Slashdot Mirror
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
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.
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
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...
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.
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."
Please note that "64-bit" encompasses two completely different things:
Note that you can already use 64-bit registers and do 64-bit math. This is more of a compiler issue than an operating system issue. (The only change needed to the kernel is to save the full contents of the registers on context switching, rather than only the low 32 bits.)
What would 64-bit pointers give you if you could use them?
How many apps actually need to address more than 4GB of RAM at once? Usually they're only doing that if they are dealing with big files. A process using 32-bit pointers can do this using mmap() and if used correctly the kernel can load the whole file into RAM (if possible) and just adjust virtual memory tables so that the same chunk of 32-bit address space points at different parts of the file as needed. The app just has to make the right mmap() call to cause the kernel to shuffle around the virtual memory mappings to change which physical page is mapped onto which virtual page in that process's virtual memory.
If you do need 64-bit addressing for some reason (although it's extremely rare for it to be actually necessary, nearly everything can just mmap() files instead), then fork off a separate process and let it do whatever needs to be done with that huge amount of RAM. Use your favorite form of IPC or shared memory to talk to that process.
What does Tiger give us that's not already in Panther? Well, all apps will see some performance improvement as various system libraries now use 64-bit operations for arithmetic where appropriate. Processes using 64-bit pointers now have some important libraries available, most notably libsystem (Apple's combined libc and libm) which was not available for processes using 64-bit pointers in Panther. Not all libraries are available in 64-bit versions (Carbon and Cocoa, for example) but there's no good reason for them to be. There's no good reason for it. Apps run slower when using 64-bit addressing on current systems, so only those rare processes which really need the extra addressing space should be using it, and user interface code certainly doesn't fall into that category.
Apple's information on 64-bit computing in Tiger is available here.
So you see, the full capabilities of your 64-bit CPU are being used. 64-bit math is up to the application writer to use the appropriate compiler options (and in Tiger the system libraries will also use 64-bit math internally) whereas 64-bit addressing is already used by the kernel (even in Panther) to handle virtual memory, allowing the use of more than 4 GB of RAM (although most processes will use 32-bit addressing and will thus be limited to only 4GB each).
-- Tim Buchheim
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.