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Apple Announces Tiger Release Date
GatorMarc writes "Well, it's official. Tiger will be released into the wild on April 29th with more than 200 new features, including Spotlight, Dashboard, Automator, VoiceOver, Safari RSS, Core Audio, and Core Image." Additional commentary available on ThinkSecret and MacWorld.
Here is the entire list of the 200+ New Features:
e s.html
http://www.apple.com/macosx/newfeatures/newfeatur
core image is an API... it will use the fasted thing on your Mac to do the rendering work.. if you have a 128 MB GFX card but the processor will get the job done faster, then it will use the processor.
I am the Alpha and the Omega-3
Tiger Up-To -Date details
What a deal for multiple computer households. I can't wait. I just wish the free update for new Macs was retroactive to January's announcements.
Comment forecast: Bits of genius surrounded by a sea of mediocrity.
The rumor sites are saying Java 5 is on the way also, as a separate update. This way older applications have a better chance of working on an out-of-the-box Tiger install.
Never ask for directions from a two-headed tourist! -Big Bird
I ordered a mini last friday, so I just called and spoke to the Apple CSR. She said any mac purchased before the announcement won't ship with Tiger and she told me about the up to date program ($9.95) upgrade. HOWEVER, it did not take any arm twisting to get her to take $10 off the purchase price of the mini so it's like I'm getting Tiger for free. Give it a try...
Apple Customer Service
1-800-676-2775
Quidquid latine dictum sit, altum viditur
You'll still get full hardware acceleration for Core Image. It'll use whatever hardware you throw at it. If the GPU can't do it all, then whatever it can't do will be handled by the AltiVec unit(s). CoreImage is heavily optimized to the extreme max!
According to http://developer.apple.com/java/faq/ Java 1.5 is available to download for Tiger, albeit as a "Developer Preview" - still it's there, and will be coming soon for full release
XenoWolf The Original - Since 1993
Tiger finally provides 64-bit apps, right? Not quite. In their 64-bit apps overview document, Apple slips in the bad news. Neither the Carbon or Cocoa APIs are 64-bit, so no graphics apps can be 64-bit. Their solution is to create a 64-bit command line app and wrapper it with a 32-bit frontend, communicating through pipes, shared memory, etc.
While that's all well and good and the Unix Way, its disappointing that graphical apps should be hamstrung in such a way. If you need big memory access and OpenGL, you've got quite a few hoops to jump through. As a linux weenie who made the switch, I'm saddened by crumbs we keep getting as Apple strings us along towards 64-bit land. Linux has been 64-bit for a very long time now and even Microsoft's 64-bit XP is fully 64-bit including graphics.
At least my G5 is still the 'world's fastest personal computer'.
Well, considering that it's still under NDA you're probably not going to see a lot of reviews on it. Or, you may see a lot of reviews that will then quickly disappear courtesy of Apple Legal. I did read a good one that I can't find right now (it was probably taken down) where the reviewer said that he couldn't go back to Panther after using Tiger. Tiger, even though the version he had was a little buggy, was so much faster than Panther that he'd rather live with the bugs than give up the speed. I think he was using either an iBook or a PowerBook.
Anyway, some real tests need to be done, but it's looking good so far.
--
Join the Pyramid - Free Mini Mac
infested with jello like fishes no melotron wishes
Well, I hate to present your trolling with these pesky facts, but Apple Automator will definitely help with improving productivity.
OMG! Wau!
Yea, Apple got sued by another networking company (sorry, can't remember the name off-hand) that owned the rights to the name Rendevous. Part of the settlement was that Apple change the name of its zeroconf implementation. They chose the unfortunate-sounding backup name Bonjour.
What's the problem? If you go to "Advanced" settings for an IMAP account, there's a box that you can check for:
"Automatically synchronize changed mailboxes"
Works OK for me...
