Slashdot Mirror
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."
Silly people! Dont' they know Apple is going out of business? They have been for the past decade or so.
"He uses statistics as a drunken man uses lampposts...for support rather than illumination." - Andrew Lang
http://www.dashboardlineup.com/
(I should say that I am partly affiliated with it.)
Dashboard Widgets
Is that for warganging? Driving on the open road, searching for unsecured WiFi ports?
Now that would be sweet!
-- Tigger warning: This post may contain tiggers! --
Does Photoshop 1 even run under OS X 10.4?
....OmniGiraffe and CandyBar look cool, keep up the freeware and a big thank you to whoever offers it!
He who knows best knows how little he knows. - Thomas Jefferson
There's more focus on it in the Mac world because they don't suck, they work properly and don't come preloaded with spyware.
Reading code is like reading the dictionary - you have to read half of it before you can go back and understand it.
In no time at all there are going to be a whole slew of Dashboard-centric sites, Automator-centric sites, Spotlight-centric sites, and so forth. Just like there are a myriad of PHP, Javascript, CSS, etc sties, we're going to see a bunch based solely on this new Mac OS.
You gotta hand it to Apple. They create an entire industry around an iPod (don't you love how Belkin, once a patch cord company, makes loads of money off iPod accessories) and are now already sporting sites all over for an OS just recently (and in some places not even out yet) released.
"He uses statistics as a drunken man uses lampposts...for support rather than illumination." - Andrew Lang
...burninating the countryside?
I mean, seriously. How much Mac software is the equivalent of "faceplates for your cell phone?"
Yeah I mean how many metadata plug-ins do we need to be able to search the text inside our prototyping, graphics, and organization applications. I mean this must be like the 50th time someone has provided a way for me to instantly search my system for tree diagrams in a proprietary format with particular text in them.
Oh wait, no it isn't.
my roommate works at @pple store and she says it's open late from 8 to midnight for all u apple geeks to go gawk.
Did anyone else misread the headline and think: "Oh no! They are releasing spyware for OS X!"
*Phew!*
Still, I'm hope they made sure that Automator is secure with Mail.app unlike vbscript and Outlook Express originally was. I'd rather not have my email being Automated to send certain things to everyone on my address book.
"I am the king of the Romans, and am superior to rules of grammar!"
-Sigismund, Holy Roman Emperor (1368-1437)
I would LOVE to be able to search my mail with spotlight...but I can't yet find a thunderbird plugin....sadness overwhelms me
"Bloody zoos!" - Rick on The Young Ones
one word:
sweet!
If you don't know what AltaVista is (was), get off my lawn.
To be honest, that was my first reaction, too. However: The little plugin thingies are going to be one of the first places where lots of people cut their teeth on programming. Apple is doing a certain amount of hand-holding here and provides some documentation and a great programming enviroment -- it got even better with Tiger. Since this site is for people who at least would like to pretend that they could code if they only had the time (ah, like me), it does make sense.
One word of advice: If you ever have to ask a question that is critical about Apple on Slashdot, post as AC. Things that are considered normal, harmless questions or even humorous in other sections get trolled to death here. The "Cult of Mac", unfortunately, is not a joke.
Wait, is this Mac OSX Tiger or TigerDirect? I'm confused...
See, this is why I'm in favour of the two-party system; you just can't trust those third parties. Bunch of savages.
Wait, what are we talking about again?
Anyone knows if there's "official" support for partitioning the disk to support several versions of MacOS X? While I'd love to write code on Tiger (and must make sure my games work on it), I also need to support older versions. I know how to install multiple versions on the same Powerbook, just wondering if there's any known side effects or differences from a 'virgin' mac :P
Cartoon-like miniature golf for Mac: http://www.funpause.com/gardengolf/
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
It looks like even though Tiger has only been out a few hours, Apple is well on its way to building three more "community economies".
I find it so interesting that the iPod (in all its flavors) and Mac mini have oodles of accessories for each.
