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Mac OS X Tiger Released and Analyzed
bonch writes "Ars Technica has gone under the hood of the Tiger release and offers up detailed impressions on the new OS X update. The review covers everything from interface changes, new kernel updates and programming interfaces, the unification of UNIX system startup services into one service called 'launchd', the return of metadata, to the fact Apple has announced that from 10.4 forward there will be no more API changes. A fascinating read about the technical details behind Tiger and the specific changes that have occurred since Panther's release 18 months ago." Today is the update's official launch day, though some lucky people have had it for a few days already.
Another in-depth review, focusing more on features and less on the OS's underbelly is over at MacInTouch... http://www.macintouch.com/tigerreview/index.shtml
Now that I've seen Tiger, I can't wait until Longhorn is released. Just think of all those juicy features that Microsoft will see and innovate into their latest product!
I'm a big tall mofo.
to tiger direct today to pick up a copy.
This is a real release now, not an accidental shipment? I know Apple is ahead of everyone, including themselves, so we best check.
What keeps me going is my inertia.
Not Google, but someone got a message from Apple about distributing it on Bittorrent. Oh and replied.
Linux Wireless Hardware in the UK
I think the Safari RSS support is neato. Does osnews.com have an RSS feed. If so, maybe Slashdot can just automatically aggregate it into the front page from now on. It might save a lot of time.
Hey... whatever happened to TigerDirect's requested stay order on the release? Did Apple stuff then with enough money? ;)
fuvoo: watch something
I wish more hardware/software sites were as rigorous in their reviews and articles as Ars Technica. It's so much better than the average OS release or Linux distro review from many other sites.
To me, "The installer is cool, look at these spiffy screenshots" and nothing else is not a review. 21 pages of detailed technical and UI examination and discussion - now that's a review.
Does anyone know the list of file types that Spotlight will be able to index out-of-the-box? OpenOffice maybe?
Can it make my dual 1.8 stop crashing? I certainly hope so...
You can have:
- reliability/stability/security
- lots of choice
- bleeding-edge feature set and interface
But you must pick only two.Damn those pesky terrorists
So when is this website gonna be sued?
Until I can have it on my G5 Powerbook
How long do I have to wait?
UK Laptops
How about letting it run on good cheap hardware Apple?
You mean like the Mac Mini?
Shades of Grayden
You can have all 3, just run Linux!
G'day all,
/Users, /Documents and /Applications/apps (where I put any applications *I* install) - yes, I'm a paranoid bugger - I did a boot->nuke->install of Tiger last night onto my PowerBook G4
.Mac details (you gotta play!)
My copy arrived from TNT 24hours ago. Along with a friend who's copy arrived at the same time, we upgraded his iBook and my PowerBook overnight.
I have two words for you:
1. Spotlight
2. Dashboard
If you don't know what I'm talking about (presuming you all do!)... --> http://www.apple.com/ and read all about them! Say no more!
Well, I can happily report that my experience has been a happy one! After backing up
All I can say is that Tiger be pretty, Tiger be fast! It was a complete surprise to find that at long last my problems syncing my Sony Ericsson P900 seem to be over, as are my faxing problems. I haven't tried either *fully* yet, first impressions are good, and happiness should prevail.
A couple of interesting things noted last night:
* The install *really* doesn't like it if you don't enter in valid
* The almost-missed "sending registration details to Apple" message was kind of surprising. My fault for giving my PB a working network connection, but it would have been nice to be asked first before sending off data! Having said that, it's nice not to need loads of installation
keys, etc. And hey - it's probably in the EULA which of course I read in detail before installing (*NOT*)
So, for anyone out there holding out to see what the feedback is like - don't! You'll just kick yourself harder the longer you hold off upgrading!
I spent a couple hours earlier today reading it, and I gotta say, the article is right on about the Finder and metadata. How cool would it be if Finder had a "Keywords" utility palette that let you "tag" files in a Gmail-esque manner? Instead we get to deal with the continued inconsistent behavior of Finder. Their video of the "Smart Folder" constantly jumping around after being opened and closed is hilarious, but sadly accurate. Here's hoping the 10.5 will be the release where Apple digs up the Finder and rebuilds it from scratch in Cocoa. It seems like lately Apple's been really lax in the HIG department. (Mail 2.0 buttons, anyone?) Someone in that department needs to find religion and start cracking the whip on their projects.
Still, Tiger is really, really impressive compared to their competition. While Longhorn continues to look more and more like a cross between Copland and the White Whale, Apple delivered its project on-time and with all the features they promised. It looks like the computing mainstream is finally starting to give Apple some credit for their accomplishments, too. Even the New York Times put out an editorial about how cool it is to upgrade to Tiger! It's just interesting to think about how much more it could be.
A truly spacial Finder with real metadata? Incomparable!
Apple's website says that it is available today at 6PM... seems like kind of an odd time?
My copy is on the hard drive of a new Mac Mini (or, if they ever release it, a Mac Midi: basically, an iMac without a screen) that I can't quite afford yet. Tiger + iLife is almost 40% of the cost of a mini!
My 400 MHz G3 iMac (with 1 GB RAM and 40 GB HD) is still running MacOS 9.2.2. It would barely run Tiger. And Tiger would break my old UMax scanner.
it's G-R-R-R-R-E-A-T!!!
(ducks and runs for cover)
Why then do you arguably get somewhere between 0 and 1 of those three when running Windows? (I've switched from Windows to Mac as my primary development machine.)
Ian Ameline
if you tell it to "Use secure virtual memory." /var/vm/ appeared to contain a uniform 128-bit pattern, I had thought at first that Apple was simply preventing user-space processes from reading them, but this is fortunately not the limit of 10.4's virtual memory protection.
As evidenced by profiling in Shark, page faults can trigger decryption. I was initially worried--as files in
$129 for a lousy system upgrade?
Reconsider your decision not to install Tiger on your aging iMac. I've got Panther running on my 400MHz Blue & White G3 (only 320MB of RAM) and it's running great. Perfect for surfing, e-mail, and iTunes jukebox. My expectation (largely confirmed by Siracusa's article) is that Tiger will run even better.
