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.

Yay ars!

[BenjyD]

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.

Re:Grats to the Mac Community

[gobbo]

It would be nice to have more choice.

You can have:

• reliability/stability/security
• lots of choice
• bleeding-edge feature set and interface

But you must pick only two.

Re:Grats to the Mac Community

[Anonymous Coward]

You can have all 3, just run Linux!

An insanely thorough review!

[earthbound kid]

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 [nytimes.com] 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!

Re:Grats to the Mac Community

[ameline]

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.)

Wow! Now that's a Review

[allgood2]

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/ [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.

Re:6PM?

[enosys]

I think they chose 6PM so more people would attend the launch. Most stores will be normally open at that time and most people won't be at work. It's better than a midnight launch IMHO.

Great big whiners

[Elwood P Dowd]

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?

Great Alternative for Windows

[PenguinBoyDave]

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."

No kidding, but then it does work

[ianscot]

There are definitely times when I wish Cupertino was as interested in loosening (or just plain changing) doctrinaire API choices as it is in the packaging...

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.

Re:Grats to the Mac Community

[kayak334]

You must not have seen option 3.

Re:Fantastic!

[nordicfrost]

Heh. That's a funny coincidence. Not more than two days ago, a Dell-fanatical friend of mine (Yeah, they do exist. Yes, they are a pain in the ass just like us Mac lovers) commented on how incredibly crappy Dells website had become over the last year.

Re:Yay ars!

[Matthias Wiesmann]

I agree, if more articles linked by slashdot were of this quality, I would sure be happy. Then again I'm really disappointed by the discussion here on slashdot, we get a really technical article (stuff for that matters), and people keep bitching about the price of the upgrade, making silly wishes for g5 laptops or OS for intel.

A few months ago, Jordan Hubbard came to CERN to talk about some of the Unix elements of Tiger, and talked about launchd. I think that this is one of the features of Tiger that should be cloned ported to Linux (John Siracusa seems to agree). Having an unified launching mechanism for processes is really something that is needed on Unix, especially for laptops.

You really want to be able to launch processes depending on different triggers and circumstances, like saying at that time, if the machine has been idle for some time and I'm not running on battery power, then launch that process. Yes, you can do hack similar functionality with scripts, but no, this is not convenient or stable.

Re:Spotlight alone worth twice the price

[swb]

As an engineer, I appreciate the technological achievement, and as a user, I am - to say it again - simply amazed.

...and as as hyperbole artist, you've fulfilled your role as a sycophant marvelously.

"Change your user experience -- completely." Either that's a complete overstatement, or you can't keep track of anything. I'm a slob, but I can find pretty much anything I want in 500GB of disk spread over 3 systems in a few seconds, without using find. It's called "o-r-g-an-i-z-a-t-i-o-n".

worth the price just for Quartz Composer

[rogerbo]

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.

Re:Great big whiners

[be-fan]

No, because Siracusa is basing his analysis on basic human interface ideals that Apple itself pioneered (and still have in the HIG), while you're basing it on your personal reaction. Scientifically, your personal reaction counts for zilch, because it's been shown that users rarely know what's efficient for them until somebody gets in a lab and measures things.

He did say application you know

[SuperKendall]

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.

Re:Spotlight alone worth twice the price

[Moofie]

I used to organize my MP3's. Now I let iTunes search the database and organize them on the fly.

This way is better.

Re:Fantastic!

[TFGeditor]

OS "features" I'd like to see:

- Simple interface (command line is okay, but simple GUI prefered)
- Cross-platform app support
- Straightforward firewall
- Cross-platform networking
- Meaningful user's manual
- Minimal system resource demands (reserved for apps)

Maybe I am asking too much.

Re:Yay ars!

[Wyatt Earp]

Dive in quality?

I might be an old timer, but holy hell, /.'s quality is way, way up from the Hotgrits days of 1999 or the angst and crap of Jon Katz and the hate that came with his posts about nothing.

The discussion level is up, the editorial level isn't.

Re:Yay ars!

[As Seen On TV]

I think that this is one of the features of Tiger that should be cloned ported to Linux

Please don't. We're releasing it as part of Darwin for a reason. Please don't waste all that time re-implementing what we created in a similar but not entirely compatible fashion. Just use our code, then invest your time doing something new and wonderful.

Re:He did say application you know

[CausticPuppy]

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.


Sounds similar to Java. I think .Net's primary market these days is for in-house server-side development anyway.

And .Net is rather useful and powerful for this kind of development.
Think of it like like J2EE. Do you know any commercial desktop apps written with J2EE? Or even just plain old J2SE? I can think of a few, but they tend to be IDE's and developer tools.

However, on the desktop side of things, ATI's Catalyst utilities and control panel are written in .Net, and require the .Net runtime, although they still have a non-.Net version available.

So... the lack of desktop apps does not make a particulary platform a failure.

