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Tiger's 200 New Features
An anonymous reader writes "If this hasn't already been posted, Apple set up a page listing,
by software section, all of the new features for OS X.4, or Tiger.
Given that every upgrade touts over a hundred features, it is interesting to see all of the enhancements to this upgrade to see what adopters get out of the box.
There are a lot which are tweaks, some new non-Spotlight oriented features and a few that are interesting, mostly security related features.
2 words: stealth mode.
"
It seems to run a bit quicker with every release, unlike my poor SP2 machine. Go OSX.
OS X's firewall is very competent (ipfw). However, Apple's GUI for it was quite rudimentary, for good and for bad. It basically had a button to turn it on or off and one to open ports.
Most consumer-oriented firewalls overdo the configurability and impose the log on users who would be better of not knowing how many malicious and non-malicious "attacks" are directed towards their computers, as long as the firewall blocks them. It's the attacks that aren't blocked / logged that should be interesting.
Apple always strives to strike a balance between "user-friendliness" and power. Apparently they decided they should give stealth mode to those who need it and make it easier to view a log.
Apple uses a different version numbering system. Just because it is called 10.4 doesn't really mean anything - it could just be as simply called Mac OS X 2005 or v4.0 or Mac OS Tiger for all it matters.
10.3.6
Comparing to Windows Service Packs, there has been two for XP. Apple has released 9 "service packs" for Mac OS X Panther.
10.3.1
10.3.2
10.3.3
10.3.4
10.3.5
10.3.7
10.3.8
and now 10.3.9.
These have added new features, tweaks and improved security also.
I am sick of people whinging about apple charging for "point updates;" it's is an old and worn out argument and it comes down to the simple point of if you don't want it, don't buy it.
Your comment just lost a couple of cool points in my book.
I think the most interesting new features of Tiger are under the hood. Those four new frameworks add an incredible amount of functionality into the base OS, which can be easily used by future applications. For examle, CoreImage adds tons of image processing features a la Photoshop, is extensible, and uses the GPU.
Amazon has a $35 rebate on Tiger, which brings the price down to $94.99.
If you're a student/educator, you can also take advantage of Apple's educational pricing - $69 w/ free shipping.
Apple also posted a more readable comparison table with Panther and Jaguar at http://www.apple.com/macosx/upgrade/compare.html .
Windows 2K = Win 5.0
Windows XP = Win 5.1
Windows Server 2003 = Win 5.2
It just means that every computer has to index network volumes for its self,
No it doesn't, it means the server creates the index of its volumes and the client machines have access to that index. As I said in another post in this thread, Apple was doing that back in 1999 with Sherlock, except the index was separate instead of part of the file system, and the indexing ran at intervals instead of happening in real time.
~Philly
Okay, I'm on a disinformation-squashing crusade today.
Google indexes content. This is important. Hugely, massively important. But we've had content indexing for a long time now. It only takes us so far.
What's more important than content indexing is metadata indexing.
Metadata literally means "data about data." It's information about your files that isn't actually stored in your files. For example, let's say you take a photograph and store it in your Pictures folder. Spotlight can automatically extract some metadata from the picture all by itself. It can tell that the picture is 2048 pixels across and that it's in Nikon RAW format and that you took it on December 24, 2003. The computer knows this stuff already.
Other metadata was inserted automatically when the picture taken. For example, the camera inserted metadata identifying it as being taken with a Nikon D1 using a 1/250 exposure and a 2.8 f-stop.
Spotlight indexes all that stuff.
But there's a third type of metadata. In addition to intrinsic metadata and automatically inserted metadata, there's descriptive metadata. Your computer knows that the picture is 2048 pixels across and that it was taken with a Nikon D1, but it can't know that it's a picture of your niece Katie. That's where iPhoto comes in. You use iPhoto to write a descriptive caption -- "Lawrence's daughter Katie on Christmas Eve" -- and that caption gets stored in the photo as metadata. Spotlight indexes it.
So if you come along later and search for "Christmas pictures," Spotlight will find that photo. Because it knows it's a picture, and because you described it as being related to Christmas.
Now, that's today. (Well, in two weeks.) What's next? We're going to find new ways of attaching automatic metadata. Here's one we've been talking about a lot: Your laptop has a GPS receiver in it. Tiny thing, about the size of a pencil eraser. At all times, your laptop knows where it is on the face of the Earth, accurate to about thirty feet.
Every file you create is tagged with three new, additional pieces of metadata: latitude, longitude and altitude. That's on top of the date and time data we already attach to every file.
Say you go on a business trip to Seattle. A year later, you can search your laptop for that e-mail you sent to your coworker Tom while you were in Seattle.
More: Using a very simple user interface, you can define locations. Sitting at your desk, you tell your laptop to refer to that location as "work." Any file created within a 100-yard radius of that location will be returned in a search for "work." On your couch you define a location called "home." Sitting at the coffee shop you define a location called "Starbucks." And so on.
Now your computer knows not only when you modified that file, it knows where you were when you did it. That's all metadata you can use for searching.
This is pretty advanced stuff. It's going to be a while before we start shipping GPS-enabled Powerbooks. But it's on the drawing board.
Spotlight opens up a whole new way of storing information. It's not a new idea; we've been trying to make it work for ten years now. But the actual working implementation of it is simply revolutionary. It's a quantum leap beyond anything that anybody has to offer right now.