I'll never get this read before class if you people don't stop hammering the server! Christ, I should have finished reading this last night.
Part of the reason Apple can produce such elegant software is that they work on a well-defined hardware platform. When you say "Intel" you presumably also mean "random BIOS, motherboards, controllers, graphics cards, NICs, etc." Hardware support is not the only challenge that slowing down Longhorn, but it's a large part of the problem.
As for the WinXP UI shell on Linux? Why? It's not particularly great. Now, the Mac OS/X UI on Linux... that would be nice.
My blog
If you just bought the Mac Mini, you may be able to get a free upgrade. Check Apple's website. If that doesn't work, check out the deal in my sig. :-)
Javascript + Nintendo DSi = DSiCade
The official requirements are a PowerBook G3 with built-in FireWire, so that means that the Pismo is the lowest-end machine supported by the new OS.
That could possibly mean that there will be a hack to install it on your older hardware - but don't hold your breath.
If I recall correctly, the Lombard came out sometime in 1999? In PC terms, that's the equiv of, say, a P2 400 laptop. That was *top end* in 1999 for mobile systems. XP doesn't run too badly on those, either...
That said, XP doesn't do a lot of things that Tiger, or Panther (supported) does.
Food for thought anyway.
As for your wireless, D-link make an 802.11g NIC in cardbus form which is supported with D-link's drivers. Also, I am told that any Broadcom 802.11b/g NIC will work with the airport extreme drivers - but I suggest borrowing one first.
My brain nearly imploded when reading this review. I realized after so many years of being treated to 1-3 page reviews that skimmed over everything except the authors ego, I had almost forgotten what an in-depth review could be (I'm ignoring Amit Singh's http://www.kernelthread.com/ since they're more like white papers).
It was great to read about a lot of backend stuff like metadata handling or core video rather than just here about Spotlight again and again. No mistake, I'm looking forward to spotlight, but I like knowing how things work and or the problems that had to be overcome to get them to work.
Ha! Touché!
Damn those pesky terrorists
I found it incredibly funny.
If I could have modded the guy I'd have modded him underrated (+1 mod, unlike funny, which is +1 but non-karma, thus his -1 troll took from his karma even though he had +1 funny).
Proceed with Format (Y/N)? Y
You know it is Apple related software when the review uses an entire page to comment on the look of the cardboard box.
Tiger only runs on machines that have built-in firewire. That means the oldest laptop supported is the Pismo.
I'm sure the Xpostfacto folks are looking into how to get Tiger to run on older machines.
Two wrongs don't make a right, but three lefts do.
I take it you haven't actually used Tiger? Unike what we usually get from the generous ladies and gents over in Redmond, Mac OS X updates actually contain new features, and not simply cosmetic touchups and bug fixes that should have been available as a free update.
But the nicest thing about OS X updates is that they continue to improve performance on hardware across the board, including older supported hardware. My G4 1.33GHz is noticeably snappier than it was on Panther.
On the other side, can you even fathom someone uttering the words "Wow, that new version of Windows really makes my P3 fly!"
Click next right above the PDF thing..
Kyle
http://www.unlogikal.net/
I got my hot little hands on my copy yesterday, and installed last night. Simple, straightforward, no problems with the install. Took about 30 minutes; most of that time was likely indexing, as the actual data transferred from the DVD to my machine was only about 2GB.
Spotlight is astounding. It is amazingly fast, beautiful to watch, easy to use, and wonderfully complete, searching applications, documents (word, pdf, txt, rtf, html, etc, etc), images, music (though I haven't checked *lyrics* yet), mail messages - everything. It's fast. It will change my experience as a user - completely.
I spent so much time playing with spotlight last night that I didn't even open the Dashboard.
I did open Safari, however, and sites (all those I opened) render much more rapidly than in Panther. The RSS feature is nice, but I didn't spend much time with it. Much of the interface responds much more rapidly to user requests, with the singular exception of Expose, as others have noted. I am hopeful that Apple will tweak Expose in an upcoming update.
If you don't own a Mac, visit the nearest Apple retail store and try spotlight. As an engineer, I appreciate the technological achievement, and as a user, I am - to say it again - simply amazed.
If the Government becomes a lawbreaker, it breeds contempt for law;
Sorry, ignore this. I misread the grandparent as saying that he couldn't afford Tiger. That'll teach me to post before coffee. :-)
Javascript + Nintendo DSi = DSiCade
No, the entire article is there. See the little "Next" link at the bottom of he page? Click it. It takes you to the next page (amazing, no?). If you do this 20 more times or so, you can read the entire article.
"You can have:
* reliability/stability/security
* lots of choice
* bleeding-edge feature set and interface
But you must pick only two."
Then I pick the first and third option.
It's an excellent article, and gets at a number of good points. Very worth reading. I'm just through the first quarter.
John Siracusa is a great big whiner. Thankfully, in this article, his Spatial Finder crown of thorns is only employed in one sentence. He also predictably complains about the unified title bar look for aqua Windows. And the new look for Mail.app.
I've been a Mac user from the age of four on. I could move at light speed in System 8's finder, and I'm delighted to be rid of the spatial Finder. I like the unified title bar look, and I like the Mail.app redesign. Does my anecdote cancel his out? The guy at Ranchero Software seems to like the unified title bar look too... now can Siracusa bite it?
There are no trails. There are no trees out here.
Spot the poster who failed Reading Comprehension.
Try moving your mouse down from the PDF link about 40 pixels and clicking on that link instead.
For those who've already picked up Tiger, how well is application compatibility preserved?
I'm worried that some apps that I have might be broken and may take a while for fixes to arrive. The one I'm worried about the most is Office for Mac being broken ( yeah yeah I know iWork is better but I got this for free from a friend )
One of the things I really like about MAC OSX is that it offers Windows users an alternative to Windows if they are not interested or if they are afraid for Linux. Readily available software on the shelves and the stability of the BSD kernel. I think it is the best of both worlds. At OSCON in Portland last year I was amazed to see how many people were using Mac's at the show...personal machines. I expected to see many more Linux machines, but I just didn't see that. Maybe someone who is more familiar with it could explain this to me, because while I think it is cool, I just don't know as much about the inner workings of it to be able to say "yes...for an Open Source person the Mac is a good alternative."
