Slashdot Mirror
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.
"
If this hasn't already been posted
:-P
I think you really meant : "If this has already been posted"!
O yeah, My first first post maybe?
I'd rather be sailing...
It seems to run a bit quicker with every release, unlike my poor SP2 machine. Go OSX.
This new feature allows you to use different systems like base 8 or hexadecimal. Take that Microsoft.
of Longhorn another 6 months.
Coincidence?
I think not!
Creative Commons music that doesn't suck: emptydrum.com
There looks like there will be some great new features in Tiger, but I think they are stretching it with things like "Import contacts into Address Book in a variety of formats, including tab-delimited and comma-separated text." and "Print a handy pocket address book to take with you anywhere."
By including this type of thing in the list it threatens to swallow all of the real new features like Dashboard and Spotlight.
Looks like they took the burnable folder feature straight out of Gnome.(eg. the burn:/// folder in Gnome)
The global economy is a great thing until you feel it locally.
It's essential for any respectable firewall, and both e.g. Kerio and ZA even for Windows should have this, and both are available in free versions.
And firewall log?? Hmm, excuse me, but is the news Tiger just got a standard quality firewall or what? That's be more reason to blush than be overjoyed IMHO.
Beware: In C++, your friends can see your privates!
10.3.x is a point release, not 10.x and trust me the whole OS feels different.
keanmarine.com
*sigh*
OSX is widely regarded as a fairly secure system. XP is widely regarded to be as secure as a barn door.
Tiger gives you features and a speed bump, SP2 gives you application incompatability and some security features that should have been there in the initial release. No wonder it's free.
Suttree, a weblog about casual games development
iptables -A INPUT -m state --state NEW -i ! eth0 -j ACCEPT
/bin/echo "1" > /proc/sys/net/ipv4/icmp_echo_ignore_all
iptables -P INPUT DROP
Hack your mind out of its sandbox.
I think a lot of network admins will breath a sigh of partial relief when they see the Password Helper. There will always be the "[kids_name]123" password people, but there are a decent number of users who want something secure but easy to remember, and to know roughly how secure a particular password is.
Please help metamoderate.
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.
Cats rock!
I was just sitting at my freelance gig, reading some online encyclopedia (win supersite, I believe) and the scientist there said that there are only 2 features: spotlight and something else. He stated that all other ones are pretty much nothing.
He also said, and I'll have to agree with him on this one, that SP 2 is a much better update than Tiger, and it's FREE!
I don't even know what you MAC people are cheering about, you're not even getting a firewall OR pop-up blocker, not to mention malicious software detector with you're upgrade your paying $$ 4! LOL!
If you don't know what AltaVista is (was), get off my lawn.
Grapher: Create 2D and 3D graphs with this full-featured equation grapher.
How about that? Not bad.
Admittedly, over 50 of their new improvements were aspects of spotlight, dashboard, dashboard widgets, etc. But there was actually more there than I'd expected.
Why is a barn door not stable?
From the list:
Use command line file commands on HFS+ items with proper results -- utilities such as cp, mv, tar, rsync now use the same standard APIs as Spotlight and access control lists to handle resource forks.
Being both a Mac User and a Command LIne Junky. This makes me happy.
To E-mail me, replace the first period in my domain with an @
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.
...at $129 yet again, but I've got the family pack on pre-order, so amortize the $150 after the Amazon rebate across 4 Macs and it's quite the bargain. They should really provide upgrade pricing, but the $129 list is still wayyyyy cheaper than XP Pro, but twice as expensive as my SUSE 9.2 boxed set.
I would, too. But, as much as I work via the CLI, I also need a mature GUI. OS X is the only game in town in that regard.
("Damn the electric fence!")
Hmm, I wonder if font book is scriptable.
Also, Playing DVDs in the dock is by far the only reason I am getting Tiger.
I could have sworn there was a firewall in previous releases of XP, they just tightened up the rules a bit and confused the heck out of everybody.
More than anything, XP SP 2 was designed to relieve a huge embarrassment to Microsoft, the security issues. MacOS X has security issues fixed at no charge through software update, so it's really no different.
If early accounts are any indication, Tiger will have significantly improved speed yet again. My ancient 400mhz PowerBook G4 is already faster under Panther than it's ever been and I'm looking forward to further improvements. In the same time period, MS has gone from 2000 to XP, and enormous increases in bloat and dramatic reductions in performance have been the result.
Spotlight is a feature Microsoft was trying to create in Longhorn, and it looks like their version might be cut from the Longhorn release so MS can make its deadline. Again, this is clearly something both Apple and Microsoft were planning to charge for.
Finally, features have been added to Tiger that will allow programmers to substantially speed up their processing of video, which will help applications such as Final Cut Pro. It's pretty cool to see them in the OS so that third-party programmers can use them, not just FCP. So even though buying Tiger + FCP is more expensive than getting FCP alone, I'm confident that these changes will improve third-party software to the extent that it's worthwhile.
So in conclusion I certainly don't think Tiger is in any way comparable to SP2. It's nice that something's free, but it doesn't have the comprehensiveness, new features or speed increases Tiger brings to the table.
D
Because a high wind blew through a stable and knocked it's door off, so they had to put in a barn door, and now the barn is left without a door.
(This is an issue because, if the cows get out of the yard they might end up inside the barn and make a hell of a mess.)
If you don't know what AltaVista is (was), get off my lawn.
Spotlight, Dashboard, Quicktime 7, H.264, CoreImage, CoreData, X Code 2, ... are hardly "tweaks." The list goes on and on.
Free Manning, jail Obama.
You're right, that didn't need a GUI at all.
I just wanted to point out that I have been on slashdot for a while now, and I have *never* seen a thread with so many posts moderated as "troll", "flamebait" or "offtopic". Many of the posts are valid points, and if they were discussing microsoft, they would be modded +5 funny, or +5 informative. It seems to me someone is taking things a little too defensively.
For the record, I hate microsoft, and I am a unix guy at heart. That doesn't mean that everyting apple feeds to me I have to love. A little healthy criticism does everyone good, including apple.
You're looking for a file containing the word "supercalifragilisticexpialidocious" (sic?)
In any case, in spot light you type "superca" and the list refines itself enough that you see it and start working with it.
If it waited for you to hit enter, how far would you type? Would "superca" be enough? Maybe you would type "supercalifra" to be safe. Maybe, if you were like most users, you would think you needed to type the whole word out... then you spell it wrong (like i probably did above) and it doesn't find anything.
Live search minimizes your typing. It's the same reason for type-ahead find in firefox. It just works better.
(As far as the subject goes, a . release in OS X is much like a major release or at least 0.5 anywhere else - they just want to keep 10.n because OS X is supposed to mean OS 10.)
