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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."
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
Does Photoshop 1 even run under OS X 10.4?
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
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.
"Bloody zoos!" - Rick on The Young Ones
Wait, is this Mac OSX Tiger or TigerDirect? I'm confused...
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.
There's an interesting story behind that.
... except the Entourage database.
Nearly two years ago, we went to Microsoft's Mac BU and said, "We've got this new thing going on, and you're going to want to change the way Entourage stores its data." We told them all about Spotlight and how it indexes individual files and associates them with key-value attributes. We showed them the way we were redesigning Mail, and the workarounds we were going to employ for Address Book and iCal.
Their response? "Meh."
We fully expected to see a complete rewrite of the Entourage data format in Office 2004, but it didn't happen. Instead, Microsoft's guys said that they wanted to work with us to make Spotlight index their database.
Well, that's really not what Spotlight's designed to do, see. It's not that we won't make it do that. It's just that that's now how it's designed to work.
So now we have really excellent metadata importers for all the Office file formats
Last I heard, we were still doing the back-and-forth with Microsoft. Not sure where that's going to end up.
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.
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.
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.
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."
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.