I'm not a troll, but I play one on Slashdot.
Apple has been hyping for two weeks that anybody who orders by 4/25 will receive theirs on 4/29.
I ordered my copy from the Apple store way back on 4/13. So today, I get this email:
Nice job, Apple. My order status is still "preparing shipment" at the moment. At first I thought it had to do with the tigerdirect thing, but as of now there's no court order.
Of course this delay will be forgotten in a couple weeks' time, a few extra days' delay for a new OS isn't that important in the grand scheme of things.
I just think it's a bit funny given how Apple reacted to other companies who actually managed to ship it to their customers on or before the release date.
-CausticPuppy "Of all the people I know, you're certainly one of them." -Somebody I don't know
which was based on an even nicer quicktime ad available here. there are also more movies available there.
also look for an anime music video at animemusicvideos for a movie called "AMV Hell". They have a nice clip in that short movie using the ellenfeiss commercial.
Every experiment which ends in a big bang is a good experiment.
...and my PowerBook feels snappier already!
But you know, every last thing I buy from them does feel like blinkin' Christmas morning to open. Anyone who has an iPod, and obviously they're out there, did a little "that's cool" reexamination of the box once they'd gotten the thing out. God knows why it makes a difference, but it does.
Maybe Apple just regards it as a way to stake out their market position as (Steve J's analogy) the BMW of the desktop set. Same thing happens in optics: I'm a birder, and if you buy Swarovski or Leica or Zeiss, you get a very cool box around your thousand-dollar binoculars.
"Fundamentalism" isn't about divine morality. It's about human authority.
You must not have seen option 3.
There is a simple hack to add your "unsupported" 802.11g wifi cards to OS X. Just a matter of looking up the PCMCIA card's ID (one terminal command and a little looking) and edit the config file and add the id. Done it to several pismos. Only works on OS X though, if you have OS 9 still (which is an issue all its own) you're outa luck.
Airport cards aren't that terribly expensive though, although the older 802.11b airport cards can be a tad challenging to find.
I work for the Department of Redundancy Department.
Hereyou go.
The days of the digital watch are numbered.
I guess that's what grandparent meant. How does it run on a Mac Mini? Has anyone tried it yet? Maybe it's a bit early yet ^^
Well, here we are 18 months and 6 days later, finally getting a look at Mac OS X 10.4 Tiger. Windows users patiently waiting for Longhorn may not be sympathetic, but the longer wait for Tiger is something new to Mac OS X users.
Crow (smug): "What about System 7?"
Servo (irate): "THEY'RE WORKING ON IT!!"
Well, Tiger is shipping on the newest Mac hardware already.
Just ordered a 2.7 GHz system, and it included a link to the Tiger Online Seminar.
I haven't heard anything about when it will be available on the older Macs.
They will be "stuffing" the computer boxes with a little insert with a NFR set of CDs, for the customer to install when they open it up. Apple usually stuffs any boxes that ship after the OS releases. It'll be a few weeks at least before we start seeing macs that have 10.4 on their actual install/restore CDs though.
Apple has also been known to send NFR CDs for things like iLife when a new version cones out, sent to the retailers so they can stuff the boxes they have in inventory, but I haven't seen them do that with an OS before.
I work for the Department of Redundancy Department.
Here is the official list of supported hardware.h tml
http://www.apple.com/macosx/upgrade/requirements.
You will find that a lot of older hardware works, just not as well as you would hope.
YMMV.
What is the huge difference between Mac OS X and the OS X GUI on Linux?
Unix underpinnings? Check.
Awesome GUI? Check.
I have a website. It's about Macs.
The one Safari feature I was looking forward too seems to be missing. Anyone know how to get Safari to scale images to the screen in the same way as IE or FF does?
That's crazy, I pre-ordered my educational-priced copy on Sunday the 24th and it got here yesterday, the 28th. I'm in suburban Washington DC, and the FedEx tracking info said it came from a distribution center in Pennsylvania, which is why it got here overnight (shipped the 27th). I'll be installing tonight after I backup the old boot partition with SuperDuper.
With the first link, the chain is forged.
I love Mac OS X 10.4, no complaints about it so far, except that I'd like to recompile my kernel, but I can't as the newest sources released under APSL are 10.3.9. Anyone know when Apple will release the sources?
Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic.
I bought a Dual 1.8 last night at the Apple store and they actually weren't going to let me have it because it had a copy of tiger stuffed in the box. Since I cannot use it with my hardware currently I managed to convince them to pull it out and give me the $9.95 coupon instead.
:)
A bit lame
http://www.neooffice.org/
This can not be good.
I am defenseless. Use your button. Mod me down with all of your hatred.
It's running fine on a 6 years old G4 400!
Sure, it's not as fast as with my iMac G5, but still perfectly usable.
The mini is not far from the PB 12" and it's running extremely well on it, can't see the difference with the G5.
For those who have hardware older than 7 years, maybe it's time to upgrade...
There's a coupon for CD media, but you've got to surrender your DVD media to get it. I _like_ my DVD media...but I've also got an (pre firewire) iMac that can't read DVD's....can I make a dmg on an external usb/firewire drive and install it that way?
"Draco dormiens nunquam titillandus."
I've also heard that a Lucent WaveLAN card will work as an AirPort (not extreme) card without extra drivers.
Or you could click "Next" and continue reading the article for free.
But it's already obvious that reading isn't one of your strong suits.
-- I'm old enough to have lived through six different meanings of the word "hacker."
I ordered Tiger on April 12, which was the day its release was announced, and I got an email yesterday saying
"Due to an unexpected delay, we are unable to ship the following item(s) by the date that you were originally quoted:" (followed by my order for 10.4)
It shipped yesterday, won't arrive til Monday, when they guaranteed upon ordering that it'd be in on or before today.
Has anyone else had the same thing happen to them?
