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 good review

[archdetector]

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 [macintouch.com]

will it stick this time?

[Eternally optimistic]

This is a real release now, not an accidental shipment? I know Apple is ahead of everyone, including themselves, so we best check.

Re:Great OS, good timing, great features

[Grayden]

How about letting it run on good cheap hardware Apple?

You mean like the Mac Mini [apple.com]?

Re:Grrrrreeeaat!

[gobbo]

Can it make my dual 1.8 stop crashing?

If it's your whole machine that's crashing (i.e. kernel panic) then look to bad or under-spec RAM first, not the OS. OS X machines are very particular about RAM.

10.4 does indeed encrypt swap files

[scrod]

if you tell it to "Use secure virtual memory."
As evidenced by profiling [onlinehome.us] in Shark [apple.com], page faults can trigger decryption. I was initially worried--as files in /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.

Re:My copy

[neuroklinik]

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.

Re:File Types in Spotlight

[Anonymous Coward]

Tiger ships with these importers

In System/Library/Spotlight/

Application.mdimporter
Audio.mdimporter
Bookma rks.mdimporter
Chat.mdimporter
Font.mdimporter
iCal.mdimporter
Image.mdimporter
iPhoto.mdimport er
Mail.mdimporter
PDF.mdimporter
PS.mdimporter
QuartzComposer.mdimporter
QuickTime.mdimporter
RichText.mdimporter
SystemPrefs.mdimporter
vCar d.mdimporter

In /Library/Spotlight/

AppleWorks.mdimporter
Keynote.mdimporter
Micro soft Office.mdimporter
Pages.mdimporter
SourceCode.md importer

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.

Perhaps they'd like to port OpenOffice first though.

Re:Grats to the Mac Community

[pieterh]

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.

Re:premium PDF? WTF?

[FuzzzyLogik]

Click next right above the PDF thing..

Re:Tiger Has Arrived!

[sg3000]

> I have two words for you:
> 1. Spotlight
> 2. Dashboard

I got my copy of Tiger yesterday, so I installed it last night. Dashboard is cool, where I spent way too long adding and removing widgets just so I could watch the ripple effect (I've got a 1.5 GHz PowerBook G4 17" with 1 GB RAM). It's kind of like when everyone spent about 30 minutes doing the Genie effect when they got Mac OS X 10.0 Beta. Random cool things:

1. When it's sunny outside, the sun from the Weather widget spills out above it, gently illuminating the other things on the desktop. That's cool

2. The Address Book widget is fast and makes AddressBook far more usable. Just type in a name, and boom! you have their info.

3. The Calendar widget is next to useless. I thought it would show me my iCal events for the day or something, but no such luck. It just sits there, red and unaware.

4. I find this hard to believe but QuickTime 7 looks much better than QuickTime 6. I watched the large Star Wars Episode III trailer in it, and it appears to look far more detailed! You can actually see Anakin's complexion turning gray when he's talking to Palpatine!

5. Spotlight is really cool. It took about 30 minutes to index, but once it was done. I searched on a few terms. It found emails I wrote six years ago that I forgot I received. It's very fast. Type in someone's name, and in one second, you can see all sorts of stuff about them on your hard drive. Basically, your Mac turns into a giant contact manager (if you've ever gotten one of those PIMs to work where it tracked files, emails, and whatever for contacts). I'm getting used to the idea of using SpotLight to look for a file or application before I even go to the Finder, and it works well. SpotLight has earned its place in a hallowed corner place on the screen.

6. iChat can now display what song you're listening to in iTunes. That's cool, too!

7. The mouse preferences has a place to adjust the sensitivity of the scroll wheel and which to make the primary mouse button (left or right).

8. When Safari can't open a page (like this Ars-Technica page right now), it displays an error page, rather than a slide down dialog box. It's less obtrusive this way.

Re:Fantastic!

[IAmTheDave]

DotNet does not work as advertised (EG: have you seen any commercial apps in it?)

- Dell's Website [dell.com]
- MIT's iLab and ShuttleTrak services [mit.edu]
- T-Mobile's customer portal [t-mobile.com]
- Infragistics website and software solutions [infragistics.com]
- Any one of the items listed in Microsoft's .NET connected directory [microsoft.com]

Or perhaps you would like to look at the massive amount of work that has gone into emulating the .NET framework with the Mono project? No, .NET is completely unsuccessful (BTW, I wrote and run an ecommerce application for my company of employ on .NET that does over $20k/day in business. Sounds like production quality to me.)

Re:File Types in Spotlight

[Anonymous Coward]

It will support OpenOffice and NeoOffice.

The guys of NeoOffice already start to coding the metadata importer

http://trinity.neooffice.org/modules.php?name=News &file=article&sid=89 [neooffice.org]

Re:Panther still being sold with new Apple machine

[v1]

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.

Re:What about TigerDirect?