Firewire isn't a requirement in itself, but rather an easy way to tell the age of a computer. Any Mac too old to have shipped with firewire is too old to be supported by 10.4
The new versions of iLife and OS X are included on all new machines. iLife split off from the OS a revision back (Panther). This is nothing new.
a preview is available to developers and it'll be available to all at a later date
-- i am jack's amusing sig file
I have a 1.5 Ghz Powerbook, and a 500 Mhz iBook. I'll be upgrading both. A lot of Wintel-types will complain that $129 is too much for a point release. But there are a lot of reasons I'll be shelling out my $200 that haven't been covered on the rumor sites, and will work fine on the older iBook:
- Preview now reads Adobe DNG images.
- Preview now reads RAW images.
- Built-in no internet connection needded dictionary.
- Built-in language translator.
- Built-in flight tracker.
- Envelope printing from Address Book.
- Fax status in the menu bar.
- Built-in unit conversion.
- Burn folders.
- Preview slide show (the only reason I still keep Graphics Converter around).
- Inline Safari PDF viewing (about time).
- Wireless image capture.
- Jabber IM support.
- Firewall stealth mode.
- Burn DVDs for other file systems.
Unfortunately, some of the 200 new features that Apple claims on this page are duplicates, or things that were already implemented, like Bluetooth headset support (I've been doing that in Panther for almost eight months). But still, there are a lot of reasons to upgrade, even if you don't have the latest greatest hardware.
-- I'm old enough to have lived through six different meanings of the word "hacker."
Well, you're in luck. Mac OS X (as of 10.2) came with an upgrade option called "Archive and Install". Basically, what it does is it takes your old system files, puts them in a special folder called "Previous System", and then loads a clean copy of the new OS. During this install you're given the option of saving all of your old settings.
That's actually the method I used to upgrade my Powerbook from Jaguar to Panther, and it worked almost flawlessly. (The only issue was that my Palm HotSync Manager stopped working, but a reinstall of the Palm software fixed that.) I'd personally say it's the best way to cleanly upgrade your system and maintain your current settings.
If you want more info on Archive and Install (as of Panther), just click here.
Just my $.02...
Just to correct the strange math in the parent post:
Good God, are you ever not a graphics developer.
I'm gonna make this fast because I'm sick of writing the same comment in every Tiger article. Core Image is Apple's implementation of hardware-accelerated 2D image processing. It's comparable to SGI's ImageVision Library, which you should look up right now.
Core Audio is a hyperlow-latency audio-processing framework.
Neither of these things is in any way related to Direct X, Open GL, or any form of 3D programming.
Careful with that "tray-loading" business: all iMac G4 models are tray-loading, and they're definitely supported.
http://www.dashboardlineup.com/
Dashboard Widgets
I called their customer service and since i missed the cutoff by 1 h 45 min (since it's of course PST) they said they'll let it slide. I got a second email confirmation from them this morning with todays date on it :)
:)
Apple you rock
There shouldn't be any problem running 10.3 binaries on Tiger, and if not, Fink always gives you the option to build your own Tiger-specific binaries from source.
Taft
I am TheRaven on Soylent News
Yes you can. Just do a force quit (Command + Option + Esc), select the Finder, and click Restart. The Finder will terminate and restart.
"It is difficult to get a man to understand something when his salary depends upon his not understanding it."
The shortest answer is Yes.
A slightly longer answer is No, but you can effectively disable it by simply excluding all or most of your system from the spotlight database.
The spotlight Preference Module contains a Privacy Tab. In this panel, you can add directories which are to be excluded from the index database. Presumably, adding / here would suffice to both save disk space and ongoing CPU costs. However, doing so broadly seems rather pointless. Certainly if you have confidential data on a network accessible volume you would be prudent to omit it. Likewise, if you have a subtree containing a large database, or collection of large files whose content is not usefully presented by spotlight, It might be worth excluding them.
On the whole, though, the incremental cost of maintaining the index is trivial and is correlated to the addition/modification of the files. This, in most environments, is both sporadic and requires negligible CPU and disk resources. If parts of your workflow have a file access pattern which makes spotlight less valuable to you, simply tailor spotlight to meet your needs.