I don't think that's the case. The three or four installs I've done/seen had no trouble with skipping .mac. (I've never had a .mac account and I'm running 10.4 just fine.)
you had me at #!
Seriously, I have given up on Safari. Updates far and between and consistently making the browser slower. It takes a couple of seconds to render up any page on eBay on my 867 PB. FireFox does it in less than half the time. It's kind of funny that they originally went with KHTML instead of Mozilla because KHTML was faster.
a word of advice, install the dev tools that come with it and take a look at Quartz Composer. It's an entire modular programming interface to all the Core Image / Video / Audio / OpenGL stuff. Similiar to MAX/MSP but complete integrated.
You can use patches from it your apps with a single function call, make screen savers with it or run the compositions stand alone in Quicktime.
Hours for fun for graphics geeks.
What a fool believes, he sees, no wise man has the power to reason away.
anyone know? i know of a couple drivers which depend on this (and related) functions, and it looks like they've all but gotten up and left the ranch .. it ain't there no mo'?!!!!
(vn_open is part of the BSD 'virtual filesystem' API... most BSD's have it.. but Tiger has moved it somewhere, it seems.)
; -- the corruption of government starts with its secrets. a truly free people keep no secrets. --
Understood. I had not seen it before.
Apologies to the mod.
Ignorance is curable, stupid is forever.
The article and summary both mention the consolidation of many launching methods into an new 'launchd' daemon that is responsible for a wide-range of tasks including starting and stopping applications and other daemons on behalf of users and the system. After more than 100 comments, I have not seen even one mention of it. Is this because it is uninteresting, no one has RTFA, or because nobody really knows what it does yet? The Arstechnica reviewer advocates that the other UNIX type systems immediately steal this idea and code and incorporate it. Nobody here has an opinion on that?
Any old in-house app can be developed in .Net, where you can throw as many servers as you like at it and who cares how often you have to coddle it?
He was talking about user applications - I've seen some simple examples myself but nothing really beyond shareware.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
Only two people are porting it, and they are begging for corporate support and saying they won't be able to go on without $120,000/year. While I can certainly appreciate their predicament, I also am not reassured about the future quality of the product. Finally, a more worrisome thing is that they don't seem to have any plans to add scripting support. This is a problem, because the code for the GUI (Java, I think) is not exposed even to AppleScript's UI Element scripting (a framework for arbitrarily interacting with any program with a visible interface). In other words, NeoOffice/J is entirely un-automatable.
Shop as usual. And avoid panic buying.
Until there is a way of pulling (good, relevant) metadata out of most (all) file types Spotlight etc will be at best half features.
:)
I have difficulty getting users (intelegent users, mind) to file things in a single directory consistantly (yes I know this is ment to avoid directories but a location is only one example of metadata) . Fill in meta data as well? I may as well ask them to fly!
Ok text docs, spreadsheets etc will be fine (ish) as some occasionally appropriate info will be extractable, but what about drawings, scans, films. I know companies and the analy retentive will fill this in but an awful lot of people will not.
On the plus side I see this as the near end of application (un)installation hell....
rm *.mozilla !
ls *.apache !
or whatever syntax you choose, as the metadata will gladly be added by distro builders/app programmers. I've never heard this mentiond.
Ah well I'm off for two weeks holiday. Promise to think of you all while walking the dog
Jo
they make a tremendously good product and still have time left to think about what the box should look like.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
Yeah, you're right that Microsoft isn't writing drivers for all these different devices, but let's look at a couple things. First, I never need to load drivers when I'm using my Mac. The drivers are pretty much always included in the OS. Working on a Mac, you'd hardly know there's such a thing as a "video card driver". Why? It's in the OS. You get updates with the OS updates. After all, Apple is only including a couple different graphic chipsets from 2 different vendors in their systems. There aren't a lot of drivers to include before you have drivers for every possible video card.
And when there is a problem with the drivers, if there's some instability or performance, whether it's the OS's fault or the video driver's fault, Apple can just work either ATI or Nvidia to fix it. With all the different possible configurations of Intel/AMD with Intel/Nvidia/ATI on god-knows-whose vid card and motherboard, it's a little harder to track down the problem, reproduce it, convince the party at fault that they need to fix it, and push the patch down to everyone's local computer.
I don't know if that's a clear explanation, and maybe I'm missing some things.
my morning coffee.
:-)
That'll teach me to post before coffee.
Shhhhh! You'll disturb all those trolls that think Macs can only use one-button mice.
The criticism in the article is not just whining: in Mail, Apple is violating its own Human Interface Guidelines on icon design, and the author clearly states this. Consistency and thoughtful design is what separates Aqua from Luna, Microsoft's toy-box UI skin.
:P.
I was also very disappointed to see that quirky Finder inconsistency video: it goes against everything Apple has been preaching since day 1.
Of course, you need to see these for what they are: small missteps in an otherwise very nice update.
It would be pretty boring if it was 21 pages of praise, no? Regardless of whether you like or hate Apple, this review helps you form a much more informed opinion. Let's hope someone writes a similar one for Longhorn when it is (finally) released
I've gotten a netgear usb wifi to work without any troubles (W111 I think ??) I do have airport cards, I just used that as a second adapter to connect to two wireless networks at the same time.
I can hardly wait to start playing around with extended attributes, and it's great to see the filesystem notification services are in place and working (which I figured they had to be for spotlight). As he said, the worst problem finder had was not being accurate all the time and that is fixed now. I can live with the rest of the quirks pretty easily...
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
Hello, I have problem please hlp me fix it now!@!! I can't get my 10.4 Tiger to install on the P-P-P-Powerbook I got on ebay. I have contacted ebay and they will not help. Please reply quikly.
ooh, thanks for the insult, that really helps me improve myself! yay!
; -- the corruption of government starts with its secrets. a truly free people keep no secrets. --
So... applications developed for Tiger are guaranteed to work for OS X >= 10.4? The APIs have been thusly deemed perfect? Apple has start work on OS XI?
-Rob
Marriage doesn't have to suck!
One of the highlights in my opinion, FTA:
Don't forget about those other lucky people that have had it for a few days now...
