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Third Parties Already Taking Advantage of Tiger
tezbobobo writes "Tiger been out hours and already the Apple download page has been updated to take advantage of the update's new features. These cover areas including Spotlight plugins, Dashboard plugins, and Automator plugins.
These allow a range of actions from searching within omnigraph documents (spotlight), to resizing photoshop documents (automator), and (my fav) a dashboard wireless locator. The best bit -- a cursory glance indicates about half are freeware."
http://www.dashboardlineup.com/
(I should say that I am partly affiliated with it.)
Dashboard Widgets
One that probably isn't on the page may be the Spotlight plugin to allow for indexing of OpenOffice.org 1.x and NeoOffice formatted files. Unfortunately, I couldn't open source it prior to the Tiger release because the APIs were covered under NDA, but no longer!
The NeoLight metadata importer is licensed under LGPL and illustrates basic parsing of OOo 1.x formatted documents using CoreFoundation XML utilities. It's still in development and could use some developers to lend a hand testing, optimizing, and determining if we're extracting all the relevant content properly.
More information can be found in this trinity article.
ed
Sure, you can do that. You can do it from the installer. Each partition shows up to the operating system like a separate volume.
One of the most important things we abandoned when evolving our operating system from Unix was the idea of separate, hidden partitions for things like virtual memory stores. All of Mac OS X runs on a single, user-visible partition. Which means you can trivially split your hard drive up into separate partitions and run different instances of Mac OS X on them.
Well, I can see why "please spend a bunch of time to rewrite your storage format so it works better with our OS feature" isn't particularly high on the list for the Entourage folks.
How about "please spend a bunch of time to rewrite your storage format so it doesn't completely implode if a single byte gets written incorrectly?" Or how about "please spend a bunch of time to rewrite your storage format so it doesn't crap out when it hits two gigabytes?"
Or how about "please spend a bunch of time to rewrite your storage format in order to make your users happy?" That's my favorite.
Or better yet, AIAT/V-Twin/SearchKit- which was Apple's pride and joy of searching and the Next! Cool! Thing! for search a couple of years ago?
Um. You do know that Spotlight is basically Search Kit 2.0, right? It's based on, and is backwards compatible with, Search Kit.
"You applers?" Horrifying crimes against the English language aside, I'm not really sure I'm buying what you're selling here. In order for that to be true, the average size of each mail message would have to be less than 430 bytes. I don't think that's true.
Here's how it works. The Mac OS Extended filesystem has a minimum allocation block size of four kilobytes. A one-byte file on disk will be given a minimum allocation of four kilobytes. Okay?
Let's say your "mbox" file contains exactly 12,000 messages, and that it totals exactly 11,534,336 bytes. That means each message is an average of about 960 bytes long.
On your Mac, those 960 byte files will be inflated to 4,096-byte files, because of the way Mac OS Extended allocates. That's a ratio of 4.27:1. Your mail store on your Mac will be 4.27 times larger than your mbox file.
That means your mail store on your Mac will be 49,213,167 bytes, or about 47 MB. Even if you double that to account for the property-list metadata embedded with each message, that only comes to 94 MB. Not 105 MB.
So I'm gonna go ahead and say that I don't really buy what you're selling.
Now, setting that aside, your Mac requires considerably more than the 36 MB wasted inside your mail archive just for virtual memory paging. If you're in a situation where 36 MB makes a difference, you're doing something seriously wrong.
How about a real-world example? I have an archive of 22,433 entirely average e-mail messages. On my Panther system disk, that archive occupies 876 MB. On my Tiger system disk, it occupies a grand total of 880 MB. A net loss to me of 4 MB of disk space, for a net gain of all the functionality of Spotlight.
In the real world, e-mail messages are much closer to, or even significantly in excess of, 4 KB than they are in the case you described. And even in the case you described, the net difference is 36 MB, a totally insignificant sum in today's terms.
OS-Level scripting is absolutely NOT to be ignored. Amigas did it years ago with ARexx, and it was an incredibly powerful feature. In fact, I would go as far as to say that it's the GUI equivalent of Unix's small-but-pipeable-commands philosophy.
I'm quite surprised that it's not universally supported on Unix machines now. Luckily, KDE at least does support it via DCOP and scripting APIs along with command line apps to access DCOP calls.
To give a few quick examples:
I recently discovered started using KDE's automatic wallpaper cycling for a given directory full of wallpapers. However, some wallpapers wouldn't suit my mood at a certain moment, and some wouldn't look as good on screen as they did when I downloaded them. So I figured I'd add some buttons to the panel: A red X for "Delete Wallpaper", and a forward arrow to switch to the next wallpaper. Implementing that took LESS than a MINUTE, since I just had to open a console, run "dcop", and see that kde exposes two helpful calls:
kdesktop KBackgroundIface changeWallpaper
and kdesktop KBackgroundIface currentWallpaper
The first command was added directly to the next wallpaper button, and the second was added to a short script that uses it to get the wallpaper name, changes to the next wallpaper, then deletes the old one.
As another example, I have a quick little script that finds my currently playing song in whatever KDE music player I happen to be using via dcop, without the need for specially made command line tools that access the players API, such as xmms provides.
The real power comes when you want to do things like connecting a 3D rendering app to a photo manipulation app, followed by lipsync tool and a final movie encoder.
ARexx was doing things like this years ago, and it's perfectly possible (and implemented!) on Linux today. It's just a shame more people aren't aware of and using it. We're ignoring potential power, as if we all used DOS and continued to claim that Unix command line functionality was pointless and unnecessary. Maybe when we use Unix the way it CAN be used, we'll finally have a killer app that puts the secrecy of windows' proprietary apps to shame.
At the very least, I would ask people not to insult OS X for finally implementing this important feature. They seem to have done it in an innovative GUI-based way, too.