Re:launchd

[javaxman]

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?

launchd is super-cool. Anyone who writes software or admins systems should be really excited about it. They are also likely doing real work right now, just like I should be.

To be fair, I have seen some comments posted about launchd and it's coolness, some of regarding "if it weren't for that damn Apple license, we could just use their code in Linux". Most people seem more interested in Spotlight searches and the 'ripple effect' in Dashboard. Personally, I'm all charged up about Core Data and how it'll make developing apps even easier. I've seen more posts about launchd than Core Data. The article barely touches Core Data, it gets a paragraph or so in the "Grab Bag" section and talks more about what it's not than what it is.

You can draw your own conclusions about /. posters being developers or users. Despite what some folks say, the readership around here actually seems pretty diverse. It reflects the general population, in that more people are 'tech-interested users' than serious programmers. I'm not saying there's anything wrong with that. Not everyone who is interested in cars needs to be a mechanic.

Re:Waiting a little longer

[Rimbo]

I've had the problems you describe, and it's largely because I'm so familiar with Linux that I get frustrated when things I expect to work a certain way (because they work that way in Linux) don't (because they don't work that way in OS X).

Best example so far: Netinfo. I have no idea what this thing is or how it works, other than that it's rudely replaced all the things I'm familiar with for networking-type-stuff. ("No entry for netinfo in section 5 of the manual." Dammit, Apple, where's my man page?)

Everything that I'm looking for is there. The fact that I don't understand how it works (and too lazy to find out where the missing man pages are) does not make the operating system overrated. It means I need to expand my horizons and learn how to do things in OSes not named Linux, and get off my ass and do a simple Google search.

I mean, in the time it took me to write this post, I could probably have found via GIS one or all of the following: (a) the man page for netinfo, (b) a download location for ALL of the missing man pages, not just netinfo, (c) an Apple-produced PDF detailing how netinfo and other networking ideas work, (d) the entire Apple sysadmin guide library, (e) a book I could borrow from the city library RIGHT NOW with all I need to know about NetInfo.

So it's not OSX's fault that you and I suck.

"Silliness" of proprietary software abounds.

[jbn-o]

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.

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[account_deleted]

Comment removed based on user account deletion

Re:Lack of native OpenOffice is huge in my opinion

[Nice2Cats]

You know, there's really practically no demand for it.

Let me tell you a little story about how the lack of a native office suite is hurting Apple's sales.

About two years ago, my in-laws had this old PentiumPro computer they wanted to get rid of. Basically, they write letters, do a little Excel for their business, e-mail, and surf -- that's all. My idea was to have them buy a Mac because they wouldn't have the hassle with all the malware, and it would Just Work. Also, my brother-in-law has a PowerBook and is there often enough to help them if something went wrong. So they listen to my little pitch, and then ask about the office suite -- which one does Apple have? Well, you can get Microsoft Office for the Mac, too. But, they ask, if we're going to use Microsoft office anyway, doesn't it make more sense to get Windows, because they will cooperate better?

So they bought a Dell.

Pages and Keynote are probably good products, but there is this thing about spreadsheets. When it comes down to it, Apple does not natively offer one of the most important programs or rather bundle of programs that everybody needs: An office suite. This leads to bizarre behaviour on the part of pro-Apple people:

Microsoft Office 2004 is pretty amazing, albeit not perfect. Everybody who needs it, already has it.

Microsoft costs about $350 at the Apple Online Store. This is money that goes to Microsoft (well, most of it, probably). Now, if Apple were to include a free office suite like a polished version of NeoOffice/J, those $350 could go to something that is actually Apple's -- an iPod, iSight, the beautiful Airport Express setup. $350 is getting close to another Mac mini for your dear old mother who never had her own computer before. In other words, everytime somebody buys MS Office for Mac, Apple looses money. This should be bugging Apple badly.

I realize that Apple is in a bad spot here. They simply need an office suite, and the only one that is aquafied enough for the general public is MS Office. They can't risk pissing off Microsoft by starting to make their own, even if they wanted to expend the resources -- Microsoft could make life hell for Apple by just little things in Office. Coming out and supporting NeoOffice/J of couse is something that would really piss off Microsoft, so you can't do that. It's not reasonable to expect any major official support, even though the NeoOffice/J people are Apple's best shot on the long run to get at that $350 Microsoft tax.

What I do expect, however, is that Apple makes life a bit easier for people who don't want to spend $350 on fucntions that in the PC and Linux world they can get for free with OpenOffice. Like, including OpenDocument support natively with Tiger, instead of forcing the people to write one themselves.

I would be writing this on a ThinkPad running Linux and not an iBook if it wasn't for the OpenOffice people, and would never had gone for Airport Extreme, an iPod, iLife 05 (good grief, have I already spent that much?) ... Apple will have to fix this problem at some point, and OpenOffice / NeoOffice/J seems to be their only realistic shot at the moment without start a war with MS they can't win. A bit of love would be nice.