowed to make anything similar.
To take an idea further you must first steal it. And I don't give a damn who made it first. Sure. Give them credits. Don't take it and say you made it first. But take the idea and make it better.
Otherwise we would still be trying to fish up ants with treebranches. Or no wait. The chimps already have registered that and copyrighted.
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.
... 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
"To change the color or font for a sticky note, flip the note around -- all Widgets controls are on the back to keep them out of sight until you need them."
Sounds like Sun and Apple are finally taking computer users to the next level with 3D interfaces. It'll be interesting to see what Microsoft comes up with.
Microsoft has this idea covered already. Each copy of Longhorn will come with a colorful selection of Post-It notes that can be affixed onto the back of your monitor. I think they already have the pattent application in the works too. Admit it... the people at Microsoft are just too smart for the rest of us.
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.
It's almost always been this way. Some feature gets added by third-party developers - via shareware, etc. Apple takes notice of the usage, and provides a less klunky, more integrated version of the same App. Has been this way, will continue to be this way. Go back to System... what.. 3?
Watson did Sherlock better, Apple did Watson better.
Konfabulator
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.
How about a tiger, the animal. The one in the jungle.
Notice how they have the Slashdot RSS in thier Screenshot?
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.
Konfabulator is not an original idea at all, sorry. Classic Mac OS had desk accessories since 1984, Windows 98 had its Active Desktop (which nobody ever used because it was too unstable, but did much the same thing). The only thing new here is using Javascript, and Windows did that almost a decade ago.
I have sympathy for Perry and Arlo, but I'm not about to vilify Apple over bringing DAs into the 21st century.
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!
If you look at the quicktime movie of the Dashboard in action, one of the Widgets is a little game called "Tile" that is like the "Puzzle" desk accessory in OS 6+... Now nobody can complain anymore that there aren't any games for MacOS!!!
"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=
Please tell me you're joking. As far as technical competence goes, bioligists are just above the pre-med morons in my book. I know biologists - at a top school - who use tables to figure out buffer pH's because using a simple equation from freshman chemistry was too hard.
I try to avoid gross oversimplifications, but generally chemists do a LOT better in bio classes than the other way around. (I'll let the physicists make similar comments about chemistry, and the mathematicians do the same for physics).
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
Gawd, you just don't get it do you, there are designers in the studio where I work who will literally wet their khaki corduroy pants over this, not matter how many video cards it requires. Screen real-estate isn't important to the average programmer geek or management wonk, but to a designer (who by definition are very visual people), to have all their tools on screen at once is priceless.
The cost, sure it's expensive, but two things; one, it's Apple, Apple users expect to pay more, and most of the time prefer to pay for quality over quantity, two, for the percieved effect it will have on productivity, a couple of decent paying clients will cover the cost of one of these.
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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 had the same experience as you -- just 2 weeks ago I emailed a rant to some friends about the fact that the WIMP / Desktop metaphor has been only incrementally improved since 20 years ago. (I'm serious -- while there have been lots of increments, where's the revolution?)
.cshrc", not to mention more intuitive than "open -a TextEdit .cshrc". The man pages are a joke. Xcode 2 promises better developer documentation, but we shall see.
I mentioned an idea like Dashboard / Konfabulator, without consciously knowing about Konfabulator. Now that I know about it, I am trying it out and I will pay for it if I continue using it.
What about other innovations? I also use Workstrip, which solves a few weaknesses in the Dock.
I'm still waiting for CDE-like 'workspaces' however -- where windows and desktops can be hidden easily according to function. Expose is a good feature, but I would also like workspaces.
Another thing I wonder about: why hasn't Apple done a better job of integrating the GUI with the CLI? I just found out about open(1), which can send an open message to any Finder application. But it's much easier on other Unix systems to simply type "edit
What about shells / terminal apps? Why are we still having to use only the keyboard to navigate the Command Line Interface? The only GUI elements that seem to have made it into the terminal are a scroll bar and a split window. I could imagine at least two improvements: a split window with the history buffer, and better navigation of CLI text (perhaps using table cells).
It's possible that I'm the only guy in the world who wants better GUI/CLI integration, but I suspect not.
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.
Aggregating DVI channels is pretty extreme, but I wonder how high a resolution LCD manufacturers could produce using (multiple) PCI express? Decent frame rate as well?
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.
"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.
Agreed. I don't feel the need for multiple desktops now I've got Expose either. But to make my window management experience complete, I'd like to see 2 (small) extra features added:
1) The ability to map the Yellow window button to Hide instead of Minimize. I never use it anymore, as it's much quicker to double-click on the title bar.
2) MOST importantly, once I've Hidden an app, I'd like to be able to unHide selected windows from that app. I'll give you an example. Open the Terminal app and start several instances that you then use to login to remote systems. I use a connection script that automatically sets the title to the connection name, and I can view/select the any one of them from the list presented by Ctrl-Click on the Terminal icon in the Dock. It would be VERY useful to Hide the Terminal windows and then just open up the ones I want to work on leaving the rest hidden. The advantage of this is that it doesn't clutter up the "iconized" portion of the Dock.
If you want all the Terminal windows back on the screen then (as now) you can just click the icon on the Dock to unHide them.
Another example where this would be useful is with Mail. Currently if I Hide Mail.app and then use Ctrl-Click to select "Compose New Message" from the Dock menu, then I get a new compose window, but it also unHides Mail.app in the process. I then have to iconsize Mail.app before I can continue because I didn't want to see it in the first place.
Is any of this making sense?
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.
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.