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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.
But congratulations to Apple for what sounds like it will be another quality release. I personally don't plan on switching any time soon, but it pleases me to see some strong competition re-entering this marketplace. While I doubt this is the end of Microsoft, it certainly means they will have to get off their asses. The complacency of the last five years is over.
If you don't know where you are going, you will wind up somewhere else.
What I want to know is when the Mac Mini gets updated with a graphics card that CoreImage can use to its full extent.
..now we'll need to a new product to speculate about every other day!
Jimmy
Sunday he wins the Masters Golf Tournament and already they are naming an OS release in his honor after him!
According to the new system requirements. old tray-load iMac owners, and probably old Firewire-less iBook owners too, are at the end of the OS line. While sad, this isn't entirely surprising. But, since Firewire seems to be the deciding factor, one wonders what the fate of the newer but still Firewire-less slot-load 350MHz iMacs will be.
Here is the entire list of the 200+ New Features:
e s.html
http://www.apple.com/macosx/newfeatures/newfeatur
This is great news, but the lack of mentioning Java 5 makes me think that it won't be included right away. That's sad news for me...
"Let your heart soar as high as it will. Refuse to be average." - A. W. Tozer
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.
If by last night you mean April 12th (after midnight), then you'll be able to get it for $10 shipping and handling. Otherwise, you're gonna have to call and talk them out of it. In fact, I'd probably call today and let them know. Who knows, you only missed the announcement by a day, maybe they'll give you a discount, or just send it for $10.
I've been waiting to purchase a mini until the announcement since I knew if you ordered beforehand you won't get a free upgrade. Off to the Apple store I go...
The more I see of MacOS X and the more features they put in there, the more I realise just how slow devopment on the Windows platform is. Think of the progression thats been made from Apple, then compare that to Windows. The last great leap was done with Windows 2000 IMO: but even then for the desktop users there was nothing really knew.
Spotlight, Dashboard & Automator all look like great additions. I know there are perhaps Windows alternatives, but can any of them claim to be as slick as Apples?
I'm a Windows user, but as time goes on the thought of an mac mini just to give the OS a try becomes more and more tempting.
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!
from the forward-down-forward/down-punch dept.
Heh. Version 10.4.1 should be called Tiger Uppercut.
Am I the only one excited about the core data technology? In every write up of Tiger I have seen so far have not mentioned this new technology.
I mean come on. It gives you save, undo and redo functionality for free, no extra coding. Plus if you make good use of cocoa bindings in interface builder you could build a complete simple application with out writing a single line of code manually. That is pretty freaking sweet.
Maybe its just the geek in me but I think its cool. Plus you can save in multiple different file formats, binary, xml, or sqllite.
More Here: http://developer.apple.com/macosx/tiger/coredata.h tml
Anyone have any reviews for Tiger on any hardware platform?
Sure thing. Here you go:
It's total shit on the Athlon XP 2500+. You can't even get it to boot up. Less functionality than either Linux or Windows.
I hear it works much better on other platforms, specifically Apple-built PPC systems, but you will have to look at other reviews for that information.
Information wants to be anthropomorphized.
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.
--
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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.
I'd totally making the switch if it was named "Liger." It's pretty much my favorite animal. It's like a lion and a tiger mixed... bred for its skills in magic.
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...
Did you even try Intel? I hate AMD-fanboys on Slashdot.
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.
Any fink developers out there? Will fink be down for the count for awhile, until new binary packages are made for Tiger?
One of the interesting things about the move to 64-bit is that unlike going from IA32 to AMD64 on Windows, on Mac OS X there is no speed boost from targetting the G5. All the speed boosts you're ever going to get from compiling for a G5 are there and enabled in Panther; all you get from moving your app to 64-bit is 64-bit addressing, and as such, a slight drop in speed. This will hopefully be offset by the fact that your app actually needs more then 4GB of memory space. This sort of makes 64-bit apps less neccessary/desirable then it does in the PC world.
My English teacher once told me that two positives don't make a negative. Two words for her: Yeah, right.