Nothing like Spotlight OR Dashboard OR Automator as far as order of magnitude goes got added to SP2. SP2 brought a better firewall - so does Tiger. SP2 brought vastly improved security - so does Tiger, to a certain degree (the reason SP2 could deliver vast improvements was because there was a lot of room for it - OS X may not be *all that*, but it's been more secure than XP from day one, for whatever reasons). SP2 brought better handling of wireless network - wireless networks have been way easier to handle on OS X overall.
We haven't even looked into the new stuff, like the new improvements in QuickTime and the addition of Core Image/Video which basically relayers the whole graphical layer part of the OS and allows for much better performance.
SP2 is an example of constantly improving the OS, yes, but so's Tiger, and to a much larger level of magnitude if you look at all the facts. I'm not exactly jumping with joy over having to pay Apple $129. And I'm not exactly the guy that'll take advantage of every single of those 200 features. But I'm liking it for what it is - steady improvement of the OS, so that people won't have to get used to ages of stagnation, be it the way it was with System 7 or the way it is with Windows currently, where security has developed into a feature.
(And yes, Linux is steadily developing too. This discussion is about SP2 vs Tiger.)
One of the new features is that Mail.app supports Exchange servers - but I have a feeling this is just imap support and won't handle meeting invites, etc.
So, I'm stuck using Entourage. Does anyone know if Spotlight will be indexing Entourage emails, etc? I sure hope so! My corporation has ignorantly banned Google Desktop search on the windows machines, so I no longer have a way of finding emails I need in a snap. Entourage + Spotlight puts me back in the game on that front.
Seeing as how all Apple computers come with some version of Mac OS - wouldn't you say that this IS upgrade pricing?
Conserve Oil, Recycle, Boycott Walmart
Our intelligent designer has never created an animal that we couldn't improve by strapping a bomb to it.
I'm surprised that they have Access Control Lists as one of the features.
/. community isn't all over that feature.
I mean, that is something I've been wanting standard on Linux for a long time (I haven't used Linux in a while now so let me know if it is standard now).
I'm also surprised that the
I would have expected apple to bang the drum a lot more on that feature. But I guess that apples target group aren't that enamored with technical points.
The Internet is full. Go Away!!!
If you use computers, you should care. Apple has consistently 'led the market' in computing, meaning if you watch Apple now, you will have an idea of what will be a big deal in a few years in general.
It's not necessarily the case that Apple can get 'credit', so much as Apple was first to 'get it right'. If not Apple, then someone else would have, it was just the fact that Apple was first that it matters. Examples include:
Windows, mice, folders, desktop metaphor in 1983 with the Lisa and 1984 with the Macintosh -> Windows 1.0 in 1985
Networking, introduced in 1990 with AppleTalk and AppleShare in System 7 -> Windows for Workgroups and Windows 3.11 in 1992
Quicktime, also introduced in 1990 with System 7 -> Video for Windows/AVI in Windows 3.1/3.11 in 1992
Color support, which allowed for Photoshop and other image programs, in 1988 with System 6 (Photoshop came out in 1990) -> Windows 3.0 in 1990 (And Photoshop in 1992)
Desktop publishing, Word, and WYSIWYG came out for Mac in 1985 -> Windows version in 1989
See a trend yet?
So what features does Tiger have that will probably be common in a few years?
'Quartz' 3d accelerated OS
'Spotlight' integrated OS wide database driven search
'Core Image/Video' hardware accelerated image and video libraries
'iSync' computer to computer 'synchronization' (bookmarks, preferences, etc)
'Apple Remote Desktop' built into the OS
'Target Disk Mode', which transforms your system into a 'plain' Firewire hard disk when it is booted.
'Xgrid' transparent, p2p distributed computing built into the OS
Who knows, maybe only half of these things are big deals, but I suspect most of them will become 'standard' by the time Longhorn ships.
GPL Deconstructed
With Quicksilver, one can spare oneself a lot of poking about and futzing with the mouse
With Bash, one can spare oneself ALL use of the mouse.
Being both a Mac User and a Command LIne Junky. This makes me happy.
Ditto here!
(ducks, runs for cover)
Please help metamoderate.
Ciao
It is called "Burn on the fly", and please don't make rocket science out of this. It was year 1995 when most of the burning software already contained this feature
Signature Pro version 1.13.2-3 release 83.5 beta3try7 after-breakfast edition
..as advertised. This is what graphic artists have been waiting for, a font manager that's STABLE with thousands of fonts. Suitcase is, but the interface is pitiful. FontAgent is easy to browse, but unstable with lots of fonts and if you turn on WYSIWYG in some views. There's been a big hole in the font management area for a long time now. http://www.apple.com/macosx/features/fontbook/
Oh, I can just see telling my 80 year old mother to type that in!
FTFA - How is this a feature?
Buy Printing Supplies
Easily purchase supplies for your printer right from Mac OS X Tiger.
I (and I think many others) don't want their operating system selling them crap.
RSS feeds as a screen saver. It's actually pretty cool. :)
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
With PCs it's somewhat a matter of survival - if a malicious hacker finds your windows box, well, it's his.
With Macs, it's simply a matter of privacy. And tiger does this out of the box, no need to buy any additional software as you point out.
I work for the Department of Redundancy Department.
Calm down man... Longhorn will be here in... hmmm... sometime. ;)
Of course every version of OS X is faster (though 50% is a fucking pipe dream) - 10.0 was pushed out the door way before it was ready - a slow, kludgy mess. OS X shouldn't have been released to the public before 10.3.
a) they dont mind posting a dupe
Neither do Apple - "Scriptable Font Book" counts as two seperate features.
apprently it is.k /
http://www.apple.com/macosx/features/fontboo
look at side bar on lower right
Mac OS has had the abilitiy to do this "firewall stealth mode" since IPFW was bundled. (10.0? 10.1? not sure...) What they're talking about is now there's an improved interface to ipfw. I run 10.3 and I've already turned on this "stealth mode" with a few ipfw commands in a startup item.
But this isn't something joe sixpack can do with just a click. Oh wait, now there's tiger. Nevermind that.
I work for the Department of Redundancy Department.
One thing sorely missing from Panther was the ability to AppleScript power management features. It would come in handy for putting your Mac to sleep after a long task, or to wake it up upon certain conditions.
In order to do that, IIRC, you had to buy a third party extension/dictionary/API. A workaround was also to script at the UI level and simulate clicks in the menus - very inelegant, prone to failure and useless for waking up the machine.
The new features list in TFA doesn't cite this addition. Does it mean users will still have to resort to third-party software for this basic ability? Automator might help, but still it's not the same as a full-fledged AppleScript dictionary...
Most of your rebuttals start with "you can get...". You seem to overlook that these are built-in to Apple's new OS, meaning there's no getting - it's already there.