* A very smooth install. Point, click, walk away for 45 minutes. Added a drive before I started, and booted to a new RAID array. Entirely painless.
* I wasn't particularly excited about Spotlight until I tried it. We're all used to Find functions searching on demand. Having everything pre-indexed makes all the difference. It is REALLY easy to find things this way. I quit using the mouse to launch applications when I discovered Quicksilver. Now I'll stop using it to find things on the drive. You non-Mac guys are gonna love this feature as Beagle matures and Microsoft gets with the program. Makes mousing around a diectory tree feel like clubbing things with a stick.
* Not sure if I like Dashboard yet. It's impressive eye candy for visitors, but I don't know how really useful widgets are unless you have them open on the desktop all the time. Even on my big-ass flatscreen, that means burning valuable real estate. I'd rather call the apps more-or-less instantly from Quicksilver when they're needed. Guess we'll see what sort of widgets people come up with.
* Like previous releases, Tiger feels more nimble than its predecessor. I know a lot of this is just tweaked user interface, but I like it.
* The RSS screensaver is as cool as it is useless. ;-)
* Mail is improved. But it's now ugly as sin.
* The cosmetic presentation of Tiger is cleaner and less "lickable" than 10.0-10.3.
* Nothing has broken yet. I have a LOT of apps to check, though. Am concerned older ones -- such as Office v.X -- won't run well.
* Safari totally smokes now. Fastest thing I've ever used, including Opera. We got a preview of this when Safari 1.3 was released with the last point update.
* Looks like Automator will be worth learning.
Pretty subjective stuff, but I'm quite pleased with Tiger so far. Looking forward to pushing it some over the weekend.
This is my post. There are many others like it. If you don't like what you read here, go try one of the others.
Mind elaborating on where the config file is, and what command to run to get the ID?
..
Its worth giving it a shot..
Tried that wifi thing on sourceforge, it never did work.
( Running Panther here.. not OS9 )
---- Booth was a patriot ----
the judge will throw the gavel a the tiger-direct lawyers.
I am the Alpha and the Omega-3
When the grandparent poster mentioned have you seen any commercial apps in it I think he meant 'software you can buy' written in dot net.. Can you buy anything from a vendor written in dot net? Is there a peoplesoft application released that is built on dot net? That sort of thing.
Seth
$5 / month hosted VPS on linux = awesome!
the topic says it all, run you software update and check it out!
This is 666 in octal, the number of the Beast...
Great Maiden song. Great Maiden album.
For your second wish, it's already possible : http://www.xpde.com/
Slashdot anagrams to "Sad Sloth"
That's Good !!
Riiz
I have been wondering, CoreImage allows all those fancy new effects, like desaturating, sepia toning etc. Is there a way to use this in the regular UI?
I am thinking of this, you know when you have a window sitting in the background, now it just sort of greys out the text & buttons. Is is possible to just desaturate the whole window? buttons, frame, content, everything, it would be much more consistent, and very nice for the eyes.
just curious,
Im.
In terms of technology, Tiger is in Longhorn territory. Longhorn assuredly will not run on anything resembling a P2 400...
A deep unwavering belief is a sure sign you're missing something...
I understand the theory, but if this is so...
why is it that Joe-Random-Bored-Dude can get Linux to run on his toaster oven?
What they don't advertise is that Quicktime 7 will break a Quicktime 6 Pro installation.
Yes, that means if you want the Pro features (such as playing in full screen) then you will have to pay for the Pro upgrade yet again.
This is particularly infuriating as they have a family pack deal for the OS, but not Quicktime Pro it seems.
When I get around to installing it on my Macs I'm going to see if there is an option to not install Quicktime 7. If not I'm going to raise hell on thier support line.
Does it finally have a working implementation of NAT-T?
This has annoyed me for years. Apple, make NAT-T work.
Need Free Juniper/NetScreen Support? JuniperForum
There really needs to be a native version of Open Office for OS X. Even one that charges $49 per copy or something. Anyone for starting up a company? If some VC wants to give me a million bucks, I'll hire some developers and get an Aqua based OpenOffice out there.
Why is /. taking so long to load? Has it been slashdotted?
Work like no one is watching. Dance like you've never been hurt. Make love like you don't need the money.
Too much text, too little geek porn.
Laugh.. Please?
It's The Golden Rule: "He who has the gold makes the rules."
I wanted to do the same, but I just can't find them no matter how much I search on Google.
Why develop something as impressive as Quartz 2D Extreme and then leave it turned off by default? My inquiries to Apple have gone unanswered, so I can only speculate about the reasoning behind this decision. My best guess is that all of the bugs could not be excised from Q2DE in time for Tiger's launch date, and that it will be enabled by default in a subsequent update--perhaps as early as version 10.4.1."
I told you so.
Java 5 (or 1.5 or Tiger or whatever it's called) is also now available for OSX Tiger http://www.apple.com/support/downloads/java2se50re lease1.html
I hope all those complaining that this was not available before the OSX release are happy now!
Pismo(aka Powerbook G3 Firewire), has been re-added to the supported list. A few weeks ago it was conspicuously absent. Hurrah!
"* The install *really* doesn't like it if you don't enter in valid .Mac details (you gotta play!)"
.Mac. You can easily bypass this step.
It doesn't make you choose
I posted this on LiveJournal too..
:P )
Mac OS X 10.4 (Tiger) comes out this Friday, April 29th. It only ships on *DVD-ROM MEDIA* - if you want it on CD-ROM, you'll have to order the $9.99 CD-ROM set from Apple, and jump through a few other hoops (I don't remember what they are offhand)
If you don't want to wait, here's how to install it using Target Disk Mode. This will require *two* Macs, both equipped with Firewire.
* Take the Mac with the DVD-ROM drive (Mac #1) and insert the 10.4 DVD.
* Power the non-DVD Mac off.
* Plug the Firewire cable into Mac #2.
* Plug the other end of the cable into Mac #1.
* Boot Mac #2 with the letter "T" held down. Hold it down until you see the Firewire logo appear on the screen.
* Wait a few seconds. Mac #2 will appear as a Firewire volume on the desktop of Mac #1.