With Spotlight, Dashboard, and Automator all generating the software equvalent of these accessories, it seems appropriate to explore the "community economies" Apple is creating.
Perhaps there is a better phrase than "community economies" to describe the markets that emerge from supporting a specific product as well as the communities that for from them (take for instance, iPod community websites). Whatever they may be called, it is interesting how Apple seems more capable than other manufacturers, even in other spaces, to develop these "community economies".
But why is this becoming common for Apple products? Apple seems second only to automobile makers in creating accessory markets and communities of owners & supporters. The same doesn't exist for GAP or Sony or even Microsoft, though an argument can be made that the latter has a huge community of PC software vendors.
But more than the vendors, it is the concept of little sub-economies and users so specific to a particular product that is very interesting to me.
I only came here to do two things; kick some ass, and drink some beer...looks like we're almost out of beer.
We have wildly overstocked retail stores with copies of Tiger. We don't expect any of the stores to run out tonight.
Seriously: wildly overstocked. Like you wouldn't believe.
Nobody is forced to upgrade. Mac OS X 10.3 will continue to be supported. We just released Safari 1.3 with lots of enhancements last week, and we released QuickTime 7 with H.264 support for Panther this morning.
;-)
If your sister wants great new features, she should buy the upgrade. If she doesn't, she shouldn't.
Or, you know. You could be a really awesome brother and buy it for her.
I could argue the "Cult of Mac" thing. The fact is, every group trolls here. Apple threads get Windows- and Linux-fanatics. BSD threads get "- is dying!" trolls like nobody's business. And SCO threads... well, in that case it's pretty much deserved. But nobody is spared. In a community this large, everybody hates something.
It's just plain old garden-variety groupthink, where a lot of people receive a stimulus and respond similarly. It's not a cult, but it's just two or three steps removed.
Now, as for the success of Apple on Slashdot... you need to go back a ways, but it wasn't always the way. Practically any thread mentioning Apple would attract its share of detractors, anonymous and virtiolic. Then something unforseen happened: Steve Jobs returned.
I'm not really fan of Steve Jobs either, but I will admit that a (mostly) benevolent dictator is the best thing Apple could have gotten at the time. He challenged -- and changed -- computer culture, to the point that those silly looking triangular bubble-shaped iMacs that every "expert" at the time pooh-poohed still pop up in some clip-art collections.
Over time, Apple apparently started doing some things right. Not everything, but enough to continue their survival. "Apple is dying!" went from troll's battle cry to last bastion of the hold-outs, and now where it's used, it's sarcastic. Even you admit in your post that they're doing some things correctly.
In this case, the customizeability isn't quite programming, nor should it be. The fading of Hypercard from the public eye was enough warning that most people don't want to deal with programming. There's enough control under the hood on OS X that those people who want to can play with perl, python, ruby, c, c++, obj-c, java, emacs, vi, pico, php, etc. For the rest of them, there's this neat thing that does what they tell it -- programming in essence, but not in name. And that might make it easier for people to swallow.
You cannot truly appreciate Dilbert until you read it in the original Klingon.
Sure can! Just bop on over to iTunes, click to buy album. Enjoy!
I want to shoot the messenger!
http://www.dashboardlineup.com/
http://www.iheartwidgets.com/
http://www.thedashboarder.com/ (go easy on these guys, they're already being beaten to death.)
In fact, several of these have been up for a couple of weeks. Has anyone else noticed that /. auto-links things now? Here's a test : http://dupedupedupe.net/
Sweet! There goes what little HTML skillz I had!
P.S.- Just ordered the Mini a few minutes ago.
Cool. Convertible?
must... stay... awake...
I just got my iBook G3 700mhz in October 2002. I've already bought Panther to put on it. I can't believe Apple wants me to pay for another upgrade. This is outrageous. I'm switching to Windows. At least then I don't have to buy another upgrade for 7 or 8 years.
Spyware application vendors and anti-virus application vendors come to mind.