You correctly point out that most of these features aren't strictly new. However, you overlook the fact that none of these features has been implemented even half as well as Apple's done them for Tiger (yes, I *have* tried them). Most people don't understand that there's a difference between doing something and doing it well. If that's you, fine. If not, do some more research before making a fool of yourself.
2D acceleration != 3D acceleration. Apple's using 3D acceleration for their 2D UI, which *is* new.
Unlike Google and the others you cite, Spotlight is updated instantly - no need to wait for the search tool to see the change, or to run updatedb.
Core Image/Video allow you to do things that were formerly only possible in Photoshop/After Effects - all in realtime, without special hardware.
iSync - doesn't sound terribly new to me.
ARD - sounds like catch-up to me too (though ARD has been around for years, just not built-in to the OS).
Target disk mode - been around for years. Just Works.
Xgrid - built-in, no setup to worry about. Just Works. Unlike, say, Beowulf.
So basically, Apple has refined a load of features than can be haphazardly cobbled together using other OSes and combined them into a system where they're implemented *well*.
Sorry loser, but you sound about as well-educated as the average American 15 year-old.
Well, regardless of how far you can count, you obviously didn't look very hard for changes. The improvements to web-kit alone are major, and have also been back-ported to OS 10.3.9 for free (the latest minor release). The features you list
Spotlight
Automator
Core Video
Are not currently available in any other desktop OS (though Linux has beagle). In fact Longhorn won't now have WinFS (perhaps a more flexible solution than Spotlight but unfortunately vapour-ware).
You missed out:
Dashboard
Core Data
Web Core (DOM API accessible in cocoa etc)
xGrid
PDF annotations and forms (plus various preview.app enhancements)
Jabber, H.264 and multiple video IM
etc,etc...
Consider Microsoft's approach - renaming Windows 2000 to Windows XP (now with hideous colours), service packs for bug fixes, a monthly scramble by customers to install updates for remote vulnerabilities before they're exploited, and an attempt to move their customers to a subscription model (which looks like it's failed, but that's their goal).
Compare and contrast with the consistent and regular updates to OS X - major updates which you can *choose* to upgrade to every couple of years, augmented by regular updates every month or so fixing bugs and adding minor features.
I know which world I prefer to live in.
Just why should Apple give this update for free to all its customers, they already update the OS around every month for free? Sounds to me like you're the one who is cheap.
The fact that the site is called winsupersite.com should give you some hint of bias from its owner. Of course, it's not iluvwindozecuzitskool.com but it's getting there. I wouldn't call Thurrot an "experienced reviewer". The first paragraphs about how he claims to be a Mac fan because he had at some time an Apple IIgs are particularly laughable.
The fields that Thurrot covered in his review concern generally the GUI. And, apart from Spotlight, there is little revolution in this area from Panther to Tiger, merely refinements. Most of the people that will upgrade won't notice a big difference in their habits.
There are two points where Thurrot isn't particularly convincing. One is his endless comparision between Mac OS X and what Microsoft offers, that ranges from "It's some kind of imitation of Windows" to "They're the first to implement it but MS had certainly already thought about this feature before and their version will be better". The other point is the new set of APIs brought by Tiger, much welcomed by developers and overlooked by Thurrot.
In the end, many people will be ready to spend $129, not only because they're "Apple fans" or because they expect a revolution but because they feel that 10.4 will be an improvement in many fields (especially speed) and that future exciting apps for Mac OS X will require this release.
For instance, I'll pay for the new version and I see the relative lack of major redesign in Tiger as a sign that major architecture choices for Mac OS X have turned out to be valid. Apple is currently expanding what their OS can do instead of spending time to correct a big flaw. Which is a rather new notion for Apple users. And Apple users love to pay for something new.
Also includes ground-breaking new usability features, a couple of which weren't borrowed from Mac OS X Tiger (we got them from KDE and Gnome)! New security failure features as well!!
Yeah, right. The Slashdot editors and community is known to fall all over themselves on everything Apple does. Not. Shall I count the number of Mac-related articles that include the obligatory smart-ass line indicating the authors disdain for everything Mac? C'mon. Apple has done really well reaching out to the nerd set over the last few years. What acceptance they've gotten here is well-deserved.
You want to see slashdot get really stupid? See how everything having to do wth Linux is unquestioningly regarded as The Best Thing Ever.
You like your Macintosh better than me, don't you Dave? Dave? Can you hear me Dave?
Funny, my copy of XP, and everyone else's I've ever encountered, has this built in to the OS. Try again.
I notice quite a lot of the usual complaining about Apple charging for a point release of an operating system where Microsoft would give it for free.
While those people are right in that they are likely to get modded down by Mac fans, the complaints seldom offer much insight into what is a point release, what is a service pack and what is a full version number. To be fair, the OS vendors, both Apple and Microsoft, don't make it easy on the consumer either.
Apple generally gives out their version of point releases (10.x.x) for free, but those point releases usually don't offer much or any new functionality. (Currently I'm on OSX 10.3.9) which includes a new version of the Safari browser (1.3) but that is unusual. Apple also usually gives out point releases of the various software accompanying the OS for free (iTunes, QuickTime, iSight, iPod, Bluetooth etc) and they provide specific security patches as new exploits become available.(although there are currently about two hanging security issues that Apple really needs to fix)
Apple usually includes quite a lot of new extra functionality in the version upgrades (10.x). In the 10.3 Panther upgrade it was Expose, Fast User Switching, iChatAV and XCode and under the hood new APIs (Cocoa Bindings etc). in 10.4, it's Dashboard, Spotlight, XCode 2, Safari 2, Mail 2, Automator and a lot of new APIs (Core Data, Core Image etc.)
Microsoft is a little less consistent with its OS upgrades, pathces and service packs, but also follows a certain strategy. Generally, Microsoft offers API changes and some minor functionality changes in service packs, but rarely major new features. For example, WinNT went from sp1 to sp6 and actually gained a lot of the functionality that was in the Win98 and Win2k userspace, and NT users got those for free. Active Desktop for example (one can argue about how useful that was). Moving from NTSP6 to Win2k would not have entailed major changes for the common user, but, obviously, there was a lot that changed under the hood. Better security model, more stable, some minor UI changes, better networking etc. Obviously, for a user, it was worth paying for.
All the while, Microsoft also offered generally free upgrades to its bundled applications, such as IE, Outlook and WMP, although there was an outcry about the mp3 quality and MS' charging for better quality.
But can the same be said for the Win98SE to WinME upgrade? WinMe had a terrible reputation and was seen by many as an excuse by Microsoft to generate revenue.
And the Win2k to WinXP move, while also having some big under the hood changes (firewall, signed drivers etc), mostly had big UI changes (themes) and Fast User Switching, Automatic Updates (also in 2kSp3 onwards) etc. For the user, and the developer, it was probably worth the price. Since then Microsoft has offered two service packs, both free. SP1 had no visible change but fixed some glaring security and stability issues. During this time Microsoft has released literally hundreds of security patches, thankfully, free.