Also, both system wide, and application specific spotlight queries are astonishingly efficient. Performing real time queries and displaying the results uses very little CPU and happens quite quickly. Even long queries (lasting seconds) do not appear onerous, since the result list is updated frequently as the search occurs, and incremental results are available.
The user decides which kinds of data are displayed for searches, and can tailor searches to a subset of volumes or systems when multiple disk (and remote volumes) are mounted.
Anyway, you can tailor the system to index less (or effectively nothing). Doing so, however, is unlikely to be of benefit. The system once primed appears so efficient that you would not save enough disk/time to make it worth your while. I suggest that rather than worrying about how to disable it to save processor cycles, you try it out for awhile and discover how it can save your brain cycles.
Spotlight is not a specific function or program. Rather it is a pervasive system. The base system provides a daemon which creates an initial index of all files, and subsequently handles requests for updating new or modified files. This process runs heavily niced in the background. While you can access a general Spotlight query tool using Command-Space, the real benefit of spotlight is its pervasiveness. Use the spotlight tool in the Preferences app to find out where a particular setting lives. (Note that Windows converts searching for a Windows-centric name will be presented with the Mac-centric counterpart.) Likewise in mail, the finder, and other programs, spotlight is available to help you find the context specific data you seek. Since developers can easily create spotlight plugins to parse data formats and export metadata, expect that most future applications will integrate well with the system.
It is important to note, that I found spotlight to be quite useful for a number of tasks, even though I only used it sporadically for testing purposes. Thus, I am inclined to be favorably biased towards it. On the other hand, I usually use a dual G5 Powermac and a fairly recent G4 17" powerbook. The fact that most of my use of spotlight was on a 400Mhz G3 powerbook suggests that my assessment of its efficiency is likely credible.
As always your time and your mood are the only true measures of a software tool, not my opinion.
"[Regarding the 'cloud,'] ownership was what made America different than Russia." -- Woz
Well, that's a universal problem with any networked file system, including NFS and SMB.
The problem (as I understand it) is that you have all these network file system calls happening in kernel mode; if one of these calls takes a long time to complete or timeout, the process is stuck in kernel mode and cannot be killed.
The "no kill" problem happens on any OS, including Mac, Linux, and Windows. Try this on Windows: Open notepad, Select File->Open, and type \\google.com\foo. Notepad will hang for 5 minutes, and Task Mananger will not be able to kill it.
Using a network file system over an unreliable network is very painful. I used to blame Windows for this, but it really is a universal problem.
The unique problem with OS X is that there is only one Finder process, and most other applications depend on this process in some way. If Finder gets stuck in a system call and cannot be killed, your desktop becomes quite unusable. Microsoft has mitigated this problem somewhat in XP by running multiple Explorer.exe processes; it's harder to get the desktop and taskbar to hang, but it's still easy to lock up individual Explorer processes.
I access network drives on my Mac all the time without any trouble. But you're right, if the network goes down it is perhaps more of a pain than it needs to be.
ENDUT! HOCH HECH!
QuickSilver was written by an individual who orignally developed the app for himself and then decided to share it with everyone. I imagine he'll (some day) make it shareware, but it's free till then.
Did you look at the Preview page? It gives a nice, simple explanation of some of the abilities of QS.
But I digress
The reason that it isn't described well is because it cannot be easily or simply described.
Instead, let me give you a few details.
For example, if I select a document on my desktop, I can pick "e-mail" then select from my address book who to e-mail (just by typing part of their name) and QS will launch mail, start a new e-mail and attach the file I selected. You can even FTP this way too.
All that said, you cannot really understand how QuickSilver will improve your OS X experience until you use it. I cannot live without it and often find myself wanting a Windows version as well. Give it a try - it's a drag/drop install and is removed just as easily.
I recommend the plugins: Mail, Clipboard (adds multiple clipboards), iTunes, Flashlight, Dictionary, Address Boook and Calculator. Most of these can be installed automatically when you run the app the first time if you choose.