People are rushing to buy them before the company goes under!
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
your a retard who cannot read.. both konfab and apple agree that dashboard may LOOK like konfab, but fundamentally they are different technologies.
I am the Alpha and the Omega-3
There are at least two markets that Apple matches 100%
1) The clueless Windows user that call the tower the hard drive.
2) UNIX geeks that are tired of messing with Linux
Windows gamers do not match. Windows gamers match 100% using an XBox or PS2 for gaming. They would save a bundle in hardware upgrades as well...
Your Average Joe
"At least then I don't have to buy another upgrade for 7 or 8 years."
;-)
You mispelled "download," "patches," and "days."
Custom metadata fields are not supported, except to the extent that each importer can define its own schema.
Extended file system metadata is not going to be supported because it's not filesystem-agnostic. The idea is that we're going to broaden support for new filesystems, not restrict it.
Spotlight is a search tool, not an asset-management database.
Although, sooner or later someone will probably just write a plug-in that imports any extended file system metadata for any file.
No, they won't, because attributes can't be defined at run-time. They're defined in a schema file that's a part of the importer package.
Gonna say it again: Spotlight is a search tool, not a database.
of Apple's Tiger, and they were doing it a day before release!
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.
I wouldn't hold your breath on Onyx doing an OS X version anytime soon.
I was the original author of Spotlight, and they haven't developed the IP much from the original version I sold them (I'd sold it because I was busy creating CrossBasic at the time, which was eventually renamed to RealBasic).
In fact they went so far as to threaten me with legal action a couple of years ago, when I started to develop a Mac OS X equivalent, even though the non-compete provision had expired.
To be honest, that was my first reaction, too. However: The little plugin thingies are going to be one of the first places where lots of people cut their teeth on programming.
The original summary mentioned sites providing three types of third-party software to take advantage of tiger. Both automator scripts and dashboard widgets are great for quick and fast small tasks that can be easily distributed and used. They are great for really really quick or small operations and will be great for adding customized functionality for many people.
That said, I don't think either is very important compared to the third item, spotlight plug-ins. This is new and real filesystem level functionality being extended by third parties. If this happened in Windows, Linux, Solaris, or NachOS it would be on the front page of Slashdot, and rightly so. A single day after the OS was released, thanks to dozens software developers, a user of tiger can instantaneously search their entire system based upon the contents of all sorts of file types. Apple allowing this for fifty or so very common data types is great, but the fact that people have already provided plug-ins to let my searches extend to OpenOffice files, Omnigraffle diagrams, Realbasic projects, Corel Painter Files, VOIP logs, and many more proprietary file types really makes me think that this technology will be used and extended to the point that it will really, really change the way I use my computer on a fundamental level. This is, as far as I know, the first time this sort of thing was possible on any system although I have no doubt that it will be embraced by every consumer OS within a few years time.
This is definitely "News for Nerds."
Search Kit can index multiple things within a single file.
:
:
Can Spotlight?
If not, why not?
Frankly I think your hostility to the Mac BU (and by extension anyone who questions this 'feature') is misplaced. Why should every mail application (or other application) have to change their storage format to a single file per object?
If this is the case, this is a gap in the Spotlight API, and a step backwards from Search Kit - it would not be backwards compatible. If it is backwards compatible you can indeed index several things in one file (I know because I'm doing it presently with search kit).
You can add arbitrary URLS (ie an url scheme of your devising) with
SKDocumentCreateWithURL
Then add text to be indexed with
SKIndexAddDocumentWithText
I haven't looked at the Spotlight API so I couldn't tell you if this is the case with Spotlight, but everyone seems to be saying that you need to feed it a file URL for each object searched. Perhaps because of the tie in with the operating system to see when files have changed.
BTW, your posts are very interesting, and I'm glad you post here, but you do sometimes give the impression of talking as 'the voice of Apple' on all subjects. Is this intentional? You can't possibly know about everything Apple does.