Now comes the part to argue over. XPSP2 offers a new security center and a firewall on by default. It also upgrades IE. SP2 is free. BUT, the security enhancements for SP2, including the IE upgrade, are not available for Win2k. Microsoft was getting a terrible rap with WinXP up to SP1. It was almost impossible to install a new machine on the net (activation) without getting hit by some of the rabid attacks going on within a few minutes. Microsoft HAD to do something, and, if they had charged for SP2, there would have been an even bigger outcry by an extremely digruntled public.
My personal opinion about Microsoft is that Microsoft, in a way that only Microsoft does well, decided to use the opportunity to both garner some lost respect by including the new security features, but also enforce upgrades amongst its userbase by excluding Win2k. This, I think, is something that Microsoft specialises at, prodding its userbase with new features, but including a catch somew
"apples loud-mouth marketing is pathetic, 200 new features? yeah right...just like the "over 150 new features" in panther?, i could count to about 7 or 8"
;-)
I recommend you not to buy the upgrade.
But be honest, compare with other OS upgrades and you'll see what value is in the package.
For me, the whole widget thing is extremely useful. I've only just explained that yesterday, not about to do it again, but it's a very Good Thing(TM) for me and I think lots of other people. Not talking about the potential, just the widgets that are standard in Tiger.
Spotlight is another thing most computer users have been asking for. Now we get it. And it's a hell of a lot more useful than the Google thing. And maybe next year or the next we can see if Windows will be on par. You don't want it? Don't buy it.
Apart from that, this is not a trivial "update". Just like core audio was a godsend, core video is way out there.
About half of the 200 features appeal to me. That's pretty much. You sir, can't judge this, if you can only count to 8
You'll be happy to hear however that the Turd agrees with you, but sadly that doesn't say much about the credibility of your statement. So please, whatever OS you use, be honest in your assessment.
And I repeat, upgrading is a voluntary process.
I think, therefore I am...I think.
I know it's a real hardship to actually read your own links, but perhaps if you had taken this unprecidented step you would see that they list Pagemaker as coming out in "the mid-1980s," not 1980. Further, if you had actually read the article linked from that page, you would have found this: "1985 - Aldus develops PageMaker for the Mac, the first "desktop publishing" application."
If you have any further difficulties with basic reading comprehension, please let us know.
Lawrence Person (lawrencepersonh@gmailh.com (remove all "h"s to mail)
http://www.lawrenceperson.com/
I don't disagree that Apple isn't first.
But Apple is still here.
BeOS, Xerox, Amiga, Geos, all of them had 'firsts' that Apple now can 'claim' not because Apple was necessarily better, but because Apple survived and they did not.
Windows has always had the possibility of doing great things, but they rarely exercised that option. It seems, in hindsight, that Windows was more an exercise in accessibility than an exercise in usability. Apple, traditionally, has been much more useful, but due to pricing, availability, or compatibility, has had much more limited accessibility.
GPL Deconstructed
This won't change anything! There is still no software available for Macs! They still can't run:
1) Netsky-P
2) Zafi-B
3) Sasser
4) Netsky-B
5) Netsky-D
6) Netsky-Z
7) MyDoom-A
8) Sober-I
9) Netsky-C
10) Bagle-AA
What good are they?
Cool art gallery, if you're into that sort of thing.
I think Panther to Tiger would be more akin to windows 2000 upgrading to XP-sp2 then XP upgrading to XP-sp2
so what if I pay for what people think is a "point-release"
hmmm windows users NEVER do that
Windows 2000 = Windows v. 5.0
Windows XP = Windows v. 5.1
I will gladly pay up for the upgrades in OSX, not to be a zealot,
but because I like to keep current technology on my desktop. Since I prefer Apple's computers & OS then I'll keep current with them; if I preferred windows then I suppose I would fork out the couple hundred bucks to upgrade when they release new OS version. It's a simple matter of preference, not a feud war for crying out loud. no one is being FORCED to upgrade in either camp. Mac users who are happy with 10.3 can stay with it, Windowz users happy with Win 2000 could stay with it. The way I see it it's that simple.
I hope I'm not blasting my NDA saying this, but we've been using seed builds for a while and the one thing that I think many people will be pleasantly surprised with is the sense of responsiveness/speed. I'm using a spanking new G4 laptop and using Tiger on it makes it feel like I have an ever faster machine (which is what I said about 10.3!). Everything is more responsive; screen redraws, directory listings, quicktime videos, etc. It's on-par with my AMD64 box with XP in terms of GUI resposiveness now!
-_-
I even SAID that Apple doesn't necessarily deserve credit:
BeOS had their database functionality first, but they died. Xerox had their WiMP interface first, but they never released (licensed only to Apple of course!)
Networking wasn't new, but it was experimental and Apple made it both easy and integrated.
CGA counts as color, but Apple introduced 24 bit color to a consumer level device.
3d acceleration was done first by SGI, in $10k devices, then by VooDoo Graphics in $600 video cards, but no 'common' or 'commodity' OS has implemented until Apple did in 2001.
Perhaps you're bitter, but you have to also understand Apple HAS done things, just like Microsoft has, and SGI, and Linux, and all the other companies out there.
The biggest thing people seem to have issue with is Apple's iPod.
The iPod did three things that no other mp3 player did before:
Density. 5gb in your pocket. Predecessors include Creative, with 20gb in a Mac mini sized device and the Rio with 64mb in a lighter sized device. Apple's was 5gb in a cigarette pack sized device.
Usability. Apple's device could be used by one hand. Creative, with 13 buttons (maybe it was 11) could not. The use of iTunes and a database meant, also, you could access thousands of songs with only a thumb and a forefinger. Finally the adoption of Firewire, over USB1, meant you could fill the thing up in 5 minutes, instead of 5 hours.
Style. Apple cared enough to make it look good. People don't like wearing ugly clothes, driving ugly cars, or wearing ugly watches, so why would they want an 'ugly' mp3 player?
GPL Deconstructed
What typical nonsense from someone who is:
1. Not a Mac OS X user (clearly)
2. Believes that version numbers still accurately reflect changes
3. Relies on other non-Mac OS X users to review Mac OS X.
4. Requires a dramatic visual change (perhaps change the color to bright red?) to "realize" the value of a new product.
YES -- "one of the main" 200 features is an RSS reader. And it happens to be very nicely integrated into the browser for an experience that definitely adds value. Of course there are 199 other features too.
True, a lot of features in this release are under the hood. What that means is that developers will be creating some very cool apps as a result of the new release (that they couldn't easily create in the past). But even so, there are major benefits in this ".release" to the end user and while not all 200 features are on the level of Spotlight or Dashboard or Automator or QuickTime 7, they do add up.