The 10.4 DVD contains the 10.4 Installer - double click it, and it'll ask you to reboot. Go ahead and let it reboot. The installation procedure will be just like you were installing it on your local machine, but when it asks you which volume to install it onto, select the Firewire volume (Mac #2) and go from there. It's safe to have it reformat & install (unless you want to just do an "upgrade" which is rarely recommended.)
Once the installation is complete, it'll want you to reboot again. Go ahead and reboot. As soon as the machine powered off for the reboot, yank the Firewire cable out of both machines. Mac #2 will still have the Firewire logo, but that's ok. Just force reset it with the reset button.
Mac #2 will boot up & walk you through the Mac OS X 10.4 setup assistant.
At this point, you're done. Software Update will run once you get to the desktop. Have fun!
(Hopefully this will stave off the "Wah, I don't have a DVD-ROM.. how can I pirate teh Tiger??" crowd.
FYI... there are no wild tigers remaining in africa...in africa you'll find lions (but not panthers)...and much like the beast itself Mac users are are rare, but at the apex of the food chain. Tigers are the biggest cats in the world. They live in wet, humid and hot jungles as well as icy cold forests. There are five different kinds or subspecies of tiger which are still alive today. These tigers are called Siberian, Indochinese, South China, Bengal, and Sumatran. Their Latin name is Panthera tigris. Tigers are an endangered species; only about 4,870 to 7,300 tigers are left in the wild. Three tiger subspecies, which are now extinct are: the Bali, Javan, and Caspian tigers. They have become so over the last 70 years...
I searched on a few terms. It found emails I wrote six years ago that I forgot I received.
i know we've all been a bit lonely at times, but, you know, there are people you can call before you get to that stage.
The problem of course, is that I have a hard time throwing out the nice boxes. If they looked like crap and had styrofoam shedding over everything, I'd just chuck them. But the small collection of (probably never-used again) Apple boxes in my basement is getting out of hand...
Received my copy here in the UK at 14:00 Zulu. Arrived by courier - delivered overnight from Ireland, so pretty fast delivery.
Impression so far:
Spotlight & Dashboard blow me away. System is snappier than before even though Spotlight is currently indexing external firewire drive and 20GB iPod.
Xp and FlyakiteOSX look better than the real thing!
Get Firefox!
I have 259 Xserves. Three run ulimited client versions of OS X, the rest run 10-client versions...
well today i got 3 copies of unilmited and about 512 copies of 10-client, each with a set of media and a manual.
WFT Apple. Talk about waste!
More than one person can own a trademark. The word "tiger" has 187 registered. However, I was unable to find the record that shows TigerDirect's ownership, since for some reasons "(tiger direct)[ON]" doesn't work, but they aren't on "(tiger)[FM] and (tiger)[ON]" which I would expect to work.
'SBEMAIL!' is better than a goat!!
I'd already decided that my next desktop/laptop systems would be Apples, and this just confirms my feelings that they're the way to go if you want a UNIXy operating system along with a reasonable number of games. Linux is going to have some stiff competition in my house over the next couple of years, and I've been a hardcore Linux user since the mid '90's!
I'm trying to teach myself to set people on fire with my mind... Is it hot in here?
I was wondering if any of the Tiger-savvy folks here know whether it is possible to implement novel fields in the metadata associated with each file. For example, I would like each file to have a metadata field such as: "forwarded by:". Is there any tool (dev tool?) that would let me do this in Tiger? Cheers, Oori I have no .sig
I've been using it since last week and I can't understand how people say that it is great. It's not so good. Some reasons:
- Spotligh does not index nfs mounted units. So I can't search my 700 GB LVM. Quicksilver does index it.
- I use firefox not safari and I read my feeds with bloglines (which safari rss has copied)
- The dashboard is a pretty useless copy of konfabulator. The good thing about widgets it's to have them visible lying on your desktop and not having to use expose to get to them.
- I don't use quicktime. VLC or Mplayer are much better options and you don't to worry about codecs
- I use gmail not Mail.app
- It performs the same as 10.3 on my ibook and mac mini. Most of the users that have tried it on my forums (including some G5 users) do not report a performance increase http://foro.frozen-layer.net/
- There seems to be some issues with applications getting stuck for some seconds without an aparent reaon (It seems to happend to everybody)
If you remove safari rss, mail, quicktime, spotligth and the dashboard. What's left on the update? And I don't think I'm the only one using firefox, quicksilver, vlc, mplayer, gmail and bloglines as better free substitutes for their mac equivalences.
I will probably buy it but only because it will cost me 20 being considered and update (I bought my mini 15 days ago)
My home machine is a G3 500 iMac w/ 1GB RAM and 80GB HD. It has been running Panther nonstop since it was last updated to .7, a few months. It has on average 5 or 6 apps always running and sometimes multiple users are logged in. It runs filters in Photoshop while surfing /. and checking mail and listening to tunes and running Azureus. It isn't super swift while doing all that but it is capable with all that RAM. It runs FCP 3 just fine and even AfterEffects putts along.
I could upgrade but why bother? I have nice machines at work and it has no fan and takes up very little space, while doing what I ask. And about your scanner: see if Vuescan will work.
I also run Panther on an old G3 iBook: 366MHz, and a 5400 RPM HD, w/ 8MB of VRAM and 368MB of RAM. It's FINE for admin and some image stuff (I use it for scanning, layout, and presentations on the road), the processor chokes on high bandwidth apps like AfterEffects, not the OS.
I remember when a 400MHz G3 was great for video post. It still works, just not for pros.
Damn those pesky terrorists
I'm extremely tempted to call those lawyers and ask them how the sodomizing went.
I doubt they'd find it funny -- but I sure would.
Assume I was drunk when I posted this.
I am not a unix file permission GURU, but is the Ars Technica explanation of the limitations of UNIX file permissions entirely accurate?
I love Tiger, but I have one small problem: Safari does not work. At all. As in, it won't launch, no matter what. Anyone else experiencing this? I mean, I can get around it to a certain extent, since I use Firefox as my default browser anyway, but Tiger set Safari as the system's default browser so all links will first try to open there. Kind of annoying to have to copy all links to the clipboard first, rather than just clicking on them...