[Orinthe]

The Tiger Direct vs. Apple Computer lawsuit is an almost completely baseless suit designed for one purpose: advertising. Tiger Direct is attempting to catch a ride on the back of Apple's Tiger marketing campaign. They don't have any intention to stop Apple from using the Tiger name.

If Apple were renaming all of their Apple Stores to Tiger Stores, they might have some grounds. As it is, Tiger Direct [tigerdirect.com] is a computer hardware reseller, and Mac OSX 10.4 Tiger [apple.com] is an operating system. It's only slightly more related than the US Census Bureau's registered trademark on TIGER [census.gov] for its GIS data.

Also, Tiger Direct is complaining about search rankings, but a quick google for "tiger" [google.com] shows Apple at a distant 4th to Tiger Direct's 2nd place ranking (behind a page on, surprise, actual tigers).

Re:Wifi ?

[data1]

Here is the official list of supported hardware.
http://www.apple.com/macosx/upgrade/requirements.h tml [apple.com]

You will find that a lot of older hardware works, just not as well as you would hope.

YMMV.

Re:Application Compatibility?

[Twid]

Everything I had loaded ran fine, including some APE stuff with a few haxies. Even GeekTool continued to run, which really surprised me. Office for Mac (2004) ran fine for me after the upgrade, although Word crashed the first time I opened it. (Maybe a coincidence.)

The biggest annoyance for me right now is that fink and darwinports are partially broken. Ethereal continued to run (which was not expected), but glib appears to be broken so irssi won't run for me right now. That's OK, I needed an IRC break anyway. :)

Re:Waiting a little longer

[Anonymous Coward]

I own a Mac Mini, and OS X is highly overrated. Stick with Linux distros, they have all the good things that aren't quite as easy in OS X (though supposedly possible since it is a *BSD). If you are a hardcore Linux user, OS X will be pretty disappointing.

Re:Spotlight alone worth twice the price

[the_2nd_coming]

there are published APIs for it.. I am sure that you could make a plug-in for thunderbird, though I do not know if you will be able to search your mail messages in thunderbird because I think that Tiger makes each mail message a separate file, no MBOXs.

Re:File Types in Spotlight

[drc1]

There is a growing library of Spotlight plugins, http://www.apple.com/downloads/macosx/spotlight/ [apple.com]

Re:Grats to the Mac Community

[nine-times]

I don't think people are claiming that that's what's slowing down the Longhorn release, but Apple certainly can provide greater integration and stability with hardware due to the fact that they have control over the hardware.

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.

Re:An insanely thorough review!

[BorgCopyeditor]

Of course, even if code changes were necessary, you could probably pull it off with mach_inject...

Or you could save yourself the headache of potentially unsupported or unstable calls to the kernel (sheesh! talk about killing a fly with a shotgun), or you could just edit the .nib file in Interface Builder.

12 hours with Tiger

[kitzilla]

I received my copy of Tiger from Apple yesterday, and loaded it right away. A few first-blush impressions:

* 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.

Re:Upgrade technique?

[dourk]

I created a .dmg from the DVD, wiped my iPod, restored the Tiger image to the iPod (with Disk Utility), set the iBook to boot from the iPod, and restarted. Worked great.

Hell, I didn't even back anything up.

The longest part was restoring all the music onto the iPod.

Re:Yay ars!

[adam mcmaster]

No need to clone it, from TFA:

Apple has developed launchd as an open source project that it hopes will be adopted by the wider Unix community. To the average Unix hacker, launchd probably looks like a reinvention of the wheel. I think it addresses a problem the Unix community doesn't even know that it has. In this way it's much like Mac OS X itself. There was "Unix on the desktop," and then there was Mac OS X. You'd think that alone would have been a big enough wake-up call.

Re:launchd

[Matthias Wiesmann]

The idea behind launchd is to have one single daemon to replace all daemon that launch other processes, this means initd, crond, inted, etc...

The advantages of this approach are the following:

• All those daemon have shared functionality but different code, this means more code to maintain and more security risks (all those daemon have to run at some point as root). Each of the 'old' daemon also has a different file format, which does not make life easier either.
• Process launch criteria can be a mix of those offered by the 'old' daemons, crond is based on time, inetd on network connections, initd on boot sequence. Launchd 'understands" all those notions.

The example I was given was of starting a backup task on a laptop. The criteria to launch the task would be something like if last execution was more than X days ago and the computer is not running on battery power and there is a network connection and CPU load has been low for some time then launch... Launchd is supposed to have 'adapters' to understand the old file formats.

Personally I think this is a good idea, factoring out common functionality and using more reasonable file formats, but of course the old guard will complain that the current set of daemon just works (not on a laptop) and that this was proposed by people who do not understand Unix - who is this Jordan Hubbard anyway? :-)

You should read this

[teamhasnoi]

There's one final barrier to hardware-accelerated bliss. Quartz 2D Extreme is disabled by default in Mac OS X 10.4.0. That's right, the whiz-bang new technology you just read all about is not actually used in Tiger unless it's explicitly enabled using the Quartz Debug application. Even then, it only applies to applications that are launched after it was turned on. It also appears that Q2DE is re-disabled when you quit the Quartz Debug application. [arstechnica.com]

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." [arstechnica.com]

I told you so.