In a horizontal product (such as an OS), not every feature is meant for every user. When a word processor adds support for Table of Contents, it won't matter so someone that just writes letters. But it will matter to someone who has had to create TOC manually or through some third-party tool in the past. Same thing for features in Tiger.
And what the hell do you care -- you're clearly not a Mac user, so you won't be buying it anyway. You might as well complain about cup-holder that they left out of the new Ferrari.
Panther could do this too; after all, it uses ipfw. But Tiger just adds it to the graphical interface for the firewall.
English is easier said than done.
I actually expect this release to be a milestone in GUI operating systems. Not only is inter-programm communication fully developed, it also gets a easy to use point-and-click interface to access these functions (Automator).
What would really rock is if someday Apple had the guts to actually drop the desktop metaphor and introduce some non-overlaping full screen realestate using workspace and application management. Something like blender has - only more accessable of course.
How long have knowledgable users of Windows, Linux and Mac OS dreamed of easy cross-program automation via visual graphical pipes. Once again it's OS X that's years ahead of anything else.
We suffer more in our imagination than in reality. - Seneca
That's GNU/Linuxtard, sir.
Then 'justsomebody' tried to correct the examples.
Xerox Alto 1972
They didn't get it 'right'--at least not right enough to bring to market. The Mac made the GUI useable.
ARPANET 1969
The GP was referring to desktops and LANS, not workstations and big iron. Etc. with the rest of your response. Maybe you're being obtuse on purpose?
Damn those pesky terrorists
This is by far the biggest feature. Not having to write custom API's for using altivec is going to make this OS great, not only for performance of generic science apps, but for general application performance for apps that would require to much work to write custom loops for in Altivec.
XP Pro was able to do that upon release.
I just switched to Mac, but let's not be making stuff up about PCs to make 'em seem better - they already win in many other ways.
that'll come in the Cougar release, once OS X "matures".
I am more than a little surprised that Apple decided to pack gcc 4.0 into the package. I'm not entirely convinced that gcc 4 is ready for prime time, and I am not sure if any other *nix distros are shipping with it this early.
...En að Besta Sem Guð Hefur Skapað Er Nýr Dagur
Spotlight = Copernic/Google Toolbar/MSN Toolbar
No, it really isn't. I'm unsurprised by your ignorance about this. I guess we've just done a lousy job of explaining it.
Spotlight is a full-fledged system service, not just a user interface. Application developers can very easily add Spotlight to their own applications. For example, look at Mail. The additions to Mail to support Spotlight searching were trivial. In fact, the total code size of an early Spotlight build of Mail was significantly smaller, because we off-loaded all of the indexing and searching to the Spotlight service, removing it from Mail.
Comparing Mail to a third-party bolt-on search product is, well, dumb.
Safari RSS = Why the name change?
There has been no name change. The name of the browser is Safari. The version is 2.0. "Safari RSS" is just a marketing name for Safari's RSS support.
Dashboard = Avedesk/Samaurise
Um. No. Dashboard widgets are little Web Views. They're essentially Web applications running in little floating windows. I'd suggest you check it out before just arbitrarily declaring it to be the same as something else.
"AIM Profiles in iChat AV" isn't exactly a huge innovation
No, it's not. But we got 17,438 requests for that feature from users. It doesn't have to be big to be important to our customers.
it's quite easy to obtain as many free fonts as you please
We're not including free fonts. We're including professionally designed and licensed fonts --fully Unicode-savvy, of course -- that would cost hundreds of dollars if bought after the fact.
"Improved RAID Support" is what we call a "fix" not a new feature
You don't understand the feature. This doesn't really surprise me at this point, because it's clear that your goal here is just to post criticisms without a whole lot of concern about truth.
We already had striping support, which is sometimes erroneous called "RAID 0." We already had mirroring support. Now we've added concatenation. See? New feature.
I have absolutely no problem with people who want to be critical. Critical is where we live. But is it really too much to ask that the people who levy criticisms have the tiniest idea what they're talking about first? It would save so much time.
Does anyone else notice this phenomenon of the system req's slowly advancing?
With 10.0-10.2, any Beige G3 or Wallstreet PowerBook G3 was fully supported. For Panther, they required built-in USB, thus knocking Beige G3 and Wallstreet systems out of the mix. Now for Tiger, it requires built-in FireWire. The only systems that come to mind without FW but without USB are early iMacs, some clamshell iBooks, and Lombard PowerBooks. That's a fair number of people that are starting to get left behind of the upgrade cycle.
Um, you're missing something.
/home directory.
/swap directory
/swap are all encrypted.
/. some weeks ago that FV was a moot point because the swap was raw data. That is not an issue with Tiger.
1/ FV Encrypts the user's
2/ Secure VM encrypts the
So, the activities of the FV'd user (and others, and system process) that have been committed to
There -was- a flap on
--- See you at the Tannhäuser Gate.
When the Blue & White G3s came out in 1999, people were shocked that it lacked a 3.5" floppy disk drive. They provided a workaround, though: use a USB floppy drive.
Apple did it again when they released Macs that can no longer boot into OS 9. The workaround: use Classic.
And again with Panther, which requires a G3 with built-in USB, forcing many legacy Mac users to use XPostFacto as a workaround.
Then came iLife '04, which refuses to install certain iLife applications if you don't have a G4 processor. Third-party processor upgrade cards were the workaround.
Considering that all of Apple's current lineup of computers have optical drives that support DVD-ROMs, perhaps Apple is also, in its own way, gently nudging it's market to move away from data CD-ROMs to DVD-ROMs.
Especially when you consider the installation scheme for the retail version of Panther -- 3 CDs must be swapped if you want to install everything and iLife '04 & Classic aren't even included.
The retail version of Tiger may likely need only the one DVD (since iLife '05 isn't included) for the OS + XCode2.
While the "Apple Store visit for CDs" may be an inconvenient workaround, at least there is one. It beats buying a Mac-bootable Combo- or SuperDrive and installing it.
Up, Up, Down, Down, Left, Right, Left, Right, B, A, START
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.
You're obviously making your point from a developer's point of view: mine is as an end-user, who doesn't have the tiniest idea about developer technologies. I'm sure everything you said about Spotlight is true, as you seem to know your stuff, however to the end user, who wants a search function, it's Copernic.
Um. No. Dashboard widgets are little Web Views. They're essentially Web applications running in little floating windows. I'd suggest you check it out before just arbitrarily declaring it to be the same as something else.
Again, it's clear from my ignorance that I'm not a developer. I do know however as an end user that Widgets are Widgets. If I understand correctly what you're saying, you're saying that Dashboard is different to AveDesk/Samaurise/The rest because it pulls it's information off the Internet. Avedesk/Samaurise/The rest, to the best of my knowlege, also do this, hence the Weather Widget, (which can be skinned to be exact clones of the Tiger widget, and has been available since the first shots of Dashboard were released) POP/IMAP mail checker, etc.