Of course, all Linux needs is an awesome GUI. Crowing about KDE is not much use when most apps don't even use KDE, so when you launch an app you get a competely different UI within the main UI. It's not much use when you select a theme just to find out that most apps ignore it. It's not much use when copy/paste doesn't work, or when a lot of apps don't even have a GUI component, or when the whole thing is a mixed-bag of non-cooperative apps made by completely different people with no aim or direction.
I'm convinced. I'm switching to OS X. B. Gates
Yes, it definitaly got beaten with an ugly stick.
Also, am I the only one who actually liked the mailbox drawer in Panther?
Free Manning, jail Obama.
I actually clicked the "metadata"link in the original slashdot post, because that's the topic of most interest to me, but that link (as you might have noticed) leads to an old report that does not address the issue. I assumed that the link was the only focus on metadata we have -- but it's actually somewhat of outdated diversion.
/ 6
http://arstechnica.com/reviews/os/macosx-10.4.ars/ 7
Thanks for the ref, although it was made in a somewhat rough and impolite manner. For those directly interested in metadata in tiger, follow: http://arstechnica.com/reviews/os/macosx-10.4.ars
If you install XCode 2.0 (free with OSX 10.4) it contains template project code to create your own metadata importers. The OpenOffice people would need to create an importer and stick it in /Library/Spotlight. It's a fairly trivial task.
Try NeoLight.
W
-------------------
This is my SIG. There are many like it, but this one is mine.
2. I don't have this problem, my mail sits on my G5, in my ~/mail subdirectory, being served via WU-IMAP. Whether I'm on the G5 or my PowerBook, I see only the ~/mail structure, and can add and delete IMAP folders as one would expect. I think it may be a fix you need to make on your server side, I had to recompile WU-IMAP to export from ~/mail rather than ~. But it can definitely work the way you prefer.
KeS
The biggest one I know of as far as general use goes is Limewire, which has been pretty succssful. It's a lot more widespread than other .Net apps I've seen before.
.Net yet?
It's a little unfair to metnion, but you know all those cellphone games people like so much? Mostly Java as well.
And speaking of games, at least one PC game used Java internally for the game AI engine. I forget the name but it was about vampires (boy that sure helps).
Azureus is not commercial but is a popular BitTorrent app.
JBuilder is pretty much all Java. I'd say that counts for sure as a commercial Java application. Is Visual Studio written in
When you start to get into programming tools like that there are HUGE number of examples of successful java apps, from app servers to performance tools and so on. So I'll not list them all.
Basically, a lot of people have made a lot of money writing applications in Java.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
Yes but he now has an O(1) algorithm for file placement where yours costs more. Especially if something belongs in more than one category - do you sort directories by images, or by project?
Have you never felt the need to look through a lot of files that span different directories in annoying ways? If you say no you are either lying are never really use your computer.
I also like to keep my files organized but there are times when I want a different slice at the data and Spotlight makes that much faster to implement.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
...of search technology."
/. in a long, long time.
That, my fine AC friend, is the funniest and truest thing that I read on
---anactofgod---
"Equal opportunity swindling - *that* is the true test of a sustainable democracy."
Each major release of Quicktime has done the same thing to Pro users.
Still QT7 is worth it.
Happily all of the "locked" features in Qt7 non-pro are still there in the libraries, so I wouldn't expect it to take too long before someone has a QT clone out that supports the full feature set (at least for playback). If you're really using it for the editing features you might as well just bite the bullet and upgrade.
I agree with the article though that it is time for Apple to stop charging for Pro!! Pretty silly to ask people to fork over thirty bucks just after they got a new computer.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
Here's the real metadata page you were looking for (can't believe Slashdot did not link to that instead of the older one!!!).
Basically what you want are Extended Attributes. They do have some well defined names for keys you can use, and you set them using the xattr command - from the article, an example:
% xattr --set name John file
% xattr --set color red file
% xattr --list file
file
color red
name John
% xattr --delete color file
% xattr --list file
file
name John
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
I think that you should see a good set of Metadata filters appear sooner rather than later as XCode (included will all copies of Tiger) has a blank project template for just this purpose. If you know the file format at all (even just a portion), you can build a filter.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
As the other poster noted, the article goes more in depth - but the summary is that API calls are versioned now so even if they release API updates older code can still work.
And it also means they have kernel API's now they just didn't have before, so you can actually use an API now instead of modifying kernel data structures more directly.
I think it may help improve driver support for the mac with less of a moving target to code for.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
I heard that the server version will... and that the new iChat was rumored to have support as well, but I haven't heard anything yet...?
The effect of proprietary software is to trade away freedoms in exchange for convenience--a genuinely self-centered framing of the argument. Other concerns (such as respecting software freedom, understanding why things are the way they are) fall aside and are generally ridiculed (such as why free software OSes don't come with MP3 players and encoders). How can it be "silly" for someone running different hardware to look at the proprietary MacOS and ask for it for their hardware? I'm not asking this because I want MacOS or because I think MacOS is good, but within the limits of allowable debate concerning proprietary software, it seems reasonable to me for people to want what is merely recent and well-advertised.
Digital Citizen
So I can now get seamless drag-and-drop text manipulation between applications on Linux?! Excellent! My next machine might not be a PowerBook after all!!!
Or by "Mac OS X UI" did you mean, "Mac OS X's color scheme on KDE?"
Sort-of offtopic but still ontopic...
Where does one go to get help with some of the more advanced, Unix-related issues of Tiger? Message boards, etc. Any good ones? I'm having a bugger of a time with NIS issues, ones that didn't plague Panther.
Trolls lurk everywhere. Mod them down.
Heat is the first thing I'd check if I knew the RAM is good. Awhile back I started experiencing freeezes and crashes on a dual proc G4 Powermac.
Seems my brain hiccuped and I forgot to check for dust build up for months. When I looked, the intakes and fans were totally clogged, inside the case, things were worse.
I vacuumed it all up and started cleaning every couple months -- the machine has been completely trouble free since.