I picked up one of the Mini's and they are a blast to work on. The great Mac interface, lots of quality software, and Unix under the hood. Been getting up to speed on Apple development and nice free tools. Plus it is a great central box. You can get a MS Remote Desktop Client, then it has ssh for get to my Unix boxes. So one nice place to work from.
You're missing something massively important. The reason why we chose not to release 64-bit versions of the UI frameworks is that they run much slower than the 32-bit versions.
User interface code is really pretty messy when you get right down to it. You're doing a lot of abstraction, moving a lot of pointers and integers around. On exactly the same G5-based computer, a 64-bit UI is going to run considerably slower than a 32-bit UI because of cache exhaustion. Because you're using pointers that are twice as big as you need them to be, you can only fit half as many of them in the various caches that are there to speed up your computer's performance. That effectively cuts your caches in half.
So we had two choices: Either waste a ton of developer time releasing 64-bit-clean versions of the UI frameworks and then tell our developers not to use them, or just don't ship them at all.
Believe me, the Final Cut Pro and Shake teams were pissed off about this. Their expectation was that they'd be able to release 64-bit versions of their applications by NAB. But a 64-bit version of FCP with 64-bit Pro Kit is less interactive than the 32-bit version on the same hardware, for very marginal gains in actual utility. FCP is already very good at making use of up to 2 GB of RAM when dealing with hundreds of gigabytes of data on disk; adding 64-bit support would have helped few and hindered many.
Yes, but does it come with a version that's not a DVD too? Until fairly recently, Apple was still selling computers with just a CD-ROM drive (eMac, and iBooks for the education market). Will these people be able to buy a CD version, or are they just screwed?
Because they know that as humans, people will feel cheated for not getting a volume discount and having to have 5 identical CDs and just pirate instead. Apple is simply increasing the profit margin on a box with 1 CD by putting more licenses in it (probably just costs extra ink) and customers get to know they're doing the legal thing and getting a good deal to boot.
If you reply, do so only to what I explicitly wrote. If I didn't write it, don't assume or infer it.
APPLESCRIPT IS A NIGHMARE!!! I wish they would dump it for a usable OSS language like perl or python.
If only there were a way to run Perl or Python on OS X...
I recently bought a Mac (about a month or two ago) so I don't qualify for the cheap upgrade as far as I know. But I'm still definitely going to pay for this upgrade.
My experience with OS X has been nothing short of amazing. I look between my Mac and my XP machine and wonder why the heck I'm using the latter, when the former is more stable, easier to work with, and generally a hell of a lot more slick. Everybody who's come by has looked at it and scoffed, but when you sit them in front of it and have them play around, most people are sold on the things.
"I'm a leaf on the wind. Watch how I soar."
-Hoban Washburn
Taft
One of the things really improved in this release that gets no press is TextEdit.
Already better than WordPad or Notepad (primarily because you can operate either ina normal or rich text mode), it has a lot of great enhancements - you can read Word files more easily (I think it comes with table support now and can read XML files saved out by Word), you can do bulleted lists, and even better you can save as HTML with CSS support! So Tiger now has a nice and very simple HTML editor included.
TextEdit could probably handle something like 80% of the documents people ever work on now.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
I tend to agree that it's not innovative, nor revolutionary. It is evolutionary, because it's a 21st century update of Desktop Accessories, which precluded Konfabulator by about 20 years.
I like big butts and I cannot lie.
I am TheRaven on Soylent News
I think Apple is poised to make quite an entry into a PVR market in some capacity. I keep looking at Dashboard and think how simple it would be to control your TV, DVD player, iTunes, etc with that. Hm...imagine now training the Speech part of Tiger to work hand-in-hand with the Dashboard components. Oh sweet mother of all things holy...now you're controlling iTunes or your PVR (Mac Mini with Eye TV?) with your voice? Yum...yum I say.
"He uses statistics as a drunken man uses lampposts...for support rather than illumination." - Andrew Lang
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.