We're not including free fonts. We're including professionally designed and licensed fonts --fully Unicode-savvy, of course -- that would cost hundreds of dollars if bought after the fact.
The Longhorn Readability Fonts are free: Calibri, Cambria, Candara, Consolas, Constantina and Corbel. They look pretty professional to me.
You don't understand the feature. This doesn't really surprise me at this point, because it's clear that your goal here is just to post criticisms without a whole lot of concern about truth.
My apologies, it wasn't clear which features had been added in the explanation on the Apple site, so I incorrectly assumed that Apple's uber-modern "World's Most Advanced Operating System" already fully supported RAID that was fully laid down in 1988, and that they were merely fixing a bug or two.
My 3D Texturing Skinning work (under construction)
Too bad I did not find any references to a Java 1.5 upgrade.
Does anyone know if this is to be expected in the near future?
There is for instance good SmartCard Token Support in Java 1.5 (PKCS#11) amongst other important language and framework features...
--------
* Sigh *
ditto is a command on OS X and some BSD systems that's used to copy files. On OS X it has the flag -rsrc that ensures it copies the resource forks of various documents and applications. Currently on 10.3, 'cp' will ignore the resource forks, breaking some applications that use them.
Best. Webhost. Ever. Dreamhost.
My bible for this argument is basicly here: Putting the torch to seven straw-men of the meta-utopia
People are lazy, People are stupid and the system is not scalable to larger enterprises without problems.
People being lazy is possibly the greatest problem: Very few people are going to sit down and add descriptions to all their photographs, documents and video footage. Currently Metadata is common in Music only. I don't claim to know why this is, but my best guess is it's probably because it is not a visual file and there's no way of previewing it without watching. (As opposed to seeing a thumbnail of a document/movie/picture.) If the system is incomplete and any single file doesn't have metadata added, the system is effectively useless because as with anything which is unreliable, it will fall into disuse and there will be less incentive to add metadata to files, so less people use the feature due to decreased reliability and the sitation continues to snowball.
People not knowing everything about their content is also a problem. Meta data can only identify what we know as it is added by humans. If i was confronted by Java Source Code for a program, I wouldn't be able to read it and I would not know what to describe it as.
A Meta data based system also scales up badly to network/internet size solutions. Not only is the first problem amplified the larger the system is (more people being lazy, also less confidence that everyone will do their bit in adding metadata) but an inherent problem is that in a webwide Meta data system, people have hidden agendas, and they lie. The largest web-scale meta data implemantation we have at the moment is META tags in web page markup. I don't think I need to explain why these are often ridiculed - people lie. META tags are often abused by sites to get more hits: adding Britney Spears, XXX, pr0n etc will boost a page's rank. (This is often misguided, as more hits may occur, they they will not be relevant and leave the site straight away, however this is besides the point - they still input incorrect metadata into the system.) The problem has got to the stage where Google really doesn't pay all that much attention to META tags in comparison to the page's actual content and a monitoring of it's popularity with visitors searching for a certain subject.
This last point might not be a problem with Spotlight currently, as a systemwide index it's not affected by it - however on an enterprise level there are instances where it could be a problem even over a LAN or WAN and afterall, the Internet is just computers connected together so this metadata is really useless on a larger scale in the same way that METAtags are now almost redundant in HTML, or or the RIAA has been able to spoof meta data on P2P networks to fool fileswappers.
My 3D Texturing Skinning work (under construction)
Currently Metadata is common in Music only.
Not true. Every photo taken with a digital camera has EXIF metadata, and every photo distributed by a wire service has IPTC metadata.
If the system is incomplete and any single file doesn't have metadata added, the system is effectively useless
The old "if it's not perfect, it's useless" lie. You should be ashamed of yourself.
A Meta data based system also scales up badly to network/internet size solutions.
Actually Spotlight scales spectacularly well across the enterprise because clients have read access to server metadata databases. However, this is just an incidental benefit. Spotlight isn't designed to do what you're criticizing it for not doing.
I'm sorry to have to tell you that you obviously have a fundamental lack of understanding about the problem you're trying to discuss. This is nothing to be ashamed of. But you should first try to wrap your head around the problem before telling everybody what's wrong with the solutions.
Besides, your objections are trumped by the most obvious rebuttal of all: Spotlight works. Spectacularly.
I've been on Slashdot since '99, and I noticed initially there was quite a bit of resistence to most things Apple. The groupthink about Apple seemed to be, "Yeah, they make shiny widgets that graphic artists like, but they're toys unsuitable for people who know anything about computers."
The release of early builds of OS X started the ball rolling in the right direction. Apple's foray into Open Source with Darwin at first was greated with enormous skepticism, but after a while people started to realize that Apple wasn't just pulling a publicity stunt. The evolution of Apple hardware got more people interested in Apple, and the titanium PowerBooks in particular made quite a few Slashdotters to realize that OS X on a PowerBook was essentially a very capable UNIX machine with a great form factor and nifty features.
Subsequent events (the launch of the iPod, the foray into online music, the G5 boxes, and the continuing improvements to OS X) have changed a lot of minds. I seriously doubt that Slashdot has become infested with Apple fanboys who drool at the opportunity to mod up comments that make Apple look good. My take on it is that Apple has changed for the better, and they're coming out with hardware and software that many Slashdotters like.
Read the EFF's Fair Use FAQ
If you're willing to type out descriptions on all your files, the point being. When Jobs demonstrated Spotlight he had a load of images from Corbis which had all been nicely tagged and described by the good people that work there. People who don't have the luxury of being revered as gods inside Cupertino would have to actually type these lengthy descriptions themselves.
You've managed to effectively argue for the point you wished to oppose. You initially claimed only music files have meta-data, and then you go on to mention Corbis images - which are carefully tagged with extensive meta-data.
The meta-data from Corbis is put to good use by a lot of people who buy their images (publishers for example). Currently only people running a program like iView can search on that data. With spotlight anyone can - I know that this will make my life easier personally, and I'm more likely to purchase images with said data pre-entered (note that they do this now, on all images, not just for Steve Jobs as you imply).
Where there is financial value for adding meta-data (and in many cases in business there definitely is) it *will* be added, and extensively used. Programs like Word already add author specific data to files, I imagine once it is a system-wide service this sort of facility will be pervasive, as it will allow sophisticated searches and sorting of documents which previously had to be done by hand. Initially inside organisations and between trusted partners, but it will happen. Perhaps it will never spread to the internet, but if we're talking about Spotlight that is irrelevent.
Meta-data on the internet is a joke because of trust issues. You have extrapolated from that narrow case to all others. Please don't do that.