"That naive cube! How long must I suffer this!" --Sheldon J. Plankton
You provided a reference to an FSF document to support your reasoning. The cited web page says, in part:
Granted, the APSL does not prohibit users of the software to link with proprietary libraries, thus is not a "copyleft" license. So, what? This is less restrictive than the GPL, not more. This, in and of itself does not preclude Linux users from using it on their systems.
The FSF concludes that it is ok to use and improve software which other people release under this license.
You would be allowed to compile the daemons using gcc and glibc libraries and use them with no problem from the APSL. You would also be allowed to link GPLd programs against the supporting APSL licensed frameworks.
The only limitation is that if you ship an improved version of this code that you make that code available to others under APSL terms. i.e. you provide source code so that Apple and and other users of the APSLed code benefit from the changes.
Insisting on re-inventing every wheel just so that everything is covered under GPL is a waste of effort. It steals time of those working on GPLed code from doing other work, and selfishly prevents others from benefit from you good ideas if you improve a fork of the work rather than the original work itself.
It strikes me as foolish that GNU/Linux people spend so much effort to mimic other people's work, re-implementing large subsystems just to get them under the GPL umbrella, rather than cooperating with others to re-use and improve the best code available.
I am stunned at how good this article is. If he accepted PayPal, I'd put in 5 bucks for John, it was well worth it. I wasted (?) most of a workday afternoon digesting it in its entirety. SOO many tidbits of info! They include
1) How to enable ACL's on a non-Server OS X installation
2) The fact that Quartz 2D "Extreme" (wow! nice breakdown of the tech!) is there, but not turned on... and probably won't be until 10.4.1 or later... but you CAN turn it on temporarily... and it explains how.
3) How to play with the emerging metadata features
4) A description of how Spotlight (which is file-focused) indexes objects such as Address Book entries which are (normally) not stored as separate files
Etc., etc. Excellent.
Apple's order tracking system is hosed because of the volume. My status still says "preparing shipment" but FedEx delivered my package a few minutes ago.
So I take back what I said; Apple's logistics pulled through nicely on this one.
I called Apple earlier and was assured that ALL pre-orders have already been shipped and they should all arrive today, and it looks like that's true.
-CausticPuppy "Of all the people I know, you're certainly one of them." -Somebody I don't know
a "fix" for the button toolbar change in Mail 2.0, in case you loathe it and prefer the old style...
I'm not sure I'm all that fond though of the wedding of web searches with local searches. I either want to find something I have, or something I don't - I really can't think of a time when I would have thought it handy to look in both places.
I'm sure though we'll see some refinement in Spotlight in the coming months... I think eventually there will be some way for spotlight to report on "where" something is in a file instead of just being in there, so stuff like the entourage database would work.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
(as I crack open my flash drive and review my notes...)
/System/Library/Extensions/AppleAirPort2.kext/Cont ents/Info.plist
type this in terminal:
[b]ioreg -l > ~/Desktop/temp.txt[/b]
to get a dump of the hardware IDs. Search the text file it puts on your desktop for "Airport" or "Cardbus" and find the line similar to:
| +-o pci14e4,4325@0
Then edit
and add the ID to the array list, which starts out something like:
pci106b,4e
pci14e4,4320
pci14e4,4324
pci14e4,4325 works for most MicroSoft nic cards
PCI1186,1340 is for the DLink DFE-690TXD
Now reboot, open networking preferences, and smile as it says "new port detected".
This will only work if the wifi card is already compatible, as by adding the ID to the list you're basically promising OS X that the card is compatible, so use at your own risk, no guarantees. Probably can't break much of anything though.
I work for the Department of Redundancy Department.
Whoops the post didn't like some of what I pasted in, it doesn't care for greater than or less than brackets. I'll preview this time. Replacing brackets with asterisks so slashdot can handle it, search for this:
| +-o pci14e4,4325@0 *class IOCardBusDevice, registered, matched, active, busy 0, retain count 10*
And add to the array that looks (almost) like:
*array*
*string*pci106b,4e*/string*
*string*pci14e4,4320*/string*
*string*pci14e4,4324*/string*
*/array*
I work for the Department of Redundancy Department.
Oh come on. I'm actually a big fan of Apple. I just thought that the obvious fellatio was a bit comical...
A deep unwavering belief is a sure sign you're missing something...
Basically, you can use the annotate tool to create the annotation boxes, and type anything you like in them, but your text is not saved when you hit save. This is most unfortunate (he says, hoping he could use this feature to mark the term papers he has to grade next week).
Does anybody have a work-around for this?
Babar
The section on the evolution of Quartz 2D was fascinating. It made me wonder how other OSes, especially Windows, handle the rendering and compositing of windows. It definitely seems like Apple is leveraging the strength of modern GPUs, but are they innovating in this or playing catch-up? I've always thought my P4 was more responsive than my G5 even though my G5 could certainly do some things (video encoding and code compilation for example) much faster than the P4.
You have to shell out 10 dollars for the DVD
Whoever stated that signature sizes should be limited to one hundred and twenty characters can just go ahead and kiss my
Read my Tiger Review here. My mac is now about three years old, and last night I was quite pleased to find that Apple is by no means building out its older computers. I can't remember the last version of Windows that ran as fast as the previous.
Also provided is some additional feedback on the core new features (automator, safari RSS, spotlight, Dashboard etc...) which you may or may not find interesting.
I hope you enjoy...
Could Jesus microwave a burrito so hot that he himself cou
Hm. I've been shopping for notebooks and pricing out a Dell Inspiron vs. a PowerBook. Pretty much even, if you ask me, a $200 difference when configured nearly the same, the 1.6GHz Pentium M is better for some heavy lifting and has a faster bus, the 1.5GHz g4 is fine for video editing etc. The build quality / design of the PowerBook rules, and it has firewire on board, does things like target disk mode and IP over firewire. Scrolling trackpad, Bluetooth 2, Sudden Motion Sensor, a much better graphics card. The Dell is more expensive if I don't take advantage of a time-sensitive discount.
"Bang for the buck" means more than cpu horsepower.
Damn those pesky terrorists