It ships on DVD ONLY. Target Disk Mode rocks

[EvilStein]

I posted this on LiveJournal too..

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. :P )

Re:I'm heading over...not to africa

[klubar]

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...

Re:What you read wasn't correct.

[DustMagnet]

Actually the US Government themselves own a registered trademark on the word "TIGER"

More than one person can own a trademark. The word "tiger" has 187 [uspto.gov] 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.

Re:Tiger Has Arrived!

[EverLurking]

Yup, it's a nice upgrade...especially at the $69 educational price. Got mine Yesterday at 10:30am (shipped on the 27th) and have been playing with it all night at work.

Did the Archive and Install option that moved all of my original settings/data/files over to the new OS without a hitch, quick too, took under 35 minutes on a very modest 667MHz TiBook w/ 1GB RAM. Somehow missed the Custom install setting that lets you de-select the languages you won't use and the un-needed printer drivers, but it was trivial to take care of it via terminal and a nifty utility called "Monolingual" that strips out unneeded language files (saved about 2+ GB all told).

Spotlight was busy indexing away for about 20 minutes, the computer was usable but sluggish during this time so I just let it do it's thing. Overall the system is about as fast as 10.3.9, if not a bit faster (it's a nice change when a OS version runs faster on existing hardware, what a treat compared to the WinBlows bloatfest that comes with each release). I can honestly say that my 3 year old TiBook runs better and faster today on 10.4 than it did when I first got it with 10.1.5

All preferences came over pretty much without a hitch. Most of my 10.3 apps are running just fine except:

• iPulse - they have a new version out now v2.1.2 that is more compatible with Tiger
• Windows Media Player broke, may have to try a re-install or see if a new version is being released. But Real One player seems to be just fine.
• PGP Personal broke too.

That's about it, most everything else I need is working well (actually, I wasn't using PGP much anyways so I can wait for the update).

Spotlight is kick ass and will change how I use/find/navigate my files and filesystem for sure. Dashboard is really nice and very convenient.

No stability issues and speed/responsiveness is good. Safari is notably faster than under 10.3 and the RSS feature while basic is quite usable and nice. The built in firewall is now a "Stealth" firewall, even on open ports apparently (stateful packet inspection?). Haven't played around with iChat much, but multi person voice/video conferencing will be cool. Yes, Mail is different, yet somehow closer to how Safari looks. Really not so ugly when put side to side against Thunderbird or Outlook. It is a tiny bit slower though...

All in all, I'm glad I upgraded.

DaveC

Re:Upgrade technique?

[As Seen On TV]

You should probably be aware that that's a really good way to destroy your iPod.

The hard drive in the iPod isn't designed for sustained use. Booting off of it and installing Tiger should probably take about a half hour. That might be okay. But it's an oft-repeated and I think true story that one of the engineers somewhere here on campus installed Mac OS X Server onto his iPod for testing and booted it up in a lab.

The iPod froze up after eighteen hours. The hard drive completely failed.

Just FYI. Caveat emptor and all that.

Re:An insanely thorough review!

[Xyde]

If you get info on a file, there is a "Spotlight Comments" field which works as expected.

Re:Grrrrreeeaat!

[As Seen On TV]

Your computer came with a CD labeled something along the lines of "Hardware Test." (The exact verbiage varies from computer to computer.) Stick it in, boot the computer with the "c" key held down on the keyboard to force it to run from the disc.

Run the hardware test suite. This will identify any failing RAM by slot for you.

Re:APSL

[JQuick]

Your claim does not make sense to me. In fact, the idea that launchd CANNOT be used in Linux appears rather foolish and short-sighted.

You provided a reference to an FSF document to support your reasoning. The cited web page says, in part:

The FSF now considers the APSL to be a free software license with two major practical problems, reminiscent of the NPL:

It is not a true copyleft, because it allows linking with other files which may be entirely proprietary.

It is incompatible with the GPL.

For this reason, we recommend you do not release new software using this license; but it is ok to use and improve software which other people release under this license.

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.

Highly recommended

[5n3ak3rp1mp]

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.

And of course I forgot

[5n3ak3rp1mp]

a "fix" for the button toolbar change in Mail 2.0 [otierney.net], in case you loathe it and prefer the old style...

Re:Yay ars!

[As Seen On TV]

Completely different, as near as I can tell. Daemontools looks more like watchdog, which launchd obsoletes.

The launchd service is responsible for launching services on demand, be that at boot time, at login time, or upon network connection. It's responsible for automatically detecting dependencies, and for firing off tasks in parallel whenever possible.

The launchd service replaces (hold your breath) init, rc, /etc/rc.d, /etc/init.d, cron, at, SystemStarter and watchdog.

And yes, the configuration files are all property lists.

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