No, that's the beauty of it. Tiger's built-in AI reads the document, figures out what it says, and then writes something subtly different over it. That way, when the NSA gets your Hard-drive and they try to recover data from it, they'll stop when they find the note to Suzy telling her to buy milk, and won't keep looking for the plans to bomb to the San Diego zoo in that same file.
Hey.
/.ers! You really like me.
/. would already have a similar post up by the time they read my submission.
I'm the A.C. who submitted the link to the features page. Normally, these submissions go into my browser and I forget about them long after the links are ingored by the moderators. So, it is surprising that the mods felt like posting it.
Some follow-ups:
1) I thought that the verbage would be changed; instead it was posted verbatim. Yikes. Me didn't want to come across as some sort of shill for Apple or as a bafoon. I accomplished the latter w/o trying. thanks,
2) I submitted it yesterday. My luck tends to be that of a johnny-come-lately and it just seemed like
3)Stealth Mode, like some mentioned, is totally about privacy. It may seem trivial to most of you but c'mon, peeps, giving non-technical savvy users that option is welcome. And, the firewall feature is built into Darwin. Any obvious privacy additions to the security features are welcome.
4) Most of the features are tweaks, simply product enhancements. There's nothing wrong with that. When the Find application in OS 8 became Sherlock with OS 8.5 it changed the way users searched for files on their desktop. It even allowed for searching the internet from within the Sherlock app. Windows search thing still launched the browser--explorer-- and defaulted to MS' search page. BS, that is.
At base, Spotlight is the better search that seemed to stall between OS 8.5 and OS X. With Metadata not existing, so to speak, in pre-Tiger OS X, the options for search were limited. That is a major reason I don't use X daily. I likes me metadata because I can arrange things the way I want to and not as the OS wants me to. And, the OS "knows" when I move things without popping up warnings or interfering with what I'm doing.
In OS 9 I can search based on the data in the resource fork. That's helped me out especially when I've had to fix corrupted files.
And, of course meta-data makes the OS "smarter."
The goal of comupting advances is still about making the interaction invisible and easier for anyone to use, right?
Arranging files you create in ways that are best conducive to the way you work is just desired. Metadata, especially since I cut my teeth on System 7-OS 9, makes things better.
Finally, beyond metadata, the things I dig most about Tiger and while I'll likely upgrade:
Automator, Core Image/video, Quicktime enhancements. All of those are good for me and my ilk who do multimedia and who don't program. The bulk of the enhancements to the OS assist people like me who aren't code junkies but who want to take fuller advantage of the OS, of Quicktime (which really has so more functionality than Apple seems to promote , like, interactivity and the 3D panoramas of QTVR) and increases our workflow.
In Tiger AppleScript will now auto-complete stuff that you type in the Script Editor app. That way, you can "learn as you go" by typing.
I fail to see how the stealth mode on the firewall will annoy legitimate users of the network, unless you define legitimate users to be something which I don't.
Even based on the page you linked to, there is no information which would lead to other users on a network being annnoyed based on your system applying stealth mode. It could be inferred that problems with DHCP lease allocation could cause the same IP to be allocated to two users, but the ISP should have sufficient technical expertise to not get into such a situation (otherwise they shouldn't be an ISP). The only possible way that stealth mode would impact other users ability to use a network would be if the network gateway, or the ISP, applied stealth mode.
The worst it could do to an end user is drop them off the network if they did not respond to ICMP pings, or heartbeats used by the ISP.
InfoSec that matters, when it counts.
My bible for this argument is basicly here: Putting the torch to seven straw-men of the meta-utopia
I quite like the "Metacrap" paper, and I use it a lot as a reality check for those diving too deeply into the metadata / XML web services / SOA utopia.
Unfortunately I disagree with your interpretation of its arguments, as noted below.
People being lazy is possibly the greatest problem: Very few people are going to sit down and add descriptions to all their photographs, documents and video footage. Currently Metadata is common in Music only.
Which came to be because some people are anal enough to sit down and add descriptions to their music collection , and people created ways of sharing those with others easily.
The point is to make it easy to add descriptions and combine it with implicit / observational metadata. iPhoto , for example, knows when you took your photos, which is a very good start for lazy people organizing data -- Spotlight can answer queries like "pictures taken on December 13 2004". People that are organization freaks can get better searches by putting some more words associated with it.
Meta data can only identify what we know as it is added by humans
Or that which is implicitly associated with something by necessity - "observational" stuff. Creation dates, authors, links, etc. That stuff is usually very reliable, as noted in the last section of that paper...
This last point might not be a problem with Spotlight currently, as a systemwide index it's not affected by it - however on an enterprise level there are instances where it could be a problem even over a LAN or WAN and afterall, the Internet is just computers connected together....
Whoa. This argument seems to be an example of the "division fallacy". Since explicit metadata solutions don't work well on Internet scales means they won't work on smaller scales (like enterprises).
It's interesting you used communism as an argument against metadata in the beginning of your post, because economic systems are really a form of information system, in a sense. Communism is an attempt to explicitly associate metadata (prices) with goods. A market-based system, on the other hand, uses implicit metadata (supply/demand price adjustments) to govern. Yet we do recognize that explicit control is used within a company because it's more efficient than the market when applied to a small enough group (aka. 'transaction costs' argument).
Relating to the topic at hand -- quality data is important, and seriously lacking in most organizations (and individual user desktops!). Metadata partially fixes a major part of the quality issue: relevance. Explicit metadata, like most explicit forms of agreement, works well in an environment with a consistent culture and centralized policy -- or in the case of a single user, someone anal enough to tag their pictures. But it requries an investment.
On the other hand, implicit metadata is "free" because it's already there, it's just a matter of capturing, indexing, and making it accessible. Google did that with hyperlinks. Spotlight is doing that with photos, music, and emails. So whether people stay lazy or not, Spotlight still significantly improves the user experience in getting access to relevant information....
-Stu
Flamebait? Ah, I get it: When Microsoft copies somebody else, sharpen the ol pitchforks. But when Linux distros FINALLY get features that Windows had for years, it's sacred.
Honestly guys, if you can't take a little poke here and there, maybe you should consider not dishing it out.
"Derp de derp."
Simply save it to a shell script called view_grandchild_photos and give it desktop link. Voila - she'll be running in stealth mode in no time! ;)
Sometimes I love Apple, sometimes I hate them. Sometimes they do great software, sometimes they screw their users as bad as any commercial software company.
This time, they done good. First: it looks like the iSight now can route audio through the system like any other mic; before, it was an expensive webcam with a crippled microphone. This should, for example, mean that Garageband can use it for recording audio input, which is convenient (and currently impossible). Second, the Audio Unit Lab is going to be interesting. It allows users to create Audio Units - which in Garageband means software instruments and which generally might give the Mac a built-in, midi-accessible sampler. It's hard to believe on the one hand - I doubt it would have features to encroach on, say Ableton Live - but on the other hand, with some pre-loaded audio, a cheapo Casio keyboard with midi ports, an isight, and Garageband, you'd practically be a moble radio station - podcasting anyone?
And the Audio Unit Lab is on http://www.apple.com/pro/musicaudio/tiger.html and NOT on the 200 list!
Expanding a vast wasteland since 1996.
We're talking about highly advanced stuff here. It exists only in labs. So it's way too early to talk about specifics.
I don't want to blow anything out of proportion, but think of Spotlight as being kind of like the first bitmapped graphics. What we're doing with it right now is cool. But what's really important is what it enables us to do in the future.
GPS-based locational metadata is just one example. Automatic speech-to-text transcription for audio recordings is another. (You wouldn't believe what vector processing can do for speech-to-text. I saw a demo where a high-quality, noiseless audio recording of an unaccented speaker was transcribed at 20x real-time on a single 2.0 GHz G5.)
Example: You're doing a multi-party teleconference. A recording is made of that teleconference (each angle), and separate audio tracks are recorded for each participant. In real time, your computer transcribes each voice track and stores it as ancillary content on the recording, content that Spotlight indexes for you. At any time, you can type "meeting in San Jose" into Spotlight, and it'll take you right to the angle and track on which your co-worker Laurent talked about next week's meeting in San Jose.
Think about more detailed logging. Right now your computer logs only the most rudimentary events, stuff that is of no interest to human beings. What if it could log everything? Right now you can say "Show me that file I worked on yesterday at two o'clock." But what if you could turn that around and say, "When and for how long did I work on this file?" That's vitally important to anybody who does billable work. Imagine if, through metadata and logging, your computer could automatically produce your time sheet for you?
Another type of automatically generated metadata we're experimenting with is relational metadata. Let's say you've got a picture of your dog on your computer. You e-mail it to your sister Jan. Your computer notes this as metadata on the photo so later you can ask your computer to show you what pictures you've sent to Jan.
Address Book is one area where relational metadata is pretty important. In Address Book, you put Jan and your brother Harry into a group called "Family." Both Jan and Harry, in their contact records, get metadata describing them as being members of the "Family" group. So later you can ask your computer to show you what pictures you've e-mailed to members of your family. Or received from members of your family. Or what pictures you've e-mailed to SOME members of your family but not ALL.
Let's say you take that picture of your dog and drop it in a Pages document, then export the document as a PDF and mail it to your sister Jan. The computer records, as metadata, the fact that that picture of your dog is related to Jan. It knows that put associated the picture with that Pages document, that the Pages document was associated with the PDF file, and that the PDF file was associated with an e-mail to Jan.
Now combine it with a gestural interface. Take two files, any two files. Say it's a PDF representing an invoice and a Photoshop file representing a poster you designed. You drag the invoice over the Photoshop file and a marking menu appears, giving you the option of establishing a relationship between the two files. If you want you can annotate the relationship. If you don't, you don't have to. The computer will simply note that a relationship exists.
Now extend that idea. Instead of it being two files, it can be two ANYTHING. Drag a contact from Address Book to a Pages document; up pops a marking menu asking you if you want to establish a relationship. Or an song from iTunes to a picture of your girlfriend. Or your daughter's birth certificate to her birthday in iCal.
The possibilities that Spotlight opens up are pretty inspiring. It's not just a desktop search tool. Yes, it makes that possible, but bleah. That's 20th-century thinking. That's you working in the way the computer wants. What's more important about Spotlight is the fact that it's an enabling technology that lets the computer work in the way you want.
There's some pretty exciting stuff coming in the next few years.
One of the new features that Apple did not mention, is that all built-in text fields, including the editing areas of TextEdit and (presumably) Mail, allow discontinuous selection now. That is, you can select a word here, a word there, a rectangular chunk somewhere else. You can then copy, cut, paste, etc.
Maybe it is just me, but I like being able to do that!
i'd hit it so hard, if you pulled me out you'd be the king of britain [bash.org]
Very few people are going to sit down and add descriptions to all their photographs, documents and video footage.
Which is why you don't have to for the system to work. Yes, the more metadata that's available, the better, but it doesn't suddenly break down (as you seem to be saying) if you're inconsistent. If you organize at all, it works better. If you don't, it still works better than it used to.
Also, invoking "Metacrap" is basically meaningless, as the entire piece is about the use of metadata on the Internet, which is a vastly different scenario than on the desktop. I don't see how any of the seven points really applies.
On the internet, the producer of the metadata and the consumer are not the same, and have very different desires. On the desktop, you are the consumer of your own metadata. You have much more incentive to do it well, and much less incentive to do it poorly (lie). If you add keywords like "v1agra pr0n britney spears" to your documents , it's nobody's problem but your own.
If the system is incomplete and any single file doesn't have metadata added, the system is effectively useless
This might be true if the system *only* used metadata, but it doesn't. Plain text files don't have any kind of user-added metadata at all, but you can still find them by content, or filename, or create/modify dates, etc.
If i was confronted by Java Source Code for a program, I wouldn't be able to read it and I would not know what to describe it as.
This is a horrible example for some point I cannot fathom. Why on earth would you *need* to describe something that you can't read? Why would you even care if the file is effectively meaningless to you? Why would you need to describe a source file at all, when all of the useful information would be part of the content index?
Maybe you should learn more about a subject before likening it to Communism.
Don't become a regular here -- you will become retarded.
Why not? Information is supposed to be free, isn't it?
Seeing as you're an Apple employee I'd like to repeat a request I have regarding Voice - to - text. That is... don't forget us deaf folks. :-) Stick in a sorta generic voice recognition that we could use on the fly to get at least a phonetic translation of someone's speech and deaf people all over will flock to Apple's. (Just like the blind are gonna do with Tiger) Something where you could turn it on and off and get a little floating / scrolling transcript. Heck, make it work for movies that aren't captioned or subtitled and I'll be able to rent stuff that came out before the mid 80's! I wouldn't have had to sell my original Twilight Zone collection just because those cheap-skates couldn't be bothered to add subtitles to old TV shows.
:-) Hmmm... maybe this is already doable in Tiger or even Panther. HMMMMM...
:-D
Oh and... if you're doing the iTunes Movie Store thing... you must add subtitles to all the movies cuz... if not I'm gonna have to sue you guys under the ADA to keep us from being completely ignored as digital movie downloads become big.
Of course make it multi-lingual and sprinkle in the real-time Dashboard translation and we've got a tricorder.
P.S. Love ya for the multi-video chat... hope it can handle 4 way sign language with a decent fps. I gotta figure out how to get the govt to hand out iMacs to deaf now.
Cwm, fjord-bank glyphs vext quiz